Gambling and the human condition: Transcending the deviant mystique

What is it about?

Henry Lesieur's (1977) The Chase belongs to a rather elite group of ethnographic texts. It is a volume that transcends its substantive area to elucidate generic aspects of the human condition. In this essay I encourage a reframing and rereading of the text in light of generic social process theory. Lesieur's work places gambling in the context of community life and, by so doing, resists what Prus and Grills (2003) have characterized as the deviant mystique.

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