Comments on: Ethnography and anthropology at Vegas

By: Anthropology.net

Anthropology.net — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 02:54:34 +0000

Where is Anthropology going?

Grant McCracken, of This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, has used Google Trends to portray the depressing lack of interest in Anthropology compared to economics. The post, Anthropology, sleeping giant or just sleeping?&q

By: k.

k. — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:10:48 +0000

Great post. I’ll now have to go look up half the words you used, but great post regardless. I was just there a few weeks ago visiting a friend. I was left with a distinct feeling of weirdness that I haven’t yet succeeded in describing. There seem to be a lot of “shady characters” who gravitate to the seedy glamor and the hint of lawlessness. It seems like a very transactional city to me. I met a couple of “mortgage brokers”, if that’s any indication. People who can’t really describe their jobs but feel a need to be close to money, even if they’re not generating it or making it grow. They’re satisfied just to lay their hands on it.

My background’s similar. New England Catholic. I don’t understand gambling one bit, though everyone in my family likes it quite well, particularly as they get older and the # of casinos in our home state grows.

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:52:06 +0000

It definitely has changed. They’ve buffed the rough edges off. And their new slogan seems to capture the variety of experience now available there: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. Whatever your personal brand of sampling the boundaries are, you can do it safely in Vegas. Kind of like risk-free risk taking.
As well as an amazing display of conspicuous consumption of water and fuel in a desert during a middle-east war.

By: aj

aj — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 13:26:02 +0000

It’s interesting in the very abstract sense that you talk about, and dismaying in a very real sense. The idea of “something for nothing” has permeated American culture; the idea that you can get a lot without ever giving anything in return (in fact, that it is a “right”); to take the Jared Diamond / James Kunstler approach, Las Vegas is also an incredibly resource-intensive society that ignores its literal desert environment – and doesn’t require very much for it to collapse – lack of water, oil/gas or electricity and the place will dry up (literally) and blow away, something to think about in an age where arizona, nevada and california have legal squabbles over water diversion, peak oil is upon us and electricity usage has doubled since the 1970s. I think on some subconscious level, the people who go there know this. Why else name a place “the mirage?”

By: Candy Minx

Candy Minx — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 12:10:50 +0000

Heh heh woow that was nicely done. I don’t gamble either. I don’t get it either. I was raised Dalai Lama initiated Buddha…yeah yeah I know, I’m the worlds worst buddhist, its true…but somehow…Vegas is captured by your words and the feelings you had…but also by what I sense and called the concept of maya.

When you wrote…I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s something like this. It is something to do with a controlled bouleversement where the spectacle of water shows, mosaic tile work, spare no expense design schemes, extravagant moments where things are put off kilter and out of scale in the most cheerful and certifiably unmysterious ways possible. Add to this the gambling, the induction into its arcane languages, quiet codes, insider understanding, and risk running around the upper reaches of the cage of consciousness like a wild thing. (You only need to say, “hey, get down from there” and it will.) But enough of this and the world feels like it had lifted off its moorings as if onto a small current of air. Risk that releases. Risk that hints at the catastrophic but never threatens it.

To me, what I struggle to say, is that THAT is a representation of the way the dominant culture works everywhere. That is it, and why I find Vegas so attractive. It’s like mice in a lab…a very large lab. It might be called a microcosm in some old fashioned movie? Couldn’t the actual NY and Paris and Mexico City and Rome be easily described the way you say? Instead of seeing the illusion revealed by meditation, or peyote, or ecstacy or rapture…go to Vegas. Not that I’ve ever done peyote. People laugh and go to Vegas and participate (okay well you and I don’t) and say oh what a place, the lights, the crime, the gambling, the food..and I think, wow didn’t you notice that you just separated your self from your everyday world and saw it under a piece of glass?

Um, an interesting thing about Wynn is that he managed to convince (I think Ceasars) to sell hima parking lot. He had nothing. So he buys a parking lot and I believe if I recall the mythology properly…he sits on it, Vegas booms, and Ceasars needs to add some space…and they buy the parking lot back off of him for a lot of money. He really is a dreamwonderboy who put shit on a stick and called it something else and made a million.

(and just before the Paris casino opened they had brochures everywhere for its arrival…one of the blurbs said, “It’s like Paris, but without the French” I kept it for years especially as a Canadian it elicits quite a guffaw, it was so politically incorrect I couldn’t believe it)

In the early 90′s Vegas was so sick of people complainting about the food that casinos went out of their way to seduce the worlds best chefs to come and work for them. Really, and many people don’t believe me, but some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten were in Vegas. I’m a foodie so you can trust me

Um Grant, have you checked out Bill Mahers Fishbowl on Amazon? Or did I miss you talking about that. It’s very sweet little show and he is quite funny in even such a pedestrian venue, its a compliment to his edge.