Social Analysis, Volume 56, Issue 2, Summer 2012, 1–18 © Berghahn Journals
doi:10.3167/sa.2012.560202
INTRODUCTION
Subjects of Luck—Contingency, Morality, and the
Anticipation of Everyday Life
Giovanni da Col and Caroline Humphrey
Abstract: This introduction illustrates the modalities in which different
societies imagine the tension between the impersonal and individual-
ized aspects of fortune and fate. After briefly discussing the role of
contingency, fortune, and gambling in the formation of subjectivities,
we outline how different societies confront the moral conundrums
arising from fortune’s unequal distribution in the world. We highlight
how luck orientations presentify the future by the deployment of what
we name ‘technologies of anticipation’. Luck and fortune can be seen
as conceptual techniques for short-circuiting temporal subjectivities by
creating a crack in time—a space of ‘compossibility’—where events
deemed to be fatal and inevitable become negotiable. We conclude
with a reflection on dice, randomness, and acts of gambling in which
not merely subjectivities but the fate or fortune of larger social aggrega-
tions—including the cosmos—is deemed at stake.
Keywords: anticipation, everyday, fortune, future, gambling, luck, moral-
ity, subjectivity
In short, the very manifesto of structuralism must be sought in the famous
formula, eminently poetic and theatrical: to think is to cast a throw of the dice
[penser, c’est émettre un coup de dés]. (Deleuze [1973] 2004: 175)
The Quasi-Event of Luck
“It follows that to the Zande witchcraft is a normal event of everyday life, through
which he may suffer at any hour of the day or night.” This statement, made by
Charles Seligman (1937: xvii; emphasis added) in the foreword to the unabridged
edition of Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande,
illustrates a society where ‘events’ are conceived neither as major historical
2 | Giovanni da Col and Caroline Humphrey
happenings or contingencies domesticated by cultural logics, nor as events con-
ceptualized as images encompassing and concealing actions and aesthetic forms
to be decomposed by a performative ‘seeing’ (Strathern 1990).
1
Unfortunate
events, such as tripping on a root, suffering a cut, or being struck down with ill-
ness, punctuate the domain of human activities, reversing the ground upon which
episodic luck is incessantly figured (Wagner 1987, 2012). ‘Lucky’ events, such as
catching a delayed bus at the last minute, seizing a good deal while shopping or
trading, landing a large fish, or sailing with favorable weather, inhabit the every-
day life of human beings and shape the mundane background of the boring and
the repetitive, the trivial and the oblivious. An ethnographic difference percolates
into the perceptual regime and bifurcating temporal perspectives following a mis-
fortunate or lucky event. An event might become a ‘coincidence’ that is isolated,
bracketed out—one’s attention might be suspended. Or a happenstance might
involve, as in the Azande’s case, an endless trailing of causal connections aimed
toward the future, the activation of the attention or an “excess of wonder” (Eco
1992: 50) at the signs or signatures of the world. Whereas misfortune is perceived
as an obstacle, a loss, or an obliteration, the ethnographies contained in this issue
show how events of fortune and luck entail anticipated perspectives on exhausting
potential futures, constituting imagined viewpoints on almost-happening series of
best possible worlds. Taken together, the articles assembled here unfold the mani-
fold temporalities of fortune and elucidate how fortunate futures are anticipated or
produced and how subjectivities are revealed or crop up in the process.
With fortune, one never knows whether the potential is enough or what
the exact state of one’s fortune is. Thus, fortune and luck constitute a special
category of happenstances, being always almost-happenings, the ‘quasi-events’
of everyday life. A quasi-event is not an ordinary fact but a unique fact of the
everyday, one that forces a shift in attention toward what will happen next (cf.
Stafford, this issue) or toward what might have happened—a mishap, an omen,
a winning, a sign of hope. The quasi-event of luck does not provide certainty
but rather constructs a fertile universe of doubts. Such a universe underlies
the desire of the compulsive gambler who cannot stop playing: he rejects an
ultimate determination of his cosmos (cf. Sangren, this issue) since he can
constitute his freedom and bridle the omnipotence of his desire within a space
of ‘compossibility’ where anything might happen. Where an event would mark
major subjective transitions, such as radical ontological shifts from humanity
to divinity (Sahlins 1985), a quasi-event allows only an ephemeral assemblage
of subjectivity. Serres ([1982] 2007: 225) gives a similar description when
defining the role of the ‘quasi-object’ in the game of furet (ferret):
The quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless, since it is not a
subject, since it is in the world; it is also a quasi-subject, since it marks or
designates a subject who, without it, would not be a subject. He who is not
discovered with the furet in his hand is anonymous, part of a monotonous chain
where he remains undistinguished … This quasi-object, when being passed,
makes the collective, if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he
is “it” [mort]. Who is the subject, who is an “I,” or who am I? The moving furet
weaves the “we,” the collective; if it stops, it marks the “I.”
Introduction: Subjects of Luck | 3
In the companion issue, da Col (2012a) reflects how hierarchy and motility
are critical companion aspects that accompany luck terms. Either forces such
as mana, grace, and fortune are bestowed by gods, or gods are believed to
have primary access to them. Thus, it is not surprising that the possession of
fortunate forces is imagined as engendering moments of cosmological mobility
(cf. Broz and Willerslev, Pedersen, this issue). By ‘luck’, humans may tempo-
rarily acquire special perceptual powers—such as seeing invisible creatures
or foreseeing events by anticipating time—or to achieve forms of authority,
resulting in the common association of leadership with great luck in influencing
critical events or achieving favorable outcomes against all odds. The previous
issue also shows how the circulation of lucky objects may parallel the circula-
tion of vital reproductive substance. However, while kinship substances are a
‘reactive’ potential—to use a chemical metaphor—luck and fortune may also
be prophylactic and anticipatory, allowing forms of temporal and subjective
‘hacking’ through their management (cf. Broz and Willerslev). The problems
of the gambler, the Calvinist, or the fortune investor (cf. Guenzi, this issue) are
therefore similar, since, as subjects, they constitute themselves by proactively
anticipating a fortunate future. It follows that fortune and luck could be excellent
heuristics for revealing the role of contingency in different social formations. As
Battaglia (1999: 114) writes, “ethnography must be willing to embrace its own
under-recognized capacity to engage and to ‘own’ contingency and ambiguity—
its capacity, as a technique of knowledge production, to generate productive
uncertainties and disjunctive possibilities for social engagement.” The contribu-
tors to this issue show how multifarious cosmologies of luck and fortune are
manifested in singular ontologies of ‘presentation’, defining in different ways the
tension between the transcendental domain of contingency and the individual-
ized elements of fortune-like forces. What does it imply to be successful in a
hazardous gamble against life itself? How are cosmologies of luck and fortune
manifested in contingent singularities and temporal views? Who are the subjects
of fortune, and what could we gain from ethnographies of contingency?
Subjects of Luck
In Malinowski’s (1966) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the subject of luck
comes up in his remarks on the danger of Trobriand sailing: ocean navigation
is the utmost test of a man’s luck. While ‘economic luck’ concerns the prosper-
ity of a man in relation to his clan, sailing luck is personal and clearly flashes
into view when Malinowski remarks on a man’s exclusive privilege to use the
term toli (ownership) with regard to his canoe, with which his good luck in
sailing is associated. While economic luck is distributed, being the outcome of
the collective agency of a clan’s magic, sailing luck is individualized, owned
by a singularity. Thus, Malinowski (ibid.: 328) writes: “A man, whether he be
rich or poor in partners, may, according to his luck, return with a relatively
big or a small haul from an expedition. Thus the imagination of the adventur-
ers, as in all forms of gambling, must be bent towards lucky hits and turns of
4 | Giovanni da Col and Caroline Humphrey
extraordinarily good chance. The Kula myths feed this imagination on stories of
extreme good luck, and at the same time show that it lies in the hands of man
to bring this luck on himself, provided he acquires the necessary magical lore.”
In a similar fashion, Prytz-Johansen (1954: 86) writes that the Maori mana
is an impersonal force that yet can be contained and owned by a singularity:
the mana of the group is mustered and magnified by the chief. Anticipating
by more than a decade Deleuze’s famous reflections on virtuality and actual-
ity, Prytz-Johansen writes: “The dynamic element in mana, the unfolding, is
brought out strongly when the word is used as a verb. The verbal character
makes the aspect of mana as a communion or fellowship recede into the back-
ground, which is only justified if we do not forget that the dynamic element
cannot be active except against this background” (ibid.: 90).
While the Maori idea of mana illustrates a univocal, ‘nuclear’ ontology,
in which all manifestations of luck-like forms are encompassed within one
linguistic referent, other ethnographic contexts reveal how fortune and luck
make visible the relations between different scales and social sets. Aptly, Rio
and Smedal (2009) describe this movement as one of ‘totalization’ and ‘deto-
talization’, contracting and waning between sets of agents counted as singular
entities and expanding and waxing into larger aggregations and multiplicities-
in-themselves. Thus, the Tibetan yang (da Col 2012a) and the roughly equiva-
lent Mongolian hishig (Empson 2012) both point to fortune as a bounty or
grace attached to valued things (or people) that can be detached and collected
in ‘containing’ entities such as chests, vases, houses, villages, counties, or
nations, as well as non-human domains such as forests and mountains, which
are ‘perspectivally’ conceived as the abodes of deities.
In contrast, Humphrey and Hürelbaatar (this issue) discuss the particular
kind of singularized, yet impersonal, subjectivity evoked by Mongols through
the notions of hiimori and sülde, which are forms of animating vitality (or for-
tune) associated with the mobile cosmic forces that are, in principle, available
to any (especially male) person.
2
Here, fortune and luck are individualized in
active subjects, supporting and orienting the gestures and the conduct of their
agents or positively bridling them. Yet despite individualization, hiimori and
sülde remain an impersonal spark of rising or falling fortune within its human
subjects. This is an example of the idea that whatever engenders achievement
and wealth requires the accumulation and bold deployment of a lucky and vital
element, which Mary Douglas (1970: 149) describes as the mark of a “success
cosmology.” Fortune favors the bold, and thus it is not surprising that, among
the Maori, Prytz-Johansen (1954) suggests that the prosperity/fortune of mana
is related to maia—evenemental luck—the latter differing from the former by
requiring active will, a display of bravery, an act of subjective determination. A
similar idea is discussed in the article by Pedersen (this issue), who argues that
this kind of ‘bravery of fortune’ goes with hope and a commitment to a par-
ticular understanding of time. Young men in contemporary Ulaanbaatar, Ped-
ersen explains, operate with a forward-oriented trust, “engaging with events
of the future as if they have already happened.” Instead of the meaning of an
event being established retrospectively, there is a continual colonization of the
Introduction: Subjects of Luck | 5
present by the future. Yet this is “an ‘impossible’ (unrealizable) future that is
subject to inherent destruction, transformation, and renewal.”
There is another sense in which luck, fortune, and the fortuitous in general raise
the question of individual subjectivities, for there is no culture in which people do
not have available alternative meanings for events. Laurence Goldman’s (1993)
The Culture of Coincidence touches on some of the concerns about the ontology of
chance outlined in the previous special issue (cf. da Col 2012a) and is a polemic
against the anthropological tendency to follow meekly in the wake of Lévy-Bruhl
and Evans-Pritchard, both of whom argued that concepts of coincidence and
accident are absent from non-Western theories of misfortune “because nothing
that so harms a human being can be truly accidental” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 63).
Goldman (1993: 268) maintains that anthropology has neglected the ethnographic
evidence of thinking about accidents, having been led into a cul-de-sac by its
doctrinal heritage, which analyzes misfortunes only in terms of the religious-cos-
mological (e.g., witchcraft, sorcery, discourses on evil) and medical domains, and
by its comparative methodology, which contrasts whole cultures while presuming
the absence of a plurality of explanatory modes within them. Goldman insists
that ‘accident’ is an available idea for Huli people. A house suddenly burns down
overnight. One of the two women living inside escapes with all her children and
pigs, while the other is burned to death. The villagers are divided: some say that
such a terrible thing must have been done deliberately (the woman who escaped
had set fire to the house and in effect murdered her companion), while others
say, no, it was just an accident. The conundrum in the case of the Huli is that the
distinction between ‘arson’ and ‘accident’ is difficult to register because of the
varied and unfamiliar ways that intentionality is encapsulated linguistically. As
Goldman puts it: “The resolution of timbre, tonal colour, depth, and positioning
of the voices of accident or murder, inculpation or exculpation, requires the most
sensitive of instruments—the analytical tools of linguistics applied to the record
of dispute speech” (ibid.: 270). In the case of the Mongols, deploying the range
of alternative explanations for a single fortunate/unfortunate event is socially
nuanced. If a respected or high-ranking person experiences a misfortune, people
are likely to attribute it to chance and say that he or she is ‘unlucky’ (azgüi). But
they will hesitate to say that such a person is ‘without hiimori’, for doing so would
imply a moral criticism, a point to which we shall return.
Mosko’s article in this issue penetrates further into this idea of accident and
can be read as a critique of the notion as employed by Goldman. Mosko argues
that the conceptualization of accident as “impersonal probabilistic chance” is
derived from “Western possessive individualism.” The Mekeo notion of laki
derives from the English word ‘lucky’ and refers to something caused by forces
outside the subject’s control, but it has adapted to cultural and ritual classifica-
tions and practices such that it differs radically from impersonal probabilistic
chance. In his article, Mosko examines how laki is associated with the notion
of tsiapu or ‘hot’—“the indigenous descriptor for every kind of agency or effec-
tiveness”—and analyzes the traditional practices (kangakanga) with which
‘hot’ (effective) and ‘cold’ (ineffective) laki are inextricably involved. Mekeo
“dynamics of partible personhood” complicate the notion of individualization: