Perilous Wagers : Gambling, Dignity, and Day Laborers in Twenty-First-Century Tokyo Paperback / softback
by Klaus K. Y. Hammering
Part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University series
Paperback / softback
Description
The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo's old day-laborer district, San'ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo.
Although San'ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety.
In this context, Hammering's book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood.
It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life.
Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values across construction sites, non-profit organizations, hospitals, bunkhouses, and illegal gambling dens, giving imaginative life to a stigmatized, forgotten social world.
Information
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Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:288 pages, 10 Halftones, black and white
- Publisher:Cornell University Press
- Publication Date:15/08/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9781501776427
Other Formats
- Hardback from £116.00
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:288 pages, 10 Halftones, black and white
- Publisher:Cornell University Press
- Publication Date:15/08/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9781501776427
