The Cosmological Ritual of Lottery: Venezuelan Study

Djukich de Nery, Dobrila and Mosquera, Alexander and García de Molero, Irida (2004) The Cosmological Ritual of Lottery: Venezuelan Study. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 49 (1-2). pp. 125-139. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

Since ancient ages the game as competency has always had a privileged space and time in the human being. Greece, Mesopotamia, Rome, the Mayas are true testimonies of the ludic “doing” of the human beings. Venezuelan people, from their side, since many years ago, they have been spending a lot of time and money in gambling games (Sánchez Bello 1999); therefore, this behavior is part of their day-to-day and of the “affective-emotional” culture (Greimas and Fontanille 1995; Fabri 1995) of the country. This study is intended to establish categories of the common strokes of the lottery player, as well as the symbolic-religious relation lying down in this ludic “doing”. The ethnic-semiotic focusing is perfectly adapted to this situational corpus to the repertory of semic entanglement whose positive isotopies gyrate around the religious themes (“to have faith”), and the esoteric matters (“to be lucky thanks to something or somebody”). The negative isotopy corresponds to the opposite semic axle and to the modal value of “Not to have = Not to do” (Greimas and Courtes 1979). There has been drawn an emotional map of the lottery player, with this modal classification and category, concluding that the daily “doing” is part of a cultural cosmology within which he dwells.

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