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The brow just keeps getting higher around here. Terra Nova's newest author, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee anthropologist Thomas Malaby, brings an agile and sophisticated understanding of modernity and its contradictions to bear on the contemporary meaning of play. From the social stakes of gambling in modern Greece (the topic of his first book, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City) to the ethical life of code in Second Life (the focus of his current, NSF-funded ethnographic research), the questions Thomas pursues -- and the answers he chases down -- light up the intersection of culture, technology, games, and chance like so many signal flares. Indeed, as I recently heard Thomas remark, while his Tauren druid and my Tauren shaman were out slaying Razormane Geomancers near Thorn Hill the other afternoon, "Die, you fat little spell-casting man-pig, die!"
Durkheim himself, I believe, could not have said it better. Please welcome Thomas Malaby.
posted by onalark at 7:45 PM on October 23, 2005