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Abstract
In this article I examine high-stakes mahjong in Taiwan as a ritual mode of male agency fraught with political significance. I show how men divine fate by conjuring estranged game forces, while disavowing the "abeyance of agency" by deploying strategy and style to control fate's fickle flip-side-luck. Through "combat" with luck, men reanimate an officially orchestrated male totality, or martial imaginary, that reproduces idealized masculine values and patterns of citizenship. By further situating mahjong within a socially and politically encompassing play-ritual framework, I argue that mahjong mimesis generalizes a pathos of "sympathetic agonism" that blurs gender boundaries and that preserves a space for a plural democratic agôn.
[Keywords: fate, play, gambling, mimesis, public culture, Taiwan]
Ethnographie Setting: Of Mahjong and Men
It was 11:00 p.m. in the dank basement of a shop in downtown Taipei, where a gang of men from all walks of urban life hung out and played mahjong. A Zhang, Little Big, Mushroom, and I were fastened to the mahjong table. Behind us stretched a cluttered tea table, on which stood a tall hotpot now cold with the scant remains of a homemade herbal consommé. As was usual practice, we had earlier interrupted our nine-hour mahjong marathon to make and take the health-giving concoction.
Somewhat unusual that night was that we were playing a third game because my friends were desperate to reverse an unlikely game-two outcome: I was the big and only winner. I had been on a winning streak for a month or so and a few guys in our mahjong gang had already become so spooked by what my consistent winning intimated about the uncanny forces in mahjong that they were simply refusing to play with me. And even though I had emerged as the big winner (dage) before, this was the first time that I had been the only winner. My friends were convinced that my luck derived from the illegitimate subversion of mahjong protocol. I presumably pulled off this act of sabotage by making unorthodox or nonsensical moves, deemed so for being logically disproportionate to game situations or probabilistically foolish, and with my occasionally off-tempo pace, which they perceived as disrupting the smooth and snappy rhythm of the game-and rhythm, as we will see, is...