All About That Place: The Curious Case of Bingo Liberalisation in Brazil

Abstract

Bingo is a form of gaming that is often associated with good works, social services, low stakes entertainment and working class sociality. In many parts of the world bingo halls are the province of charities, veterans’ clubs, older women and families: But not in Brazil. Commercial bingo grew rapidly in Brazil during a decade of legality that ended in 2004. Legal bingo halls employed tens of thousands of people and the game was widely played by middle-class and well-educated Brazilians as well as older working-class women and men. However, the game, or more precisely the bingo halls in which it was played, came to be regarded as laundries for dirty money, sources of corruption of public powers and risks to the security of urban neighbourhoods. Using contextualised socio-legal analysis of the places that Brazilian bingo halls became and their place in Brazilian society this article suggests that it may be insightful to look to the place of Brazil in a globalizing world to understand why Brazilian law and regulation failed to institutionalise the commercial bingo hall as a site of clean, safe ‘fun’, to contain the risks it posed and to ensure the continuity of bingo as a legal leisure practice.