This paper examines the lottery in Istanbul as a material, visual, and moral object through which uncertainty is lived and managed in times of economic crisis. The title, inspired by the novella, The Lottery in Babylon by Borges (1941), where chance becomes a total social system, the paper treats the lottery not as metaphor but as an ethnographic object embedded in everyday infrastructures, gestures, and attachments. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Turkey, I follow lottery tickets as they move through kiosks, homes, pockets, wallets, gift envelopes, and rubbish bins, tracing how they are bought, gifted, folded, displayed, saved, and discarded. I argue that the lottery ticket operates as a speculative object whose power lies in its material modesty and temporal ambiguity. It condenses state authority, hope, probability, and moral judgment into a small, ephemeral form. The ticket promises transformation without guaranteeing it, and in doing so it allows people to inhabit uncertainty without resolving it. Through practices of gifting, sharing, and ritualized checking of results, lottery tickets become social devices for distributing hope, managing disappointment, and negotiating responsibility in conditions of economic precarity.
Lottery tickets pose a challenge for visual, material, and museum anthropology because they are designed to disappear, either through loss, disposal, or obsolescence. Yet they generate dense social relations and moral commentary while they circulate. I reflect on what it means to study an object whose value depends on anticipation rather than outcome to show that attending to their material form, visual design, and modes of handling reveals how speculative futures are made tangible and governable in everyday life. In the paper, I ask : what kinds of objects are taken seriously as anthropological evidence, and what is at stake in following ephemeral, low-value things such as lottery tickets. In doing so, I propose that the lottery offers a privileged site for thinking about uncertainty not as abstraction or exception, but as a material condition actively sustained through ordinary objects.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2026
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Chihab El-Khachab and Paola Esposito.
