High Stakes

Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty

Abstract

In this lucidly written, carefully conceived, persuasively argued and thoroughly researched book, Jessica Cattelino studies the ways that members of the Seminole Indian nation have reconfigured material and symbolic forms of their sovereignty in the casino-era. As such, High Stakes makes a valuable contribution to literature on cultural economy, cultural studies, political economy and cultural history in addition to the author’s home discipline of anthropology. It also makes an intellectual intervention at a moment which has seen Indigenous ownership of legal gambling businesses become the object of often contradictory discourses which Cattelino relates to '...more general American anxieties... about the effects of economic power upon cultural difference and the role of differential political status in a democratic multicultural nation'(8).