Cards on K iriwina: Magic, Cosmology, and the ‘Divine Dividual’ in T robriand Gambling

T robriand I slanders adopted card gambling from E uropeans in colonial times alongside a growing familiarity with introduced money and commodities. Most ethnographic reports of gambling elsewhere in PNG have concentrated on its secular aspects. Here I focus on its ritual dimension summarized by the notion of laki (‘lucky’) as expressed in the agentive capacities of a new player, the ‘divine dividual’, who synthesizes elements of S ahlins's ‘divine king’ and the ‘dividual’ of the N ew M elanesian E thnography. In accord with the local understandings of spiritual agency, many T robriand men have adapted pre‐existing magical practices for courting, kula , fishing, sorcery etc. to gambling by seeking to encompass the perceived powers of exogenous E uropeans, acknowledged as the sources of laki , money and commodities, into their own persons in ways analogous to traditional magicians' reliance upon baloma spirits. T robriand gambling thus exemplifies how change following from the introduction of novel W estern practices can be effectively accommodated to preexisting religious and cultural practices through indigenous modes of personhood and agency.