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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research on gambling and speculative practices in Turkey’s economic crisis, this paper examines how people live through monetary collapse as an ongoing end-times condition. It shows how lotteries and everyday gambling become techniques of re-worlding

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the economic crisis in Turkey as a lived experience of everyday end-times, focusing on gambling and speculative practices as responses to monetary breakdown, inflation, and prolonged uncertainty. Rather than approaching crisis as a singular rupture or terminal collapse, I analyse it as a condition of slow world-ending, in which state promises, economic temporalities, and expectations of continuity steadily lose credibility. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among lottery players and small-scale gamblers, I explore how practices of chance emerge as techniques for inhabiting a future that no longer feels guaranteed. In a context where wages erode, savings dissolve, and the state's monetary authority appears increasingly fragile, gambling becomes a means of recalibrating time itself. I argue that gambling in crisis operates as a form of re-worlding. It neither denies collapse nor promises redemption. Instead, it allows people to act within a world perceived as already broken, sustaining moral distinctions between hope and delusion, responsibility and abandonment. These practices also reveal the cosmological dimensions of economic crisis, as chance, fate, and calculation become intertwined with evaluations of state power, fairness, and sovereignty. By situating gambling within debates on worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding, the paper contributes to anthropological discussions of end-times as uneven, ongoing, and embedded in everyday life. It suggests that worlds do not simply end through catastrophe, but are continuously dismantled and partially remade through mundane practices that hold together despair, hope, and moral reasoning in precarious balance.