Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age

Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning

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Et h nogr a ph i es of Mor a l R e a son i ng L i v i ng Pa r a dox e s of a Gl ob a l Age

Edited b y K are n S y k e s

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MORAL REASONING

Copyright © Karen Sykes, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60981–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–60981–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ethnographies of moral reasoning : living paradoxes of a global age / edited by Karen Sykes. p. cm. ISBN 0–230–60981–3 (alk. paper) 1. Ethics—Congresses. 2. Ethnology—Congresses. 3. Practical reason—Congresses. I. Sykes, Karen Margaret, 1960– BJ52.E76 2009 170—dc22 2008019906 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

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Notes on Contributors

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Part 1 1

An Introduction to the Ethnography of Moral Reasoning

Residence: Moral Reasoning in a Common Place—Paradoxes of a Global Age Karen Sykes

Part 2 2

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Valuers and Value: Words on an Uncommon Ground

Privatization: Jokes, Scandal, and Absurdity in a Time of Rapid Change Catherine Alexander Charity: Conversations about Need and Greed Soumhya Venkatesan

Part 3

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Contestations of the Standards of Value

Custom: The Limits of Reciprocity in Village Resettlement Keir Martin

5 Corruption: Insights into Combating Corruption in Rural Development Alpa Shah

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Part 4 Subaltern Reason, Moral Ambiguity, and Paradoxes of Value 6

Fakes: Fraud, Value-Anxiety, and the Politics of Sincerity Susanne Brandtstädter

7 Sacra: Rumors about the Moral Force of Ritual Objects as Public Art Karen Sykes

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Part 5 After Words 8

After Words: From Ethos to Pathos C.A. Gregory

Index

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

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ome people must be thanked first. Our colleagues and fellow authors Edward Simpson and Michael Scott, whose chapters do not appear here, began this project with us and added a great deal to this final version. Ed Simpson, especially, gave of his time for this project and has been a stern editorial eye at different times. Keir Martin kept a full record of our various workshops, distributed them to the contributors, and generally kept the conversation alive in between meetings. Brianna Sykes helped to make the final index. Generous funding from the British Academy allowed the different contributors to meet for a final workshop and present their papers in the company of other more experienced scholars. We thank those people who attended and spent their time commenting on these chapters as full drafts. It is a better book for the plenary panel of Marilyn Strathern, Bruce Kapferer, Stephan Feuchtwang, and James Laidlaw, the discussants work completed by Joel Robbins and Nandini Sundar, as well as the substantial papers prepared for the event by Almut Schneider, Knut Rio, and Annelyn Erikson. Soumhya Venkatesan’s efforts to make this event a success were unmatched. Our event was enhanced with additional financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK-Centre for the Research in Cultural Change, at the University of Manchester. The Department of Social Anthropology at Manchester University first supported the meetings with a small fund, but the journal Critique of Anthropology enhanced that budget tremendously and gave even more in terms of goodwill. This funding made collaboration with Chris Gregory possible. Finally, we give our thanks for his intellectual generosity.

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C on t r i bu t or s

Catherine Alexander has carried out research in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on the effects of privatization and post-Soviet reforms since 2000, publishing on property rights, planning, and administrative changes. Her book Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia (2007), co-edited with Caroline Humphrey and Victor Buchli, has been published by University College London Press. She is currently completing work on a book titled Mercurial Cities (Cornell University Press) on urban transformations in Almaty. Her first research in Turkey on relations between state and citizens via the part nationalized Sugar Corporation was published as Personal States (2002) by Oxford University Press. Susanne Brandtstädter completed research in South China analyzing the elaboration of traditional and ceremonial life in terms of the politics of value transformation in post-Mao China, which is opening up to trade with South East Asia, Australia, and most recently negotiating trade with Europe and North America. Her current research in North China opens out new questions about the elaboration of legal processes at the local level by “barefoot lawyers.” She is coediting a book, On Chinese Kinship: Some Anthropological Perspectives, which is to be published by Routledge. C.A. Gregory is the author of Gifts and Commodities (Academic Press 1982), Savage Money (Harwood 1997), and other works on economic anthropology. He has been carrying out fieldwork in Bastar District, India, since 1982. His most research fieldwork has been on the political economy and culture of rice growing. His Lachmi Jagar: Gurumai Sukdai’s Story of the Bastar Rice Goddess (Kaksad Publications 2003), done in collaboration with Harihar Vaishnav, is a prelude to a multivolume study of this oral epic and its annual ritual enactment during the harvest season. Keir Martin has conducted two years of research in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, working among the Matupi community in the aftermath of the volcanic eruptions of 1994. He is the author

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of a number of published articles covering issues of contested transactions, social movements, land tenure, tourism, and possessive individualism. He is currently preparing his ethnographic manuscript titled Big Shot; Custom, Conflict and Post-Colonial Social Stratification. Alpa Shah’s research focuses on addressing the reproduction of inequality and the resultant implications for and experiences of marginalized people. Through fieldwork in the state of Jharkhand in Eastern India, Shah’s interests grew from concerns of international development to the possibilities offered by social movements in the form of indigenous activism. The monograph she is currently writing looks at how well-meaning indigenous rights and development efforts can maintain a class system that further marginalizes the poorest. Karen Sykes researched the lives of graduates of secondary education in Papua New Guinea rethinking the worth of education by giving her attention to the point of view of unemployed, educated youth residing in the villages. She is the author of Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift (Routledge 2005). Soumhya Venkatesan is a lecturer in social anthropology at Manchester University after completing her PhD at Cambridge University and spending two years as a research fellow there. Soumhya’s book on her doctoral work with Muslim weavers in South India entitled Craft Matters is under publication with Orient Longman Press and will be out in early 2009. She is currently working on a research project entitled Makers of Gods. This project is funded by the Wenner–Gren foundation and traces the transformation of stone and terracotta images into gods in Hindu India.

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A n I n t roduc t ion t o t h e Et h no gr a ph y of Mor a l R e a son i ng

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R esi de nc e: Mor a l R e a son i ng i n a C om mon pl ac e — Pa r a d ox es of a Gl ob a l Age

Karen Sykes

Moral Reasoning in a Common Place “Why ask me? I don’t live here.”

My comment, uttered in desperation, did not soothe Sioni’s worries about his son’s marriage. His recent experiences contradicted his expectations of local custom and now he sought my contribution to his understanding. But, my response was inappropriate; it was the wrong thing to say. Sioni had wanted to consult with me, and I had avoided being involved in his concerns. I learned of Sioni’s son’s marriage as he poured out his heartfelt worries to me on the road to Namatanai from his west coast home of Mesi in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. We were the same age, although he was a parent of young adults and I was childless. Sioni and his family kept a respectable family business going, combining a large pig husbandry, with copra, trucking, and market vegetables; both his brothers were minor civil servants, and Sioni kept alive the family’s interests in the village. Their father was a prestigious Big Man, who held great influence in the region in classical matters of appropriate conduct in cultural ceremonies, marriage arrangements, and funerary celebrations.

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I have known Sioni and his wife Maila as friends for over a decade during the years that I pursued my research into the lives of secondary school graduates who found themselves stuck in limbo, unable to give their work to either the wage labor market or to the ceremonial and everyday social exchanges of village life. For over fifteen years, I had worked to understand how a generation of contemporary young Papua New Guineans lived, and what they said about the moral order of a global age. Among other graduates with whom I have kept longterm acquaintance, I have known their twenty-three-year-old son Bartly since he was thirteen. I kept a research record of his life experiences during and after his time at secondary school. He continued to National High School (along with 25 percent of his class, or about 10 percent of his age group), and then found work as a security personnel at the nearby Lihir Gold Mine. Compared with his peers who were largely unemployed, Bartly enjoyed partial success in finding longterm employment. He was one of the many educated young men and women, who, for the most part, had failed to access long-term employment. Furthermore, the exam selection process prevented the continuation of their education beyond provincial high schools (which provide ten years of formal schooling compared with Bartly’s twelve) and they could not access the institutions of higher education that would provide them the credentials to do so. At the time of our conversation, Sioni was most worried that Bartly was about to make a bad marriage. What should he tell the young man about love and marriage? He worried that a young woman named Rose, from the East Coast village of Lamasong, had trapped his oldest son into marriage while they were both working at the Lihir Mine, speculating that she could gain a great deal by marrying into the esteemed family and also win access to Bartly’s better-than-average wage packet. Rose had come to her potential future relatives’ home in order to clarify the conditions of her cohabitation with Bartly, which was unconventional and against customary habits. What a story it was! The elder generation then agreed that the situation was shameful and only the young people’s marriage would set it right. The simple declaration of that moved the senior men and women to confirm their approval of the marriage and set in motion all the arrangements for its success, but Sioni had some doubts. We knew we were both ignorant of his son’s true feelings; was it possible to know the emotions of another for what they are? Perhaps it was possible to have empathy and imagine one’s own sentiments in such circumstances. Yet, Sioni speculated that perhaps his son did not “know his own heart.” Sioni, ever the worried father, speculated

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about the situation more generally and asked rhetorically, “After all what did a young man know except that he liked living with a young woman?” He said that he was glad Bartly found pleasure in sharing meals and a home, but wanted to tell him that marriage was more than that. What did I, an educated Western woman, think he could do or say as a father? Here I failed him somehow. I threw away my reply by protesting that I was ignorant of local habits. Why Didn’t I Know How to Answer? I had been asked for advice; but I didn’t know what to say, although I was asked to respond to an everyday experience of the same order as others that Sioni and I might share. Marriage is a human universal, and we might share insights about its progress as an enduring institution. Sioni was a member of a matrilineal clan, who had married Maila, a woman from a different clan, as was expected of him. Not only was she of a different clan, but the couple were members of opposite moieties, each moiety being a group that identified either the sea-hawk or the land-hawk as its distinct totemic birds. Add to these distinctive features of Sioni’s own marriage the recognition that his grandfather had married three women at once, and that the villagers acknowledged and honored the legacy of polygamy, although most people no longer practiced it. By contrast, I understood marriage as a personal agreement, rather than an elaboration of complex relations between clans, although I confess that thoughtful interrogations of my own experiences would show that relatives by marriage are more numerous than first appeared and that contemporary forms of monogamy also create many kinds of intimate relationships between men and women. The most obvious issues of common interests also tested my ties to the place he lived. In what sense did I, or did I not live there? The answer was unclear, despite the history of our association, the recognition of common concerns for young men’s and young women’s futures, and the successes and failures of marriage as a social relationship that can last a lifetime. To what extent did I share the same social environment as Sioni? To what extent were we residents on the same earth? My failure to identify which beliefs about marriage Sioni and I held in common also had unanticipated benefits. The frustrations of that experience helped me to understand how difficult it was to reconcile our different perspectives. I tried to hold two different frameworks for understanding the conversation at once. I believe I was

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speechless because I remained in the classic double bind of human communication when two modalities of understanding, one negating the other, operate within one interchange. On the one hand, I had fixed my attention so narrowly on customary marriage as being culturally distinct from Western marriage that I imagined him to be living a life very different from my own. The ways of his life with his son and the members of his clan became evidence that he was always to embody the “other” of my own life. I did not want to discuss his son’s marriage because I believed in the incommensurability of his cultural values for a good marriage with mine. I expected Sioni’s answer to be coherent with the customary norms of social and cultural life in the village where he and his family lived. This might be error. On the other hand, I was so firmly grounded in my sense of my own rationality and the privileges of that way of interrogating social life that I felt compelled to analyze how the social relationships should take shape, given the deep logic informing them. My commitment to finding the rational reasons for marriage compelled me to ignore the passion of the young woman’s plea for Bartly’s love, and to focus instead on the logical interest she might have in marriage. The boundaries between her self-interest in the marriage and her interest in Bartly’s well-being were difficult to ascertain. If love had anything to do with it, then it was not determinable because the evidence of the quality of that love remained immeasurable. I tried to answer both with cultural sensitivity and with rational certainty about the nature of the institution of marriage, only to find myself speechless. In most respects, my personal account does not reflect a new criticism of anthropological research. The reasons for the inaccessibility of another person’s insights remain a major political concern of fieldwork over the last several decades. This confusion has often been summarized as a condition of inequality between anthropologist and resident. Most often this is discussed as a matter of concern for wider social and political relations that remain significant within the relationships an anthropologist makes in fieldwork. The political structuring of anthropologists’ knowledge as part of the powerful relationships of colonial and postcolonial politics has been discussed often from extremely different theoretical perspectives (Asad 1973, Fabian 1978, Said 1977; and also Stolar 1997), and an entire school of social science and historical research under the name of subaltern studies has emerged in the attempt to critique anthropologists’ assumption that coeval relations between researcher and “informant” could assure ethical and insightful research.

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In the last decades anthropologists aimed to create new analytic terms that emerge from collaborative conditions in their fieldwork. “Coevality” is a historical condition defined by the claim that the researcher and informant have a common history and therefore can aim for equality in the very grounds of their interaction. The paradox of conducting anthropology in a period of decolonization is that the historical record shows the ideological aim of coevality has been denied. That aim of coevality, to conduct research that is grounded in collaborations that value egalitarian human relations, is impossible to sustain without surrendering those very research methods to pragmatic reason, and thereby deny cultural difference as the starting point of anthropology (which is to echo Geertz’s argument for antianti relativism), or refuse universal rationality is both the end and means of analysis (as Levi-Strauss’s theory showed and as Sahlins [1981, 1985, 1994] advocated in his study of myth and history). The world is made by neither of these logics of culturalism or rationalism, and the alternative argument for pragmatism as a theory and method of anthropology (Obeyesekere 1992) has yet to confront the fact that this latter proposal is also a form of moral reason about what is fair and just, although it rescues anthropology from mythological grounds of argument. The question of how to think about moral ambiguity without reverting to pragmatic reason does not have an easy answer in anthropology. So, in an important single respect, my failure to answer exposes anthropology’s more general inability to address moral reasoning. I cannot understand Rose’s heartfelt proposal, if I privilege rational judgment over passion. If, as an anthropologist, I believe that others’ social actions are incomprehensible because those people belong to a radically different culture than my own, then they must appeal to thinly shared common values to adjudicate that incommensurability. In this case Sioni and I shared an analysis. Anthropology is constrained either by the terms of rational analysis that seeks certainty in contradiction, as when I assume this woman is moved by self-interest, not by love for his son. Or, it is constrained by the terms of culture, as when I assume this woman creatively demonstrates her understanding of her culture to confirm the value of its custom of marriage, and more generally show that she values her culture. If I recognize my own position as a researcher who is bound to specific intellectual territories specified by their grounds and premises, then I can understand the constraints that must be felt by informants who must speak from the specific places.

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Sioni’s question made me address our commonality as human beings living with the ambiguities of the moral condition on this earth. He did not ask me to answer from any sense of common human nature, but from the experience of sharing the world and the same social environment. He wanted me to pass on advice to his son about how a man should manage a relationship to such a powerful woman as was Rose, a woman who was able to set a whole clan to the work of organizing bride-wealth gifts and house building. With her “modern ways” she had still provoked her future “in-laws” to act within the scope of customary law and behavior. Would I know how he might respond, even to stop the chain of reactions that had been set into play? Sioni’s question required a human response, one that demanded me to reply from my years of friendship. I had not answered from friendship, but replied as an anthropologist and I will turn first to elaborate that response in order to be clear about its limitations.

Commonplace Contradictions of Reason and Sentiment Sioni’s concerns showed that he was clear that marriage entailed living with everyday paradoxes. In other terms, people reasoned through good and evil from the acknowledgment of commonplace contradictions in their lives. I will turn to this at length in the last half of this introduction; however, it is useful to introduce the concept here. Moral reasoning about Rose’s proposal to marry Sioni’s son, while outwardly outrageous, also rests on the recognition of commonplace contradictions, that love was not wise, that giving entails taking, and that modern times entailed keeping traditions. The commonplace contradiction is acknowledged as a form of logic that marks complementary distinctions, different from axiomatic ones, which mark differences that negate each other—day and night or male and female—and cannot be resolved without subordinating one to the other. The final chapter of this book argues that a postcolonial anthropology must find new terms for its work in a decolonized world. It is the human condition to confront moral ambiguity because that is the nature of the contradictions that are part of everyday life. Savage Money (1997) explores the ways in which people reason through gifts and commodities as commonplace distinctions that complement, rather than negate, each other (247). For this book, the advantage of reasoning from commonplace contradictions is that moral reason is shown to be a matter of perspective on the relations

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among consciousness, logic, and language. For example, associative logic draws connections between things, ideas, and forms in such a way that they appear meaningful to a person in a specific time and place, but might not entail universal claims. Marriage is a fine example for a discussion of commonplace reason. For example, Rose’s relationship to Bartly might be abstracted or universalized as an axiomatic distinction between male and female, but that makes her proposal seem absurd. However, her relationship to Sioni becomes significant in association with her potential husband, as her husband’s father. Rather than universal or axiomatic, these are commonplace distinctions in which people value social relationships that complement other relationships. Sioni’s son’s marriage presents a brief case study in the character of marriage as a generally known social institution; that is, marriage is an experience that is common to humans, and anthropologists might examine it to better understand how people reason about the value of specific social relations. Three explanations for how people value marriage pertain. When marriage is understood as only a sentimental institution it is hard to explain how the emotions endure. It can be dismissed as a bourgeois affectation that obscures direct knowledge of the domestic household economy, which is not a matter of sentiments at all. Conversely, when marriage is understood as an institution based in economic rationality, women’s choices to become wives would appear irrational because their labor is given freely to the head of the household (as in Engel’s discussion of marriage as slavery) and its recompense makes them akin to prostitutes who receive payment for sexual service. When marriage is understood as the cultural expression of the rational logic underpinning the social structure (which is facilitated by the exchange of sisters), then any explanation that shows its proof in mathematical measure of the effects of marriage will fail to explain its success as a cornerstone of society. It was Sioni’s concern to explain to Bartly that people persevere in marrying, and that marriage is a matter of both acting morally and of being reasonable, which entailed living with commonplace contradictions as a matter of being human. The only option was to reason through these. Sioni’s question about what he should tell his son about love and marriage was both a general issue and a concern specific to his relationship with his son and to their future social life. In a discussion of the specifics of this example about the moral dimensions of marriage, I can better examine age-old topics in the subject of morality—the relationship between reason and passion.

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What is Morality When Reason Socializes Passions into Calculus? A woman in New Ireland could practice humility in social life as a way of moderating the relationship of passion to reason. Rose knows very well that she must measure carefully the expression of her affections for Bartly, or risk her alienation from the affections of his relatives. An immodest expression may repulse them, just as a too generous demonstration of her feeling; also, a too vivid record of their days together could offend the sensibilities of her future in-laws. Her future in-laws recognized a woman’s humility when they arranged the bride-wealth for the wedding. By arranging the bridewealth, they socialized her passions; that is, they gave bride-wealth in recognition of her humility. This was reasonable to do, but also they acknowledged her desire for the marriage. In this case, Bartly’s mother’s brothers (his matrilineal male kin) calculated the bride-wealth for Rose’s kinsmen. Her humility effectively “appears” in bride-wealth exchanges, which recognized her emotion with gifts of shell wealth, pigs, and firewood. Her humility was socialized into a calculus of social life, so much so that the puzzle remained as to why humility should be likened to propriety in village women’s behavior? Does it exist to enforce calculation of wealth for marriage exchanges? Where does humility go when reason socializes passions as a calculus? Rose’s confession that she wanted to marry Bartly seem to challenge the anthropologists’ structuralist theory of culture as it seeks to explain the efflorescence of cultural forms as variations in the expression of rational thought. Her case raises the problem of how marriage as a cultural institution can also be a moral institution; that is, an institution resting upon received conventional wisdom and shared sentiments. If that is so, then the structuralist project benefits from fuller interrogations of affection. Levi-Strauss, at the end of Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), ponders the marriage of a woman, given to a man, in the Hindu wedding ceremony as a gift of love and a gift to love; I turned to the significance of passion for how marriage is valued. What, in particular to a young woman like Rose, is the value of a having a wedding and making marriage? How Does Passion Dwell in the House of Reason? Rose confessed her love for Bartly, and her in-laws responded reasonably. Her future father-in-law (a member of the same clan as Rose’s) built her a house on the land of her future husband’s clan. The land

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was high on a plateau and two hours walk from the nearest road that a car can travel easily along. By custom, the husband’s father’s clan would help the groom to build a house on his own clan land, and the newly weds would go to live on it near to the time of the birth of the first child. Should they fail to do so, Sioni’s clan would be embarrassed by condemnatory gossip about their lack of kindness. According to the norms of customary action she could expect such generosity, as it was the obligation of each clan to care for the well being of the other. But, the action might be understood as self-interested and strategic. Was it not the case that Sioni’s clan would benefit from an apparently selfless act of munificence? Was it not the case that by building a house on Bartly’s clan’s land Sioni appropriated future access for his own clan? Add to this the fact that Bartly and Rose’s paycheck’s supported large parts of Sioni’s expenses for building a modern house with glass windows and an elaborate water system to help those who might live in it adapt to the dry climate and light rainfall that was common to its location. There was another house in question. It was available at the mining settlement where Rose and Bartly worked. If they married, they could move into married-couples’ housing that the company offered both its male and female employees. At present they lived in the single workman’s residence, which was Bartly’s employment benefit. It was not a dignified residence for a couple or for a woman. Bartly had to marry Rose soon in order to protect her reputation from the gossip of other women in the settlement, and to protect her from the unwanted attentions of his workmates. As a wife she would be more highly respected than a girlfriend. As a married couple, they could move to a better house on the settlement, and even welcome relatives from the village to live with them. The company recognized state, church, or customary marriage. It was this later form of marriage, the customary marriage, that Rose desired. “After all,” she said, “Bartly and I are ‘wantoks,’ that is people who recognize that they speak the same language.” With respect to Rose’s concerns for her marriage, I would raise a final question about how to examine the interface between the values of the company and that of the New Ireland clans. Is marriage a universal institution that differs in its expressive cultural forms only in as much as an idea might be expressed with different rhetorical idioms? As Schneider has shown us in American Kinship (1975), both conjugal and filial love constitute the institution of family, marking different degrees of emotional distance and different qualities of affection. Schneider’s observations pertain to American kinship and

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seek to constitute marriage around love as a core symbol. Schneider allows for cross-cultural comparisons that might be made on ideological grounds such as are common to American marriage. For example, in this case from Papua New Guinea, filial and conjugal expressions of love differ; but Sioni, Bartly, and Rose manage the difference between these forms of affection to create a complex institution. This argument limits cultural anthropology to moral relativism, whereby marriage is constructed differently from one place to another by the moral claims of people on each other. Culture functions as if it is the measure of social norms. It becomes a cause and effect of creativity in social relations, but limits individual action and personal agency. Culture functions to socialize passion into human relationships, and meaning into systems of belief. Rose’s actions as representative of the current generation of Papua New Guinean young women can be explained neither in terms of universal rationalism nor as the expression of different “culture.” Moral reasoning, not universal rationality or cultural relativism, most narrowly captures what humans share in trying to understand marriage as the most common form of social relationship. In order to answer Sioni’s question, I had to think beyond these two principle modalities of intellectual explanation that anthropology possesses and stay close to ethnographic description itself. The ethnographic description comes close to capturing something we can call moral reasoning, which must address these simultaneously.

After Cultural Relativism, Beyond Universal Rationalism The contradictions between universal rationality and cultural relativism are commonplace, and only ethnography can grasp them. They are commonplace in the sense that they are ordinary, and they are commonplace in the sense that they are not axiomatic; that is, one perspective does not negate the perspective of the other. Gregory in his book Savage Money describes commonplace contradictions as a form of reasoning about the material world distinguishing these from axiomatic contradictions, following critically Dumont’s theory of caste in Homo-Hierarchicus (1980). He explores the importance of commonplace contradictions for an anthropology that goes past cultural relativism without embracing universal rationalism in his essay, “Toward a Radical Humanist Anthropology” (1997: 297–311). I only introduce that argument here because his chapter in this volume, “After Words: From Ethos to Pathos,” better carries that argument

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forward. Whereas many anthropologists after Mauss and Malinowski have described how people use objects to create valued relationships by exchanging, giving, selling, or withholding them, fewer anthropologists have asked what kind of judgment is exercised in order to value those relationships. In no era is that more important than in the places and times that giving and selling in social relationships coexist, as they did in the last decades of the twentieth century in Papua New Guinea, as described by Gregory in part two of Gifts and Commodities (1982). As Gregory (1997: 41–70) argues, discernments between giving and selling are part of everyday life, and are possible because distinctions between gifts and commodities and between commodities and goods are commonplace, rather than axiomatic. In the following pages, I discuss the work of commonplace contradiction as a kind of moral reasoning deployed by some anthropologists, and elided by others. Grasping the role of commonplace contradictions in anthropological thought requires a certain degree of reflection on the discipline as a whole. Commonplace contradictions are part of the fieldworker’s experience, and entail value judgments in order to resolve them, or even to understand them. Before turning to the relationship between making judgments about the value of social relations and the acts of moral reasoning, I would like to look at a few examples of how anthropologists reason through moral ambiguity, embracing the commonplace contradiction in the process. Anthropologists have considerable experience with the problems of understanding and expressing commonplace contradictions. Geertz drew on Ryle, the critical philosopher of mind, to make one of anthropology’s most vigorous arguments for a “thick” description of moral order, different from some forms of philosophy, which presumably seek thin or abstracted analysis of moral consciousness (as I shall discuss in the next section). Thick description of experience attempts to provide a record of the fully conscious understanding that all participants share in interpretive depth. Consider Geertz’s famous essay on the Balinese cockfight, in which he contrasts the rationality and culture of betting as different orders of rational investments in a social life. A reader can adduce from this case study how bettors enhance or lose prestige and compromise their character with a series of moral judgments about the chance of their cock winning the fight. The enactment of the cockfight conveys Balinese acting with full consciousness of the many layers of “interpretative depth”; these might be summarized as the meanings of the rooster, the playing of the game, the recognition of life’s contingencies, in the effort to win some certainty of understanding.

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Geertz describes for his reader how, in the midst of an illegal community betting party at a cockfight, he makes his escape to the Balinese household. This is evidence of “being there” intimately, and a breakthrough in his relationship with the village. After gambling that the household would be a safe haven, Geertz proceeds to analyze the outlawed activity. He describes Balinese gamblers at the cockfight as investors whose betting pitches them deeply into calculus of personal values against the presentation of their public persona. Their deep play makes the betting an activity that calculates a scale of personal prestige rather than of financial power (If it were financial prestige that the bettors desired, no one would participate in the game). The short explanation, which is a mistaken one in many respects, has been that there was “something” about Balinese culture that made the cockfight a means of establishing prestige in terms of the male character. But, a closer consideration of Geertz’s argument shows that culture is not opposed to rationality; culture simply reorders the register of its dominant calculus from scales of financial power to male prestige. Emotions are stretched and tested in the play. (Or, as in Geertz’s idiom of deep play, the emotions are plumbed, as when the depth of a well is estimated with weight and string.) By using the example of betting, Geertz sets irrevocable tensions between the socialization of the moral sentiments through participation in the cockfight, and the management of rational judgment in betting. My introductory story about Rose, the young woman putting her case to her future male affines, establishes the worth of understanding human consciousness of the interpretive depth of experience. Potential affines respond to her arrival in the courtyard, much as gamblers at the cockfight do when they pitch their emotions against the calculus of betting. Love is a “bad bet” when Rose, the bride, identifies more with the reason of the groom’s matrilineage and paternal matri-clan simply because these collective groups do not think as much about her as they do about themselves. I had learned that Rose suffers from obsession about her future affinal relatives’ affections and thoughts. She had worried whether they would accept the marriage, and she was ignorant of the possibility that her sentiments would be recognized and returned. This emotion is often relegated to the panoply of Western romantic traditions associated with the theorizing of the individual psyche. But more than translate her romantic interests into marriage as a social institution, the kinspersons create the marriage as an expression of sentiments. Marriage is not only an exemplary action that others should emulate; but also

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reciprocal relationships between groups that entail each collective completing complementary work. What if we consider the possibility that Rose has given herself to love, and thereby educated all in her affection and demanded that they consider their own moral sentiments? By acting to acknowledge her own gift, the bride reclaims her equanimity and affects the discomposure of her affined kinsmen, who lose against their better judgment (i.e., they find her behavior hard to grasp). The bride’s male affines, her future husband’s matri-clan and his father’s matri-clan, organize bride-wealth, and build a house because they believe that her love must be met with good acts, and so they respond with kindness. By giving to her, they “know” affection in themselves. So they might ask, what other reason than love is there to commit to such social actions? What other “reason” than “passion” understands a human being’s moral action? Doubt rather than trust, ambiguity rather than certainty, characterize the moral condition of the participants in the marriage. Rose is an educated young woman, typically thought to have “lost” her culture, who paradoxically is negotiating a customary marriage. Those around her are confused by the actions. Whereas thick description adds interpretative depth to human consciousness of moral systems and social norms, the ethnography of moral reason must also grasp an account of the paradoxes of human existence. This is how the ethnography of moral reason differs from cultural anthropology’s concern with human consciousness of social action. An ethnographic account of moral reason enriches anthropology with specific accounts of how people negotiate paradoxes in their daily lives. I began with the analysis of morality within marriage, a primary social institution. It belies a common stereotype that the younger generation has lost values and moral standards. Sioni, and others, might expect that youth does not revere marriage, but this is where their expectations are challenged. A young woman proposed it, but did so in a way that pressed the rest of the village to act within customary ways, toward the aim of ensuring social continuity. Each person is pushed to reason through their relationships with their relatives and their friends. We see that the young woman and her future husband wanted a house; in fact they wanted two houses, one in the village and one house on the settlement. Marriage would facilitate acquisition of the houses. In the recounting of the story of Rose and Bartly’s marriage, it becomes clear that they were people who were reacting to top–down

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dictates of new policies affecting Papua New Guineans. The residents of the settlement, and employees of the mining company, both needed to display appropriate values in order to access and maintain residences there. Ethnography can describe the contrary, paradoxical, ambiguous nature of the social relations in which people live. This is a matter of perspective and of consciousness. For example, I was not prepared to confront Sioni’s perspective on his son’s marriage, nor was I prepared to confess to my own. He asked me to share my insights into his situation from my experience, assuming that he might be able to find them useful. The request required that I confront the politics of our fieldwork relationships. When I confronted the fact that I shared the same ground with Sioni and his family, I came to think about the importance of my face-to-face relationship to him, and how each of our positions in the matrices of powerful social relationships inflected our expressions of that friendship. The contemporary world presents us with a problem—how do people consider what is good when values are not shared? I have spent some time describing my personal deliberations because I want to refer to direct experience in what follows and build on that to show that although I did not share Sioni’s point of view on many things, we could still reason through the moral ambiguities of his problem together because its contradictory aspects of each of our local experiences were recognized and respected. Cultural relativism is built upon the belief that an individual’s actions should be understood in relation to his or her culture. It is conflated with moral relativism when culture is defined as a system of shared values that define and reflect the moral order and integrity of each society. Neither Sioni nor I was confident that the two societies—one Melanesian and one European— possessed each of us. Neither could we name core values. It was possible to find a common place from which to reason about the moral reach of Sioni’s concerns because we confessed to living with the paradoxes of everyday life. It helped me to recall that anthropologists have long doubted cultural relativism, and that its ascendancy dated to the interwar years in American anthropology when the students of Franz Boas (1973), especially Benedict (1935), Kluckhohn (1962), Mead (1935) who developed the “culture and personality school,” made a unified “theory” out of the legacy of the Boasian method of historical particularism that had developed and changed in his later years into the concept of culture. Although among themselves they had important disagreements about the definition of cultural relativism, these

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students of Boas superseded the historical–particularist approach, which insisted that research should attempt to understand individual social actions in reference to the specifics of the locale, with the attitude or belief derived from Kant that individual action was mediated by culture (Appell et al., 1988, Hatch 1983, Stocking 1996, and, more recently in a different vein, Kleinman 2006). In the view of the members of the culture and personality school, culture was a system of shared values that encompassed the specifics of local knowledge, thereby making them intelligible to those who lived within that worldview, and transmittable to strangers and guests. Some remained committed to this theory because it provided a powerful claim against the eugenicist arguments of the day, which made human difference into a matter of racial qualities, rather than knowledge. During the same years, the tradition of social anthropology in Britain, especially following Evans-Pritchard put firm belief in an approach that honored the universality of rational thought and action, and addressed apparent differences in moral order and values as practical issues, incidental to the grounds of human logic. The most famous example of Evans-Pritchard’s position on morality can be found in Magic, Witchcraft and Oracles amongst the Azande (1955), where he argues that the causes of a misfortunate event, such as the collapse of a granary, are rationally attributed to natural causes by members of the community. However, it is by moral reasoning that people understand why that misfortune befell these people at this time and so the witch-hunt begins. In the later debate between philosophers and anthropologists attention turned to the work of language and to words as deeds, and so, the example of how witchcraft accusations perversely made victims out of the victims of misfortune as their immediate practical concern showed why this thing happened to these people at this time. In sum, moral judgment is shown to be precise only in the measure of the incident, does not imply a theory of cultural difference, and is underlined by pragmatic rationality about what is good for this single time and specific place. Although he followed Evans-Pritchard’s thought on the centrality of accessing the specifics of moral reason, Max Gluckman had very different notions about anthropology’s subject in changing world. As a legal anthropologist of Southern Africa, Gluckman (1967) argued that individual social actions could be understood to be reasonable with reference to the specifics of the local situation that informed the case under study. In his study of Barotse customary law he appealed to the legal concept of “the reasonable man” to argue that the colonial administration in Africa could reach fair judgments if they

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reasoned through the minute details of the case, and that no detail was too small to consider in a fair trail. The “reasonable man,” was a concept from common law used to measure moral action in the light of the judgments of the educated “man on the street” who may have no legal expertise at all. His discussion of legal and moral reason as human capacities that weigh words, logic, and consciousness of action shows the need for detailed and specific study, and dismisses culture as irrational action or illogical belief that moves people to act in ways that are inappropriate for life in a civilized nation. He rightly pointed out that any expert appeal to abstract universal values would not support sound jurisprudence in Africa, and his ethnographic case studies showed that decolonization was necessary. Africans could govern themselves, administer laws, and judge wrongdoings according to very specific understanding of reasonable human behavior. Moral reasoning is not only an expert practice, as Gluckman once showed, it is simply what every person must do as they reason through their experience with words, to relate logic to their felt consciousness of moral action. Is Moral Reasoning either a Practical Ethics or a Kantian Moral Philosophy? As I have discussed in the story of Rose, holding different values requires a process of reasoning about morality. More generally, living with moral ambiguity is the human condition, which is a feature of social life that draws the attention of both anthropologists and philosophers. The incommensurability of values is exposed in ethnography of lived experience, and philosophy and anthropology each seek to rid it of its hair. How is the anthropology of moral reason distinct from moral philosophy? Anthropology is the discipline that values ethnography, insofar as specific fieldwork enlivens the discipline from which anthropologists make the general assumption that experience grounds human knowledge. Anthropology as a discipline of inquiry into the human condition abuts philosophy on the common theme of morality. There is a history of thought about obligation in philosophical anthropology that is inspired by the desire to understand morality. Anthropology does not share with philosophy the same history of argument. Instead the claims for anthropology of moral reason lie in its capacity to deal with ambiguity, paradox, and contradictions as descriptors of the human condition. For this reason, the subject of anthropological inquiry can be known as “moral reason.”

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Consider briefly how moral philosophy and anthropology have each addressed the nature of moral obligation. In order to do this, it helps to make a direct inquiry into Kant’s early philosophical anthropology as a specifically rationalist approach to obligation as a core concept of morality. The early anthropological perspective, following Kant, judges morality as rational thought and action to advance the goodness of human conduct in pragmatic terms, more famously known stated as the full agent, “what man as a freely acting entity makes of himself or can and should make of himself.” It is not immediately clear that obligation is central to the human condition, but Kant’s concerns quickly turn to this puzzle of how humans meet their duties to each other. Kant’s freely acting agent is of utmost importance to his anthropology, and relies upon the notion of the will, or the voluntary capacity to choose, as he explains in his essay addressing the fundamental principles for the metaphysics of morals where he famously defines the will, “a power to choose only that which reason independently of inclination recognize to be practically necessary, that is, to be good.” For Kant, then, the smallest requirements to convey full human agency are namely, the capability to envisage a moral purpose (reason), as well as the ability to rise above or transcend affective knowledge of worldly experience (will). This second requirement entails the complete “dominance of sense and inclination” by which they participate, rightly or wrongly, in the social world. A full agent must not only be capable of discovering the “immutable laws” of reason, but also be freely acting in accordance with these imperatives. In practice, these are two interrelated processes. Kant’s anthropology is a multitiered project in practical philosophy that is best complemented by his philosophical anthropology to complete its work; at the risk of becoming no more than pure speculation about the nature of man (Munzel 1999). That philosophical inquiry begins famously with the question of what I can know and proceeds to the question of what I ought to do. The third question, “What might I hope?” is a one of belief and spiritual knowledge and is the last step to the last question “What is humanity?”—the question anthropology shared with his moral philosophy. The first question famously aims to establish certainty, the second a moral theory of human action, the third a theory of spirituality as it exists in both secular and religious terms. The human being wills his passions toward meeting obligations, and finally discharges his duties in the best interests of a secular or religious “good.”

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Anthropologists have written exhaustively on the topic of obligation; yet, duty is a concept that Kant and the neo-Kantians use in rather specific ways in anthropology. For the most part, Kant remarks on duty—rather more often than on obligation—it being a categorical imperative. In the Kantian deontological philosophy, that is, a philosophy in which self-knowledge became possible because humans were not led into error by their senses, duty is expressed voluntarily. In these philosophical terms, duty is quite a different matter than is obligation’s more specific social terms, about which Mauss had rather more to say in his famous book The Gift (1990). Whereas the problems that Kant and the neo-Kantians pose to anthropology could be discussed at greater length, it is not my aim to argue for philosophical anthropology. Philosophy and social anthropology differ in their approaches, and it is wise to establish the limit of anthropological inquiry into the reckoning of another field. My aim here has been to demonstrate briefly that the principle problematic relationship between certainty and experience turns the Kantian moral philosophy away from lived experience, in order to reconsider the anthropology of moral reason. Rational choice and freedom are not the only way forward. The anthropology of moral reason would question further the difference between certainty and human experience, going so far as to show that certainty is a privileged perspective of some people, against others whose circumstances predict more fractured insights. How Does Moral Reasoning Differ from Durkheim’s Theory of Social Norms? The anthropology of morality is a slim chapter of the discipline’s history as James Laidlaw (2001) observes in his analysis of how social norms can only be kept if a person is free to do so. His is a complex claim, and there certainly have been specific studies of morality with reference to case studies (Just 2001, Madsen 1994, Pardo 2002, Robbins 2004, Salazar 2006). Since Mauss (1990), ethnographers have had a concrete philosophy of why people feel moved to keep their obligations, but it is one that is not yet fully elaborated. Mauss’s is an approach and a philosophy that is best understood by way of example, rather than by abstraction or theoretical elaborations of religious or spiritual purpose in secular life. In the last pages of The Gift, Mauss writes that he intends anthropology of the total social form to make possible the discipline’s moral project. It is in the study of the exchange of wealth that Mauss directs our attention to the old

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question of how some forms of wealth are valued over others, how some forms of relationship are valued over others. I would like to consider the possibility here that the ethnography of moral reason can accomplish the project that Mauss first described. Moral reason confronts contradictory experience as when a person, who is born social, must think about the fact that they hold mores and values they do not share with others they meet in everyday life. The anthropology of morality, as a social science inquiry, addresses the social norm as if it could be a force or glue that holds social institutions together and keeps them in motion toward a common goal. The moral and the social are distinctly different aspects of the human condition. A fuller consideration of the moral within the social was the principle vision of the later years of Durkheim’s and Mauss’s anthropology and cast new light on what it meant to be human by raising the complex question of moral consciousness. Consider the ways in which morality had been addressed as a concern in the history of the discipline in order to make the Durkheimian problematic of moral education clearer. Toward the end of his career Durkheim’s (1925) interests turned to moral education, a conscious process of transmitting social norms in modern times that made knowledge of morality clearly accessible. Morality was defined as social norms, which were conventionally held beliefs and sentiments that elders taught to juniors. Morality as expressed by social norms was thought to be both “extra social” and “social” because it knit together social relations, and because morality was learned within social life, or conferred upon the next generation. Anthropologists have discussed Durkheim’s basic insight that the moral and the social were coterminous, but distinct, forms of social life (Howell 1997). The moral could be learned because it is a domain of reflection and self-knowledge, whereas the social is a given. Morality in Durkheim’s definition pushes the boundaries between anthropological and philosophical thought. Mauss, like Durkheim, assumed that to speak of morality also meant that it is human nature to be moral. In Mauss’s analysis of morality, obligation appears at the center of social life. Reciprocity is a social fact, but what is obligation as the force that moves people to return what they have received? The relationship between morality and the social life lies at the center of Mauss’s book, and shows it to be inseparable from the question of human nature. Durkheim and Mauss can be read in the light of Kant’s concern to establish a practical philosophy to appreciate the depth of Durkhiem’s and Mauss’s discussion of the nature of morality (Fish 2005, Laidlaw

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2001, Munzel 1999, Overing 1985). It is Kant who argued that the categorical imperative, in the form of a priori knowledge, precedes all social behavior. Durkheim disagreed. The distinctions between social behavior and categorical truth entail making a conscious commitment to knowing that truth in order to explore what it means to be human based on the moral nature of humanity. Anthropology is moral philosophy in this tradition that sought certainty of knowledge about social norms and belief upon which entire communities agreed. The difficulty with the Durkheimian project lies in the fact that agreement about what values are shared cannot be prescribed in any society without exerting the power to do so, and that is especially true in a postcolonial one. In my earlier research into education under conditions of national development in Papua New Guinea I had argued that, when examined under the terms of national development, education created new social relations rather than reproduced standing ones. I claimed that the disjuncture between social reproduction and the creation of a new kind of social life is best understood with a different model than Durkheim’s in order to discuss the various forms of moral life. In order to understand political consciousness in the new nation, among any order of social life, then, anthropology still needed to understand processes of moral reasoning about the differences between elites and grassroots people, a social distinction made by national education programs themselves. Although it is correct to begin there, it is not sufficient to address only deep social structural contradictions as I had in my research on education for national development in Papua New Guinea. Even up close and in the interpersonal relationships of long duration, there is often a contradiction between what is certain about social life and social experience itself. The ambiguity of social practice required exposition and that is inherently a question of moral reason. Ethnography of moral reasoning mattered to this project of redefining anthropological argument for contemporary times, when so many people have been excluded from participation in social life. I have highlighted the concern with the moral in a series of reflections on our disciplinary history, with the intention of showing how concerns with morality provide quite a different starting point for anthropology. Anthropologists are not philosophers, and should not try to be if they wish to remain alive to the contradictions that are commonplace in everyday life. Moral reasoning proceeds by negotiation, debate, and even gossip about ambiguity and fixity of experience. It is hard to analyze morality directly because it makes sense in relation to other

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domains, such as reasoning. Morality is by definition contrary to reason because when speaking, writing, and acting morally people ground their understanding of morality in sentimental life, seeking to describe what is good by isolating what is happiness. Does the End of Narrative Mark the Beginning of Moral Reason? The early twenty-first century bears deep comparison to the early twentieth century; there is much to be learned from the attempt to grasp the size of the problem that the beginnings of anthropology and sociology struggled to define. Only a generation ago, scholars argued that the problem of their day was so different from the one of the twentieth century that it required utterly different concept to approach it. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that new languages and new rhetorical skills were needed to enable those people to escape from their specific conceptual prisons, by which he means ideological colonial mechanisms that constrain their collective action by contorting the expression of critical consciousness. His meaning of deterritorialization is an escape from the limits of a restrictive conceptual space, a jail-break from the cell into which rational analysis or ideological assumptions about the social order put some people at the risk of others, and an attempt to find new collective social possibilities. For Deleuze, deterritorialization entailed creating new languages that rode on the back of old ones in order to enter a political arena; Deleuze thereby emphasizes rhetoric, rather than reason, as the instrument of critique. The philosophers Deleuze and Guttari critique cultural relativism in the social sciences for its failure to accommodate the reasoned insights of minority perspectives. For them, cultural relativism as a method that insists on the separation of societies as different in the first instance—of capitalist from precapitalist state, of nomads from agriculturalists, of ethnic minority groups from majority concerns— cannot show the ways in which minor social environs as those known by allegedly “stateless” people as nomads, hunters, and gatherers penetrate and layer the legitimacy of state society. In their book A Thousand Plateaus (1988), Deleuze and Guttari challenge scholars, including anthropologists, to rediscover this capacity for minor politics and the politics of nomadism that seeks to unsettle established societies in order to make possible a common residence. They dare anthropologists to include the rhetoric of writing from minority perspectives on the contemporary world.

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In the following section, I show that ethnography of moral reasoning is more than rhetoric; it is a form of argument that begins with a commonplace logic that admits paradox and contradiction as conscious aspects of human experience in daily life. The ethnographer already knows that more than use sly words, they must make a case that residence on earth requires distinctions between the various critical and contradictory perspectives that are part of conscious experience. This volume claims that any understanding of the apparent cacophony of values and social mores is a question of moral reason, rather than a question of culture or of rationality because both of these other modalities of explanation elide, overshadow, and subordinate the quotidian processes by which human beings try to make social life possible. The perspective from the place where things don’t add up, where paradox is the order of the day, is a claim to knowledge about what is entailed in having a social life with others who might choose to differentiate and exclude, rather than include some people in contemporary social relations such as marriage, or the ceremonies to celebrate the sequences of a life. If the subaltern is a perspective on the perceived social totality, so too is the sub-proletariat, the minor voice, or the voice of the inner city, the barrio, the housing project, or the disaffected adolescent. If these “perspectives” on society are not recognized as such, then anthropologists risk confusing them with social classes or groups with inaccessible opaque worldviews who habitually ignore the possibility of knowing or recognizing each other as sharing a common humanity. Anthropologists might also risk misattributing confusion, inaccessibility, and incoherence as labels for their states of consciousness, when they might simply hold a specific perspective that is disjunctive with the dominant viewpoint, and therefore hard to understand in prevailing terms. A new term can be useful for clearing the way forward.

Living Paradoxes of a Global Age Most recent years show that in contrast to many expectations that globalization would be a homogenizing force in cultural life, it has not created transnational cultural flows but overlapping geopolitical regions of Europe, America, and Asia–Pacific across which people “only connect” (Appadurai 1996, 2006), or otherwise openly contest value and values (Ong 2002, 2006, Tsing 2006). Many people cannot actively participate in authoring such a reconfiguration of the globe (Harvey 2005); and further, moral failure and loss of values stereotype

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lived experiences of people on the ground below. In other examples, the authors insist that people’s experience is too enigmatic to convey fairly to the reader, and too complex to justly analyze (Appadurai 2006, Tsing 2005). An anthropologist might ask, “How do these top–down neo-liberal attempts at reconfiguring relations inevitably present themselves as moral dilemmas for people on the ground by introducing contrary roles/duties/or ethics of acting?” Rather than assume these are people who “only connect” with the rationales of economic upheaval and restructuring, an ethnographer can describe the effect of their words, the terms of their argument, and their consciousness of the world. Contemporary social life can be examined from the perspective of ordinary people in everyday acts of moral reasoning, drawing on the outlook of the woman or man on the bus on the way to work, from those at the margins of society where things don’t add up, or from the point of view of those people who in a moment realize that life is no longer the way it used to be; the ordinary person mediates their experience through language, but does so from their perception, which is a specific consciousness of space and time. As Gregory argues in his conclusions to this volume in an evaluative chapter entitled “After Words,” scholars might consider how ordinary people use words passionate words spoken in anger, envy, fear, as well as in pity, love, and humility to expose and reason through the limits of shared logic and unshared values. Words are evaluative tools that enable reasoning about moral ambiguities. In this volume, words are more than rhetoric; words are always used from a specific human perspective that lays claim to knowledge about the world and shares it in a form of argument about what it means to participate in a society where moral paradox and logical contradiction are commonplace experience. Words are deeds. People use words to value each other. They are spoken as a judgment about the self in relation to another. Moral reason is a term for contemporary times. It is an inherently paradoxical term because it is made up of two words, morality and reason. Using the concept entails holding morality—a belief informing social action that depends upon convention or sentiment and has no basis in rationality—in tension with reason—a type of thought that demonstrates a human ability to link language, logic, and consciousness to determine the terms or grounds of argument. The conjunction moral reason is necessary because there is a new way of thinking, talking, and acting available to humans that emerges from the common acknowledgment that they share a world, that they are living in a global age. Moral reasoning is an action that all humans

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do, largely because of the ambiguity of everyday life when values and beliefs are not shared, despite the sense that they live in a world where all the places are said to join up. The global age demands that people “only connect” across vast differences in order to sustain transnational communities (Appadurai’s 1996 Modernity at Large is one such example, wherein people create a horizon of interaction and specific ethnicity by connecting for pragmatic ends). These authors show that when people only connect, they do so for more than pragmatic outcomes.

Good Value, Fair Deals, and a Just Price Sometimes the moral complexity of using money is obscured from the anthropologist’s view because the scholar has assumed that money is amoral in the first instance. In these chapters, we see that money, in its various forms and currencies, connects people, in complex moral adjudications of their actions. It is more than a way to only connect them. Martin (in “The Limits of Reciprocity in Village Resettlement”) shows a village leader who uses money to employ his nephews to perform traditional dance invite derision of other relatives and kin who mock his prestige when they call him a “big shot.” The presence of money itself is not the measure of the limits of reciprocity, but the means by which men use it is a mark of the termination of the work of custom. In an analysis of the regulatory uses of how development funds create corrupt business practices Shah (in “Insights into Combating Corruption in Rural Development”) shows that a complex practice of using the “pc” or the percent, which is the ratio of development funds that go to each member of the project, enables the manager to obscure the total amount of profit and benefits to himself. Even less scrupulous contractors use bribes to complete work, while others command more respect when they make gifts of some portion of their funds. It is unusual in fact to find examples when the uses of money are not inflected with moral reason. Venkatesan (in “Conversations about Need and Greed”) describes how men from a Tamil village in South India make transnational journeys to seek charitable donations for shrines, schools, and hospitals, or to arrange support to augment the personal wealth needed for a daughter’s dowry. Speculation about the purposes of the journey (the perceived need of the man) is weighed against his supposed greed. In Almaty, Kazakhstan, the blat is a necessary gift, often made as a favor that enables daily life rather than

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undermines it. If wealthy people take the blat in return for favors to the poorer people who give them money (or when they use the blat to secure prestigious services from their peers) then blat is evidence of the corruption in the system. In a third case from South China, Brandtstädter (in “Fraud, Value-Anxiety and the Politics of Sincerity”) shows us that the uses of money often measure hierarchy, not in terms of the quantity of money used, but in the manner that it is spent so that they assert the quality of a person and a thing. The authors depart from the earlier efforts to define moral reason began with the concept of a moral economy, as in the work of, first, E.P. Thompson in “The Moral Economy of the Crowd” (1971; who drew deeply on the anthropological work of Evans-Pritchard) and, later, James C. Scott in his account of the Moral Economy of the Peasant (1979; who elaborated Thompson’s insights into how working class people’s experience of their time and place helped them to apprehended the terms of the dominate logic that enclosed and captured them in subordinate positions). Both of these authors make a compelling claim that economy is always moral, and that to begin an analysis from that perspective allows a scholar to discuss how that is so, and especially how ordinary people living within specific eras and places live it. Both Thompson and Scott agree that the ordinary person possesses good sense of what is just and fair-minded action, and uses this moral insight to reflect on the terms of the logic that makes justice elusive to them. Thompson and Scott argue persuasively that the ancient claim that the ordinary person has an intuitive sense of what is a “just price” for his or her work and goods lies in the work of words in mediating logic and consciousness. For Thompson this can describe the initial movements to the construction of a class consciousness and revolution, and for Scott this can describe the elaboration of scripts and transcripts for social action, ways in which people reverse dominant and elite concepts, and thereby work against them and erode their power in ideological work. Martin, in his chapter, argues that words like kastam, a term that “defines” behavior as traditional or customary, serve as evaluative terms; they measure action at the limits of acts of reciprocity, to be just or not at the point where exchange might almost come to appear as bribes or theft. Shah demonstrates that adjudications of corruption in development work put the question of moral economy forward in relation to the small trade-offs that people make in social relations to enable the flow of money to them. In a different way, Alexander, in “Jokes, Scandal, and Absurdity in a Time of Rapid Change,” makes an excellent contribution to their arguments as she examines the work

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of absurd humor and jokes about the failed attempt to make economic planning rational, thereby enabling stunning critiques of privatization in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Each of these contributors would advocate a fuller understanding of exactly what is moral about moral economy, and this requires a better account of the word games or the evaluative terms, such as an anecdote or a joke, that people use to create different social effects. In this volume ethnography shows that people become moral reasoners when they ask, what is moral about the contemporary moral economy? The question has been broached in several anthropological studies in the last two decades (Block and Parry 1993, Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992, Humphrey and Mandel 2002). However, in our attempt to outline an ethnography of moral reasoning, we explore specific human perspectives on the morality of the contemporary economy that exposes and explores the terms and precepts of its logic, through words, in a conscious deliberation of what is good and evil in economic life. In these chapters, the authors describe how some people judge others for how they use money, as an indication of what kind of person they are and as a mark of how they value their social relationships. Money does more than connect people; it values them. How people use money is a matter of value, that is, it is a judgment about the self in relation to another, and as Gregory (1997) tells readers, value is a matter of consciousness; it is the invisible chain linking people to things, and to forms of social relations. This is true even in the current age when most social life is lived with the cacophony of an informal economy, which is the new “norm” of socioeconomic life. How can ethnography of moral reasoning grasp this contemporary “value question” and explain such incoherence in the moral economy? The answer lies in recognizing that contradiction is the first step toward the answer, but only a step toward an ethnographic understanding, the moral ambiguity of lived experience in contemporary life. This bricolage involved in the transformation of values and value is the “other side” of the engineering of politics and the liberal economy. Surely ethnographies of lived experience in their entirety can dispel stereotypes generated by the panic that people of the grassroots have lost values and social mores: their actions simply fall outside of the dominant explanatory models of social science that seek coherence or demonstrate strategic resistance to social norms. The second step moves past axiomatic contradictions to grasp the living paradoxes of ordinary life. The ethnography of moral reasoning recognizes the paradoxes of everyday life, the “commonplace contradictions,” as Gregory identified in his discussion of subaltern reason after Guha,

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that link both reason and sentiment in a form of argument against abstract, prescribed dominant values. In his conclusions Gregory shows that moral “reasoners” become “valuers,” demonstrating that value is not simply a thing or belief to be held; but rather it is a social act, a judgment made about the self in relation to another, revealing that value itself is a matter of consciousness of the invisible chains that join people to things, to each other, and to specific forms of social relationships. Value-Anxiety, Moral Sentiments, and the Words and Terms of Judgment A claim to understanding the moral sentiments within the economy in a global age is not new. Anthropologists did not begin the discussion of moral sentiments and value. The theory of moral sentiments lies at the center of debates among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists; it is most commonly associated with Smith who argues that moral sentiments are social constructs. They are learned by human beings, who know from their sensual experiences what brings happiness to them and can ascertain this by observation about what makes others happy. They can imagine sympathetically what others need, and therefore that capacity for pathos or empathy as ‘moral’ sentiments which are inherently social. According to the eighteenth-century philosophers, individuals express moral sentiments in acts of social propriety, never taking an extreme position in either case. Propriety measures the moderation of opposed sensibilities— such as greed and benevolence, as when an individual imagines the hunger and financial stress of a poor family and chooses not to prevent food from reaching them by demanding that they quickly repay debts. Propriety, in this case, establishes property in an act of benevolence, tying the recognition of personal ownership to an act of charity. But, some members of a community acknowledge self-satisfaction as its own reward, which is Shah’s joking provocation that her friend wants to use development funds to buy a motorcycle. In fact, the reader learns that he is arranging to hire labor for pittances, and use poor materials in order to win a better profit for himself from the fund he secured for the local development of the road, a better profit that will fulfill his desire for the “freedom of the road.” Moral sentiments demand attention. Venkatesan’s chapter shows that people make subtle distinctions of need and greed when they talk about charity, and these sentiments may arise simply in gossiping about other’s search for charitable donations. In talking about others,

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a person comes to recognize their own need and greed. A reader learns of the work of men and women on overseas trip to raise funds, sometimes for a village shrine, other times for personal needs such as the daughter’s dowry, and sometimes for the work of helping the poor through charitable donations to alleviate human suffering. Venkatesan does not discuss expert moral philosophers any more than other contributors because her concern is with ordinary people’s understanding of moral sentiments.

An Overview of the Ethnography of Moral Reasoning Valuers and Value: Words on an Uncommon Ground Moral reason examines terms of the logic by which people reason about what is good or bad. Notably, Alexander tells us, the citizens of Almaty, the capital of the former Soviet state of what is now Kazakhstan in central Asia, joked about the certainty with which the Soviet state believed in rationalism. They said that it was absurd to believe in rationalism because rational planning culminated in the irrational distribution of wealth. They said that the state did not practice rational thought, it believed in it. To the state, a belief in rationality meant that they could change policies rapidly, as long as they knew the policy was rational. That belief made all the difference to the citizens, who recognized that there was no possible way for them to measure the consistency of the state’s rationality in planning because rationality was premised on the belief that it was good for the state to be rational, that is, a tautology. In Almaty, the search for rational understanding of an absurd situation evokes the social recognition of their uncommon ground and incommensurable values. Alexander’s case is interesting because it lays bare the way in which people draw upon their experiences of the buildings around them. They organize their experiences to produce rational calculations of it all, but they cannot sustain a unified perspective because experience is incommensurable with shared belief. Rationality itself becomes absurd. What fascinates the urban citizens of Almaty is the absurdity of unified conceptual coherence, in the wake of successive changes of plans. They joke instead, and show that they live with the absurdity as the norm. Venkatesan writes about the speculative and judgmental gossip and conversations by which men and women in a South Indian Tamil village measure the moral sentiments of need and greed that distance

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them from their friends and relatives who have traveled to distant places such as Singapore and or Dubai to seek money for numerous charitable projects or personal wealth. Some take jobs; others collect money on behalf of different charitable causes, taking a salary for themselves on some occasions. Their actions are out of sight and beyond the ken of their village relatives and colleagues but they are talked about at length. Conversations, gossip, words that evaluate, judge, and speculate about the actions of those abroad; the gossips wonder if these men are moved by need or greed? They engage imaginatively in the trips and take almost vicarious pleasure in the journeys by speculating about what might be happening. Venkatesan’s chapter shows that emotions inform moral consciousness, the judgment of another’s need is made with awareness of distinctions between one’s own experience of the sentiments of need and greed. Gossip and simple conversation mediate human experience of very human emotions that move people to exchange services for wealth, travel great distances in order to enjoy luxuries, and beg money for charitable needs. Contestations of the Standards of Value Certainty about the authenticity of goods and about the sincerity of people is questioned, tested, and revealed as false or true. China, the world’s only industrializing nation, offers anthropologists an extraordinary case. The contemporary move to industrialize the nation changed how the country felt about the peasant who had been backbone of the Maoist revolutionary ideology as a model of virtue for the communist state. In south China, the strategy of using the practice of certainty to test authenticity and sincerity positions the Chinese consumer, recent immigrants from the countryside arriving in the cities of China, to ask an absurd question, “Is this an authentic fake?” The question provoked a new absurd development, the official production of certificates to authenticate the quality of the fakes. In many ways, this was to assure the consumer that they were not buying the authentic good, so they were not mislead to believe that they possessed a Gucci handbag. Now, Chinese urban street markets sell a class of goods known as authentic fakes, “high quality” copies of designer goods, with fake certificates assuring their authenticity as good fakes. The measure of sincerity and authenticity is a paradox because words and actions are either sincere or not, authentic or false. There should not be degrees of authenticity, yet this is the contemporary paradoxical discussion. Brandtstädter discusses that as a Maoist politics.

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In the past in south China, Maoism’s theory of revolutionary consciousness could be used to interrogate the convictions of the peasant and the intellectual alike. In seeking out the individual awareness of the contradictions between their beliefs and their experience of their own and other’s behavior, Maoism could triumph over other systems of belief. This is a little like the Soviet case, as belief in rationalism superseded other belief systems. In the Soviet case, a belief in rationalism superseded other belief systems, making them seem absurdly outmoded rather than wrong. Maoism used rational inquiry into the sincerity of the citizen, pushing it to the very limits of reason. In the earliest years, Maoism predicted that the peasant did not experience contradictions between their experience and their belief in the order of the world because they worked out of concern for their communities, constituted fully by themselves. The state assumed peasants were sincere, and so the state could assure that they spoke the truth about social action. In the contemporary period, urban migration made the identity of the peasant—at least in terms of his commitments to Maoism—much more complex than under Maoism itself. In the city, it was no longer clear if the peasant had failed to become full citizens of the new Chinese state, or if they remained sincere peasants. As a result, peasants tried to show they were good people by consuming modern Western goods in the most sincere way possible, adding them to family shrines and displaying them as art objects. In another part of the world, people find it equally difficult to be “people of quality.” In Papua New Guinea, the prestige of the Big Man is hard to sustain when he lives the life of a Big Shot whose uses of money make him an unlikely candidate for the respect more normally given to men who organize feast with the help of kin and exchange partners, who give in anticipation of future support. Martin writes of how culture, in this case kastam, has become a disharmonic symphony of local words and concepts. Kastam is used to measure the worth of a village leader, especially one who employs his relatives rather than the leader whose relatives meet his expectation that they will give their labor to his public enterprises. Martin’s chapter discusses kastam, the customary social life of Tolai people, who have been resettled to new land, foregoing their long-term village residence. He argues that before the resettlement people made matrilineal clans through the movement of customary feasts around the hamlets of the region; however, after the eruption when the Matupit villages settled into one fixed spot, they continue to create the standards of association for matrilineal social life through

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using the term kastam to designate the limits of reciprocity. Martin’s informants from the villages of the Gazelle Peninsula, Papua New Guinea, reminded him that meeting obligations, itself recognized as a local custom that is practiced for the good of others, is shadowed by the emotions of jealousy as much as by good will. When obligations are stretched to the limit, the person may refuse to give to others. The givers might envy the person who can ask for so much, whereas they feel that they can ask for so little from others. They thereby precipitate jealousy of their “wealth,” which he appears to hoard against their wishes for it. Such moral reasoning becomes a vital tool in the new criticisms of the emerging middle classes of Papua New Guinea, who might be “free” of customary obligations to their clans. Differently, Rose’s story shows her use of culture as a measure of social action. Rose showed that culture’s newer significance lay in its uses as a term by which people make moral judgments. In this case, Rose could evoke the custom of bride-wealth payment to chide her boyfriend’s natal family into making a bride-wealth gift to seal the marriage. This effectively brought about her marriage, her access to new land, and claims for her children to her husband’s clan’s wealth, which was considerable. Rose enchained a wide number of people in a process of moral reasoning about how to make a good marriage; even if she is known as one of a new generation of women who have no respect for custom. In generating so much discussion about her marriage, she dispels stereotypes about young educated women’s amorality. Rather she acts credibly within the network of social relationships and expectations within which she aims to make a good life. Rose is neither used by her culture, nor does she become its tool. Rose is not entirely unique; rather she is like many women in the region who understand that there is a new foreign moral standard to adopt even when they cannot author its terms. Her decisions are entwined with international company policies that aim to reinforce family values as a part of even infrastructural development in mining. As a worker from the mine site, Rose is accustomed to all kinds of new problems arising from the concern about the stability of marriage and family values around the site as management creates special benefits for married couples in the new attempt to support the well-being of the community as a part of their development. She feels that marriage would make her life at the settlement better. She would have respect from her employers, and be eligible for a number of small benefits that the company makes available to married couples. Company policy aims to keep good worker morale on site, and expects a standard of moral behavior that enables the company’s

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work. While it is not likely that the company will dismiss an unmarried co-habiting couple, the daily life of Rose at the settlement will be simpler with the benefits given to married people and with freedom from gossip. Alpa Shah shows us that corruption cannot be measured by a single standard of action. Paradoxically, it is not the moral condition of the users of aid; instead, it is the conditions that aid donors create among the users of it. Here we see more than differing perspective on what is rational, and what is moral. We see that the top–down perspective creates corruption itself. That is possible, as Shah shows, because the elite (even international) authors of the term “corruption” are compromised in discharging the duties of their offices. Degrees of corruption measure the participation of members of the community in aid schemes; however, this is a matter of perspective for the educated rural elite, and the other members of the village. Subaltern Reasoning, Moral Ambiguity, and Paradoxes of Value Brandtstädter investigated the nature of “quality,” what the Chinese mean by suzhi, one of several terms for the judgment of life in modern China and the accommodations of citizens to that. She discusses value-anxiety as a moral sentiment by which the new middle classes of the Chinese State judge the quality of the people named the new “urban peasants,” a derisive term for those who do not know distinctions of quality in goods. They are people who appear to be workers in town, but are on the citizens’ register as peasants because they are born into rural villages. Contrary feelings about the role of the peasant in the new China arise. Some people doubt the peasants’ sincerity because they belong to the village and the countryside, but have abandoned it for the town and factory work. What and who is the moral backbone of a new China whose revolution is being managed by factory workers, rather than by farmers? Brandtstädter shows that the well-known practice of Maoist political ethics is exerted in new ways to create a new cultural education of the peasant into a modern consumer and worker; it is an exercise in making quality persons. A quality person is not simply a true revolutionary, as they were in the Maoist era, but modern Chinese person able to use “brandname” goods, the luxury items that circulate in a global economy. In Brandtstädter’s analysis, practical moral reason is the exercise of good judgment to ascertain the truth about the quality of the person and of the goods shared in town and villages of modern China.

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In my chapter (“Rumors about the Moral Force of Ritual Objects as Public Art”), the malanggan, which can be identified as artist’s sculpture on public display in Papua New Guinea, is confused with the malanggan as a visual aesthetic form to be used in specific rituals as the physical bearer of the human spirit. This paradox parallels another Papua New Guinean community’s concern with tourist performance of ritual, where grassroots people challenge the touristy commercial performance of ritual customs, by demanding that the participants also keep a constitution of reciprocal ethic versus ritualized performance. The example from New Ireland shows that mistaking the aesthetic form of the Malanggan for the identity of the art object that is carved on the posts of the Kavieng Airport is not only an error of mistaking identity for category, but also generated a protracted debate about the effects of that paradox on social life. In this example, mistaking the carving’s identity as an art object causes a long discussion and sends about rumors that have the effect of damaging the well being of the carvers, in some cases leading people to wonder about the causes of their deaths. For the bureaucratic elite, the performance of the ritual presents no paradox. For the grassroots people the death of the carvers at the time of public display is paradox, one that gives rise to rumors about how it could be so.

Moral Reasoning and the Value Question Each contributing author in this book focuses on moral reason in the informal economy where values are not shared—including such socioeconomic processes as those of grassroots social development, local custom enchained with transnational journeys, the effects of privatization. First, each author begins with the paradoxes of everyday existence by which people demonstrate how they both “feel” and “reason” about what is a good life. Second, each elaborates upon the asymmetry of values, thereby exposing inequality that may hide in moral ambiguity. Third, each author shows how moral reason is a specifically human, consciously held perspective on the commonplace contradictions in everyday life when peasants are also workers, gifts are also commodities, development aid creates corruption rather than combats it, need is sometimes greed, or the home simply becomes unhomely. The book that follows is organized into three main themes; each one develops the argumentative form of the ethnography of moral reasoning—as “words on uncommon ground,” “negotiations of standards of moral value,” and “subaltern reason, moral ambiguity and

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the paradoxes of value.” Although each chapter addresses all of the themes of the volume, the chapters paired in each section demonstrate these steps of analysis. The first two chapters discuss circumstances in which people become conscious that they speak from uncommon grounds, and that value paradoxes exist in the midst of unflinching belief in rational economic planning. In Almaty, the absurdity of such “rational” experience generates bitter humor about the political situation, and people feel that their familiar premises, in both the literal (as in the grounds of the home) and literary (as in the grounds of the argument) senses of the word, become strangely unfamiliar. In chapter three, charity is seen from the point of view of the men who go to beg. Their aims are ambiguous; he needs to meet his obligations to arrange his daughter’s dowry, and also wants to have private wealth to enhance his social prestige. These goals are entwined and the community of gossips tries to disentangle them, telling stories about what things the “beggars” might do abroad, speculating about the reasons for his trip, and suggesting returns. Gossip, not logic, structures reason about the trip. In the second section of the book, two authors write about the processes of negotiating relationships in the shadow of the prescribed or even dominant morality. In chapter five, poor and “tribal” people in Bihar negotiate their own relationships with the elite in joint attempts to “combat” corruption in the delivery of development projects. Shah shows that the meaning of corruption varies depending upon the perspective of the elite, the rural elite, or the poor. Just as corruption is a word used to evaluate behavior, and its meanings are negotiable, so too “custom” is a word used to judge the credibility of social action, showing that each action has many meanings that only different perspectives on its performance might unveil. Furthermore, as Martin shows, the grassroots see commercialized custom as pastiche of lived custom and false, whereas the elite think that it is a tool to advance the identity of the nation and region. Chapters four and five show finally that custom is just as negotiable as corruption and each is valued from the privileged view of the judge. In the last chapters the authors fulfill an aim to understand subaltern values by asking how some objects are valued and others are not. Brandtstädter shows us that rural migrants sincerely appreciate the commodities from the West—shampoo, handbags, shoes, clothing, and other small household goods, which they purchase from street markets, knowing that the way they use the good communicates its value as a Western object, and their value to the Chinese

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state as the backbone of modernity there. Sykes shows that the meaning of the permanent display of public art stands at odds with the more transient display of ritual objects, when the carvers of the display in the airport terminal die mysteriously. Public officials and bureaucrats believe that the sculptures are images conveying their ethnicity and are proud of that as a national identity. In the rural villages and in the settlements in town, people wondered at the official valuing of the sculpture, and equivocated over the details of its display in town. They know that the question is not settled and rumors about the death of the artists fly about the villages. If public art should be treated ritually in order to atone for the mistakes in presenting it mundanely in art display, then how does that convey sufficiently the sculpture’s meaningful uses in ritual? As Gregory points out, what is finally interesting in the analysis of the moral reasoning of the subaltern is the work of “words” as they are used, especially angry, passionate words that bear moral ambiguity perhaps more than they express a singular intention. All of the chapters of this book address specific words, privatization, charity, sacra, fakes, corruption, and custom. These are used as communicative words, are known as powerful passionately spoken words. Gregory’s “After Words” elaborates the logical fallacy that arises from equivocation about the lived experience of recognizing and living with contradiction. There is no judgment but to judge, and how people move between ethos and pathos remains a matter of some concern. For him, that movement entails the difference between prescribing and ascertaining moral reasons; that is, the concern with the difference between what good deeds one ought to do and what is felt to be good. Here, moral reasoning is a form of skepticism that raises doubts about prescribed behavior. He tells that moral reason, perhaps as form of radical humanist ethnography, keeps the debates going, creates uncertainty about prescriptive logical resolutions to moral ambiguity, and asks how pathos might ascertain the value of social relations as a judgment about the self in relation to another.

Bibliography Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: The Geography of Anger. Duke: Duke University Press. Appell, George, et al. 1988. Choice and Morality in Anthropological Perspective. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Asad, T. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press. Benedict, R. 1935. Patterns of Culture. New York: Dell. Block, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry. 1993. Money and the Morality of Exchange. London: LSE. Boas, Franz. 1973. Race Language Culture. Edited by George Stocking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clough, P., and J.P. Mitchell. 2001. Powers of Good and Evil: Moralities, Commodities, and Popular Belief. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guttari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone. Durkheim. 1925. (Trans. 1961). Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, translated (from French) by Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schnurer; edited with an introduction by Everett K. Wilson; foreword by Paul Fauconnet. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1955. Magic, Witchcraft and Oracles amongst the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon. Fabian, Johannes. 1978. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Fish, Jonathan S. 2005. Defending the Durkheimian Tradition: Religion, emotion, and morality. Aldershot: Ashgate. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1983. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1984. “Anti Anti-Relativism.” American Anthropologist 86: 263–278. Gluckman, Max. 1967. The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gregory, C.A. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. London and Amsterdam: Harwood. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatch, Elvin. 1983. Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. Hefner R. (ed.) 1998. Market Culture: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Howell, Signe. 1997. The Anthropology of Moralities. London: Routledge. Humphrey, Caroline, and Ruth Mandel. 2002. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg. Humphrey, Caroline, and Stephen Hugh-Jones. 1992. Value, Exchange and Barter: An Anthropological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1995. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber.

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Just, Peter. 2001. Dou Donggo Justice: Conflict and Morality in an Indonesian Society. Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Kleinman, A. 2006. What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amid Uncertainty and Danger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kluckhohn, C. 1962. Culture and Behaviour. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Kroeber, A. 1952. Culture. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laidlaw, James. 2001. “Towards an Anthropology of Freedom and Ethics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 311–32. Levi-Strauss, C. 1949. (Trans. 1969). Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated from French. New York: Beacon Press. ———. 1966. The Savage Mind. New York: The Free Press. Lukes, Steven. 1985. Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. Madsen, Richard. 1994. Morality and Power in a Chinese Village. Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift. London: Routledge. Mead, Margaret. 1935. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow. Munzel, George F. 1999. Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Myers, Fred. 2003. The Empire of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Overing, Johanna. 1985. Reason and Morality. London: Tavistock. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pardo, Italo. 2002. Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society. Oxford: Berghahn. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Moral Torment and Christianity in Melanesia California. Rydstroom, Helle. 2003. Embodying Morality: Growing Up in Rural Northern Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University Chicago Press. ———. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. ASAO Monographs, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. How Natives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward. 1977. Orientalism. London: Verso. Salazar, Carles. 2006. Anthropology and Sexual Morality: A Theoretical Investigation. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Schneider, David. 1975. American Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James. 1979. Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia. Yale: Yale University Press. Smith, Adam. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stocking, George. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Stolar, Ann. 1997. Race and the Education of Desire. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Thompson, Edward. P. 1971. “Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50: 76–136. Williams, Bernard. 2003. Philosophy of Ethics. London: Verso.

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P r i vat i z at ion: Jok e s, S c a n da l , a n d A bsu r di t y i n a Ti m e of R a pi d C h a nge

Catherine Alexander

Theoretical Marxism, as realized in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the energy and the self-contained and exclusive character of a Weltanschauung, but at the same time an uncanny likeness to what it is fighting against. Though originally a portion of science and built up, in its implementation, upon science and technology, it has created a prohibition of thought which is just as ruthless as was that of religion in the past. Any critical examination of Marxist theory is forbidden; doubts of its correctness are punished in the same way as heresy was once punished by the Catholic Church. The writings of Marx have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as a source of revelation, though they would seem to be no more free from contradictions and obscurities than those older sacred books. —Sigmund Freud (1964), “The Question of a Weltanschauung”

Introduction Swan Lake had a peculiar resonance in the later years of the Soviet Union. Habitually, in moments of political crisis, advertised programs would be replaced with Tchaikovsky’s ballet, thus effectively blanking out the channels. As fast as one station was switched to the next, only pirouettes and white tutus would fill the screen; the state radio built into each apartment would only be playing what was, to

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all intents and purposes, the anthem of fear. Too rapidly, people learned that the soaring melodies and muscular leaps of the Bolshoi Ballet’s finest promised a period of emotional disquiet. Quite simply, it signified a threat to the established order that was being battled out behind the Kremlin walls while a nervous population waited in dread of they knew not what, perhaps the death of a leader, perhaps an insurrection in some peripheral part of the empire. The last time the divas twirled while the hopes of communism burned was the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991; footage of Boris Yeltsin riding triumphant with the tanks through the streets of Moscow did not appear until the struggle was over, Yeltsin was installed, and a new order could be safely announced. It is not only the weak who employ hidden transcripts, nor, as I describe later, subvert recognized social orders. Olga, an extremely savvy curator of one of the many literary museums scattered through St Petersburg described the seize of alarm, the emptiness in her stomach, when she turned on her television the evening of the coup and heard the first terrifying chords of Odile’s pas de deux with the prince. “It meant something awful was happening and there was nothing we could do except wait in fear. Nobody knew. That time, no-one could have even guessed, though we tried to of course, what was about to happen.” Ten years on and an Irish dancing troupe from Karaganda, ex-gulag, devastated coal mining city, performed to the score of Swan Lake in a nightclub in Astana, Kazakhstan’s “new” capital in the center of the steppe that the president was creating in part by covering up old buildings with shiny facades, in part by commissioning world-famous architects to build glittering presidential palaces and ministries. The reason for choosing this particular music is not known, but it would be nice to think that the thudding feet of the foreign dance form were trampling once and for all over that particular terrifying sign of knowing and not knowing. The coexistence of old and new buildings in Astana was a high-profile, and much commented on, example of what was happening in people’s daily lives and domestic space where the home itself was becoming unhomely.1 “Astana!” a Russian teacher in Almaty, said scathingly, “I was there as part of a building party when I was a student in the 1970s when it was still Tselinograd. It was a dirty little town then and, however much they try to cover it up, it’s still a dirty little town underneath.” Many informants delighted in showing up this physical haunting of the built environment in Almaty and Astana. “Look!” said one, “in the front there is a smart, modern

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building, but if we go round the corner . . . it’s still a Soviet building with crumbling walls and rusty pipes.” The problem was that, with independence in 1991, new uncertainties replaced older doubts. For all that the establishment of a democratic, market-based economy based on private property had been broadcast, precisely what that meant in terms of social, spatial, and temporal relations between people, cities, nations, and things remained unclear. How exactly were people to relate to the each other and the world around them? Startlingly, on occasion, this translated into not being able to see objects that were manifestly there. As I stood chatting to a citizen of Almaty, 2 Kazakhstan’s former capital, in front of the Palace of Culture that had belonged to AHBK, a large textile Kombinat, she suddenly pointed to the large concrete building and said, “where is it? Where has it gone? We can’t see it anymore.”3 As the conversation continued, it transpired that this statement turned on the confusion of not knowing to whom things belonged anymore, what rights people possessed by virtue of citizenship and of labor: the old means of assessing entitlement and connection. Further, this upturning of the previous order meant that rights in the widest sense were decidedly murky. The moral values, which had been so closely twined with social and economic actions in the public sphere, were shattered along with understandings of economic worth. The care of the self now seemed to take precedence over the collective good, present gain over long-term welfare for all. The apparent reemergence of clan structures in post-Soviet Kazakhstan (this time publicly) and nepotism serving to populate senior government positions4 have caused many to sigh the passing of an egalitarian Soviet past, even if their own experience told of hidden elites and hierarchies as de facto organizing structures in public life. The right and the good, as well as the means of achieving such a condition, were no longer apparent. This chapter addresses two questions that emerge from this particular time of rapid social change in Kazakhstan at the end of the 1990s, both of which are rooted in the Soviet period, if not before, and speak to how one lives in a world of unknowing, fear, and continual upheaval where contradictory systems coexist. There are thus echoes with other times and places. The questions are these. How does one speak and act where a given order is always on the move, liable to be reversed, supplanted, or supplemented? The second question is, in a sense, the flipside of the first, which is what does one do in the absence of knowledge, or at any rate the evidence necessary from which to reason? What we have to look for therefore is what is conjured to fill the gaps and make the story right. Here then, I am

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concerned with how moral reason is expressed through its apparent negation: unreason and emotion—“apparent” because Adam Smith’s (2002) dissection of moral sentiments as an organizing social force gave more cause for human sympathy to emotion or the “social passions” than reason. Morality, in Smith’s sense, is thus essentially relational, predicated not on an abstract sense of justice or right, but on a sense of the extension of the self to and through others. When people believe that certain commonly held tenets have been snapped, then what emerges is the evanescence and murkiness of right and wrong articulated, in the instance I describe here, through absurdity and jokes. I thus wish to think about different modes of coping with these problems on the ground, which allow the unthought and the unthinkable to be thought and said. In the early 1990s, the government of the then newly independent Kazakhstan authorized the mass privatization of virtually everything that had been under the control of the state. This program, carried out by central and local administrations with the support of the World Bank and other foreign advisory bodies, affected state-owned housing, small and large enterprises. The model was that which had been used in Poland in the 1980s and since referred to in the rather protestant shorthand “shock therapy” implying no pain, no gain. Extrapolating from a World Bank sponsored report (Kaufman and Lipkovich 1995) concerning the transference of state housing to private hands, “gain” was understood as a bequest of the country’s resources to its citizens, as private individuals, thus granting to all the opportunity to convert assets into wealth (see de Soto 2000). However, in the virtual absence of a housing market and the appalling condition of much housing handed over to occupants, the problem for many at the time was that they only seemed to experience pain: in practice, assets were liabilities.5 Conventionally, the suffering that can result from changes in property regimes in the former Soviet Union has been rendered as economic loss, or social breakdown. Here, however, I wish to explore how it was also experienced as absurdity; how, in other words, citizens understood, thought about, and expressed the disintegration of a world that had been, if not completely consistent, then at least familiar. What appears, then, is a play on Freud’s notion of the uncanny (2003b) as the element of the familiar or Heimlich that needs to be suppressed in order to maintain the illusion of coherence. The familiar was always strange in some respects, and given expression through the absurd. The advent of a market-based economy and the commoditization of space provoked a sense of the uncanny in the most literally

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familiar settings: domestic space. Yet, these two apparently distinct, if not antithetical, systems of Soviet socialism and capitalism were both rooted in the same credo of legal–rational progress providing a curious familiarity to the rhetoric of rationality that once again appeared (Alexander 2007a). In effect, reason drawn from experience and state rationality (whether capitalist or socialist) coexisted, being in turns fore- and backgrounded. Soviet socialism, in the Marxist–Leninist sense, was firmly founded on faith in enlightenment rationality6 and described a progressive movement toward an enlightened Communist future of freedom, equality, and harmony; alongside this, however, was quite another demotic tradition that acknowledged and celebrated the atemporal and irrational, in part, directly produced by the application of standard rules to infinite variety (Alexander 2007a, Scott 1988). As described at greater length later, this apprehension of meaninglessness, or of a form not open to rationality, has a long pedigree and a variety of expressions; depending on the circumstance, it can also often be highly subversive. What was particularly difficult to understand after 1991, in a country now in the official embrace of a market economy, was that the elite seemed to be backing anything associated with libertarianism while sobriety and decorum clung onto the family setting. The virtues enjoined by the Soviets, with an emphasis on the communal and the public as the arena for self-fulfillment, were now to be found in the domestic arena; self-love now dominated the public sphere. Whereas earlier a continuum had been drawn from the interior condition of the person and the external worth of what he or she did and produced, a neoliberal framing merely notes and applauds the disjuncture between private vice and public virtue. It is worth noting at this point that this essay is based on fieldwork carried out from 2000 onward while the trauma of the shock therapy measures was still present. Noticeably, the sense that the proposed system of private property, quite as mad as anything experienced under the Soviet system, softened, or at least faded over the following five years. Then, every story was punctuated with “What chaos! A total nightmare” (Nazpary 2001)7; these tropes are rarely heard now. It is difficult to say with confidence why this has happened. Perhaps the outrage over fresh absurdities has been replaced by other concerns, or the once discordant elements of the new have somehow slotted into place, the holes stuffed up with the cognitive equivalent of the rags that filled in the cracks of crumbling Soviet apartment blocks. Or maybe quite simply, as Thomas Mann (1996) put it, it is more a case of getting used to not being used to it: absurdity is an integral

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part of existence, same as it ever was, though in new guise. This construction of experience as chaotic suggests that humans confront the erosion of moral standards and systems of discernment as an event beyond their control. Turning to jokes and the absurd is effectively an expression of this dislocation of the moral passions, and thus a form of moral reason. What precisely was the form of this systemic derangement? I suggest that the radical changes caused by mass privatization were not so much experienced as moral dilemmas—since no one felt they had much choice—but a crisis of recognition both of objects, persons, the relations between them, and the values, in all senses, attached to all of these. I take value to constitute an idea of what something is, as well as its moral worth and financial cost, although these notions are connected (Alexander 2004). In each of these value domains the crisis was over how to recognize and measure changing standards of value. The process of privatization served first to undo the relations between things and people and then to remake them in different form. It was this change of relations and value standards that had such a profound effect on the configuration and constitution of the objects that had made up the Soviet world. The peculiarities of the Soviet and post-Soviet case become more comprehensible when considered through the lens of moral reason. After all, how does a person deal with a system that claims to transcend morality through scientifically determined truths, to replace the subjective with the objective and rights with the common good? Another way of approaching this is the conflict between the universalizing techne of state rationality and local praxis, to use Scott’s terms (1998) where morality might be seen as being essentially determined locally. Some of those questions can of course equally be applied to the unregulated free market that took the place of the Soviet system in Kazakhstan (Alexander 2007a, b). Such continuities can be too easily located as enduring elements of that Soviet system, however. Capitalism and socialism in the twentieth century may have had different goals and beliefs in the nature of humanity, but both drew their methods of proceeding from enlightenment modes of reasoning and equally appealed to universal truths for legitimation of what they were about. The great twentieth-century modernist projects of industrialization and large-scale agriculture on both sides of the Atlantic showed these parallels most explicitly (Alexander in press, Buck-Morss 2002). I focus here on housing and the privatization of Soviet apartment blocks in particular as the means through which to examine the clash

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of “everyday” moral reason and state rationality. These apartment blocks embodied the kind of quotidian contradictions discussed in this volume: they were state built, and the place to withdraw from the state into kin time, kin space—simultaneously domestic and state space. State-housing, once eagerly sought for the modern conveniences it provided, became a liability as owners found themselves responsible for the now decaying external structure of their apartment blocks8 and rusting pipes. Privatization meant that rights to occupy these once-prized apartments were no longer formulated on the basis of entitlement through labor and citizenship but on the grounds of eligibility and then market-based exchange. Yet changes in property rights affected more than the immediate domestic space. Foreign companies, or at least newly unknown entities (Alexander 2007b), now controlled gas, water, electricity, telephones, and other flows between the home and the unknown outside. Residents saw themselves as at the mercy of rapacious utility companies, and many were the stories of unscrupulous representatives of housing management companies inveigling themselves into homes, demanding payments for utility bills, and then vanishing together with the money. An indifferent police force was a key theme in such accounts. Homes, once simply components of a whole, were disengaged from the broad system of state ownership and management, and then apparently endlessly, impossibly repartitioned while an impassive state looked on. Three things suggest themselves here. Absurdity, which as explored later has a long genealogy, approaches the problem of reason by denying it: the universe is intractable to earth-bound rational process, language merely skitters across the surface of things, and form is an artificial illusion for the world is meaningless and arbitrary. The modes and genres that belong to the absurd are those that bypass human reason qua conclusions based on hypotheses; thus we find myths, allegory, magic, and dreams all have their place in intuiting what cannot be reasoned, all appear when formal reason breaks down or is insufficient as an explanatory model. Within this same convention I would place the Russian joke or anekdot, part of a tradition of pitch black humor addressing an absurd world, certainly a world where excessive bureaucratic rationality produced unreason and where the overt aim of the collective good wreaked hardship on individuals and families. The post-Soviet situation seemed nothing but a reprise of this theme with a different ideological framing as the jokes and scandal suggest. The effect, for minds that are dulled to the contradictions of private property, is to highlight its illogic, or at any rate its conventions. Again, as Sigmund

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Freud (2003a) shows us, jokes are about upturning the expected and condensing contradictions into an impossible world. The blackness of the Russian anekdot is that the impossible is real, inviting, and consolidating complicity with the listener that some kind of sense of right has been disturbed. This is the key to the Slavonic and, by extension, Soviet and post-Soviet brand of absurdity: the unreason here is not so much the cosmological angst of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde as a daily lived reality. This oblique means of snatching at the good as social earthquakes9 broke apart the foundation upon which moral reason was constructed was found again in the active urban rumor mills of Almaty in the late 1990s and after. Most scandals were short-lived, the excitement, hurt, or delicious outrage of one day fading by the next; yet they are worth pursuing because they express an affronted sense of the right order of things from moment to moment. They are a reverse image of the ephemera of changing moral systems in times of abrupt and sweeping change and so help to make visible those fleeting notions of what ought to be.

Rationality, Experience, and Intuition Examples of foundational precepts from which to construct systematic reason are explored in the other chapters of this volume such as the relational logic of Melanesian societies or the hierarchical order of South East Asia. The question that faces any such system of internal coherence is what happens round the edges, so to speak, when one system encounters another based on different premises. Does one system negate another, or override (repress) it, or encompass it? Or is something different created in the space of encounter between systems of reasoning: a hybrid of logics? The other possibility, which I explore briefly here, is that different forms of moral reasoning are foregrounded at different times and in different spaces. I suggest that the latter was the case during the Soviet regime to a marked degree. This is a different problem from what happens when a radically new system of social organization appears that has yet to be understood and assigned to a given time and place. Soviet rationality was distinctive in the sense that it claimed to transcend morality qua socially produced ideas of right and wrong through appeals to science, or at any rate scientism. Absolute truth, in other words, was one up on local ethics. A singular truth in the Soviet period, as determined by the Party, served the good of the collective and took primacy over the right of the individual. More positively,

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this was expressed as individuals only being able to realize their full humanity through the collective. Labor was given to the collective, mediated by the state; the collective, again mediated by the state, gave back all that was necessary for the material, cultural, and indeed spiritual side of life. Thus there was a form of reciprocity, but one that relied on the intervention of state institutions to receive and distribute. Delayed return played a key role here. The whole system was based on a future orientation. Wealth was not so much (in theory) in present possession but in the fact that welfare would be provided for a secure old age of the worker, their children would be educated, and future generations would live in the land of plenty that present generations were striving to build up. Thus the economy and economic action were deeply moralized. For all the system stultified and came to be mocked in the 1970s and 1980s as hardship lessened and what were nicknamed the stagnation years began, there had been a profound belief in this vision in certain quarters. “We felt as if we had wings on our backs then,” said one architect in Almaty speaking of the late 1960s, her colleagues, and her part in designing parks and new cities from nothing on the bare lands of the steppe. There are many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. But here I just want to mention the existence of alternative systems that undermined the official ideology of equality, reciprocity, and future orientation. Almost from the start there was an elite. Originally, this was the Revolutionary vanguard, the enlightened few who were to lead the education of the masses and the transformation of society. But to those who had a raised consciousness also went a raised standard of living. They possessed more materially and they also had greater power. Under Peter the Great the famous table of ranks was drawn up so that everyone would know precisely where they fitted in the hierarchical order, how to recognize other ranks by their uniforms, how to address others, and in turn how to expect to be addressed. Hierarchy was less explicit under the Soviets but no less carefully tabulated. The importance of being seen to be modest and simple by the ordinary people did not match what went on behind apartment walls and the administrative facades. In Kazakhstan, the need to be a member of the Party and to have patrons in order to climb the ladder was interwoven with other clan and tribe loyalties making it particularly difficult to gain entrance to this interior world of hierarchical status. Since you couldn’t do much about the clan you were born into, and reactionary relatives might serve to block party membership, this inner sphere was as much about

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ascribed rank as the outer, public world was about achieved moral status through labor. The daughter of an academician in Almaty commented in 2003 with nice precision, “It was very cruel in Alma-Ata, much worse than in Moscow. If you weren’t in the centre, it was almost impossible to get in. Most people didn’t even know that such a centre existed. My father was a famous scientist, but even so we were only on the outer edge of the inner circle.” The second system that cut across the touted egalitarianism of the Soviet system was partly created in response to the endemic shortages of the supply and distribution system. The system of reciprocal favors, blat, ran up and down and through the whole Soviet scheme (Fitzpatrick 1999: 62–66, Ledeneva 1998). This cut across the moral underpinning of the official ideology in a number of ways. The better placed had access to more things and had more power to influence educational placings, jobs, and so on. Blat met wants in the short term, thus curtailing the idea of a system operating on credit, in Arthur Koestler’s (1984) terms: that present conditions and labor would be rewarded in the future. Reciprocity through favors created a system of inequality, obligations, and debts that ran across the idea of egalitarianism. It also threw other questions of parity up in the air since unlike was exchanged for unlike; thus the question of value standards was constantly being renegotiated. Alongside all of this, stealing from workplaces was rife, usually for bits and bobs to patch together housing. One reason quite simply is that “the state” had become a nonentity—literally, it was so pervasive and all-encompassing it lacked the reality of a neighbor, a person from whom stealing was actively an immoral act (Alexander 2004); it could not be seen. That changed when it retracted or disappeared, and its previous ubiquity was suddenly revealed in its new absence. The oddity about the post-Soviet experience of a new global modernity being thrust upon citizens was that they had already been living in and through contradictory systems of moral reasoning; they had already been impelled into a brave new world of modernity. After all, twentieth-century state socialism is the paradigm for high modernism as Scott (1998) repeatedly demonstrates. In Kazakhstan, the most dramatic clash of modes of moral reasoning first happened in the 1930s with the mass collectivization of the nomadic clans and their herds, moving from one form of collective ownership to another.10 The result was devastating famine, destitution, and glimpses through fragments in archives and novels of nomads (e.g., Aitmatov 1983, Shayakhmetov 2006) waiting to die on the freezing steppe. The Kazakh population was halved. It is one of the forgotten

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genocides. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the brutality did not cease. Matthew Payne (2001) describes the construction of the Turksib railway across the frozen steppe of Kazakhstan in the 1930s, which entailed the forced proletarianization of Kazakhs. As yet largely under-researched (Pohl 2002), much of central Kazakhstan comprised a network of gulags that were not wholly dismantled until well after Stalin’s death. In my first two years of fieldwork, I did not speak to one person whose family history did not contain at least one member who had been taken to a labor camp. Many came to Alma-Ata in the 1930s for the soft climate and fecund soil; many others came accompanying relatives sent to camps. “We’re like Australia here,” an unemployed engineer laughed, “all descended from convicts.” The difference is just how close that history is to present times. The horror is soon forgotten. A history teacher remarked how his mother and her mother had always slept with a loaf of bread and a change of clothes under their bed, ready for the knock on the door that would carry them into the night, a habit they continued into the late 1980s. His teenage children, he said, had no idea of this continual fear with which their parents had lived. If anything, the radical cultural change of the end of the twentieth century was gentler than that of the 1930s. But the shock was of a different order. It was not just that the old values of socialism, as refracted through the Soviet lens, were replaced by something very different but that, at the same time through glasnost, the degree of the previous contradictions were also revealed. Of course they had always been known about, but not the full extent: there had also been a complicit silence. Wealth and power had never been flaunted before. It was clear that some city regions were smarter than others, but many apparently identikit facades of apartment blocks concealed large and luxurious flats. Suddenly, the cult of present gratification, individualism, profound inequalities, and market values were not just there but exhibited, made visible. The moral confusion was as much the shock of the old as the shock of the new.

Making Your Apartment Yours Now, Soviet state housing embodied a series of contradictions that were only brought to the fore when they came to be privatized. On the one hand they were built by the state and given to workers in return for labor. So far so the party line. Throughout the Soviet period, housing in Almaty, as with most cities, was in chronically short supply. This was partly because the huge modernist drive to

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industrialization failed to take housing into account. Kotkin’s (1998) narrative of the building of Magnitogorsk, the huge steel town in the Urals, in the 1920s describes the concentration of the planning effort into constructing four giant blast furnaces on which the industry was centered. So little thought was given to the supporting infrastructure that an estimated population of about one hundred thousand was virtually doubled by the time all the necessary services, from bakeries to kindergartens, administrative offices to hairdressers, were provided. Here, as elsewhere, basic housing provision always lagged behind need. Tents slowly gave way to self-built mud huts and these in turn to barracks. The example is extreme but by no means untypical. Khrushchev, in the early 1960s, sought to counter this by mass building the apartment blocks of reinforced concrete panels that have come to typify Soviet cities. For many families they were miraculous after being huddled into single rooms, sometimes partitioned to accommodate more than one family. But their tiny size provoked jokes too, as the following given by a forty-five-year-old secretary in Almaty illustrates: “Khrushchev merged the bedrooms and the living area, he merged the lavatory and the bathroom—but though he tried and tried, even Khrushchev couldn’t merge the floor and the ceiling.” Provided by the state they may have been, but the tiny, warm, fuggy kitchens, the center of domesticity and sociality, were also a place to escape from the state. As a 1970s’ Soviet rock song went, “there’s one truth for the kitchen and another for the street.” The domestic rather than the private was opposed to the state and public space. The problem was the common elision of the domestic realm with the private. The conflation was of little import where private possessions tended to refer to small personal items, but became much more significant when this “private” space was privatized. The illogic becomes apparent. “How,” as so many people said wonderingly, “can we own again what we already own?” The joke about privatization that had people crying with laughter in 2000 was this: A man says to his dog, “do you understand privatization?” “No” says the dog, “Well, let me explain. Is that your kennel?” “Yes,” says the dog, “Well, now . . . it’s yours! And that, my friend, is privatization.”

That suggests at least a great ballyhoo with nothing being changed at the end.

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In fact, the one thing that did change was that now being in legal possession of their apartment, the new owners found themselves liable for a steadily increasing raft of charges for utilities and maintenance that previously, if not completely free, had been so heavily subsidized as to represent a subvention from the state along with housing, education, and pensions. It was hard to understand how these new costs could be justified. Where before the state had managed and merged the lives of citizens, the built and natural environment, these were now broken up, separated, and each had a cost attached. The process of fragmentation appeared to be endless. A librarian who lived with her mother waggled a utility bill she had received that morning in front of me saying in shocked disbelief, “Look! First they charge us for water and heating. Now on this new bill they’ve split up hot and cold water and each one has a charge against it! It’s mad! What next?” The next thing, as she showed me a few months later, was the separation of gas and electricity, each with its own cost, the two charges being more than the previous whole. The disquiet was twofold. In the first place, water, in particular, had been part of the infinite bounty of nature that the state had administered for the good of the population. To attach a cost to something that was quite patently not a product of labor was quite absurd. “What next?” an old woman commented, “will they start to make us pay for the air we breathe?” (Alexander 2007b). In the second, the anxiety concerned the foreigners who seemed to be spilling into the country eager to take control of its rich natural resources, an eagerness that the government appeared only too willing to satisfy. But this was profoundly distressing. Kazakhstan’s resources, although long siphoned off to Russia under the Soviets, were nevertheless seen as the insurance for the population’s future. A common line was that the country’s future had been sold to foreigners—and foreigners represented market rationality at its most rapacious. There was, it seemed, nothing to protect citizens from the endless price hikes in domestic utilities hitting at the very heart of that private, family space. What was happening was slightly different from this perception of the new vulnerability of the domestic space as safe retreat: the uncanny, it might be suggested, was hard to grasp. The management of elderly power stations that were stretched to the limit of their capacity and beyond, and equally old, rusting sewerage systems, were leased to foreign companies on the understanding that prices could be raised to meet running costs. The management in their turn pledged to maintain and restore the pipes. The endless swings in the

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city’s infrastructure management and ownership were indeed complicated, sometimes underhand, and certainly obscure (Alexander 2007b). Faced with confusion, the rumor that sped through the city in 2000 was that a French company had bought up Vodakanal, the local branch of the state water company, and had built a reservoir on the outskirts of Almaty. As a result, instead of clean, pure water coursing down from the mountains as had happened before, still, stagnant water was now running through the city’s irrigation channels (aryk) and pipes, entering the homes and bodies of Almaty’s citizens and polluting them. None of this story was true. A Belgian company took over the management of the company two years later and began to work on reconstructing the pipes, but the rumor tapped into fears of foreigners, the mythical, unnatural reversal of movement and stillness, unseen disease entering the most intimate spaces—and above all the aphasic, indifferent state. By the next year, the solemnly repeated rumor was nowhere to be heard. Unimaginable fragmentation continued in the home. Elena, a middle-aged accountant who lived with her mother in a small, private house had to reregister her house as private. This caused merriment enough. But two years later she arrived for work one day in a rage waving a letter that had arrived that morning. It seemed she now had to register ownership of the land on which the house stood, for a fee. Failure to do so might enable someone else to buy the land. It was difficult, she said, to know whether to laugh or cry. Was the next thing to be a letter demanding she register the roof as hers, then the windows, the walls, the floor? How could a house exist without the land it sat on, indeed was dug into, unless it hovered in the air? And what would be the rights of this unknown person who might conceivably buy the land on which her house was built. It seemed likely, she said, that this stranger (who became more real by the moment) might demand, with legal backing, her house to be pulled down. Elena’s incomprehension was common. It worked the other way as well. The first (of many) land laws allotted those living in private or self-built houses their dwelling plus twelve square meters of land. To the fury of the chief architect,11 many living in collapsed collective farms simply dismantled their houses, piled the wood, bricks, and glass into lorries hired with the last of their savings, drove to the edge of the city, and there rebuilt their houses. “When we said 12 square meters,” he said, “we meant the 12 square meters under their house where it was. We didn’t mean any 12 square meters they fancied. But then,” he added with a grin, “our people are nomads, so what can you expect.”

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Other contradictions abounded. The Soviet system was premised on equality, but this was translated into uniformity and homogeneity of provision and treatment for the household unit and so produced the opposite effect. The regulation intended to smooth out such differences was the living space quota per person measured in square meters, in practice, however, the queues for apartments was such that this was not always put into practice. The quota also changed over time and place (Fitzpatrick 1999: 46). The odds are there will be diverse configurations of families; if the same size apartment is given to each family then each person will have a quite different amount of space. At a minimum, a six-person household living in a two-room apartment will have much less room than a two-person household living in the same room. This “standard” approach to equality thus produced inequality (Szelenyi 1983). So what did privatization do to this situation? In brief, both the free market and socialism are premised on ideas of equality. Under socialism the belief is that everyone should be treated as equals, under the free market that everyone has equal opportunity. In practice, in both systems, inequality of outcome tends to prevail. What happened under privatization was the odd situation whereby the equality of socialism as practiced by the Soviets was effectively presumed by the new social engineers of a market-based economy so that a kind of musical chairs privatization ensued: everyone ended up with the title deeds of wherever they happened to be living at the time. The state apartment blocks that were handed over to their inhabitants in Almaty were in a dreadful state. Built in the 1960s as a temporary measure, they had had little spent on them and nothing during perestroika. Everywhere there was concrete spalling, roofs falling in, pipes rusting away. Title deeds to the apartments, which most had been living in for many years by virtue of working for this or that factory, were handed over—but in the virtual absence of a housing market and in an environment where literally millions were fleeing the country back to the various historic motherlands, there was little chance of selling. The idea, as the World Bank report had said, was to distribute the wealth of the country to its citizens and allow them to take part in the free market by being able to capitalize their new wealth. Of course what really took place was setting in concrete seventy odd years of Soviet inequality: the elite were given title deed to their lush apartments and the ones who had never quite made it had to make do with the decrepit apartments where they were living—because uniformity applied to building materials as well. Concrete that is suitable for the

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clement weather of the Crimea, for example, is woefully inappropriate for constructions in extreme continental weather conditions. Although this was clearly carried out as a pragmatic solution to the otherwise impossible problem of housing reallocation, the rhetorical gloss that potential assets were being rationally shared out was belied and made ludicrous by the lived inequality of living space. However much alternative models and practices existed, one common model that was affronted by these acts of displacement and replacement of relations between people and things was that the people collectively owned everything (Alexander 2004). To hand over a certificate of ownership was therefore deeply perplexing if not just comical. The sadder part came later when people realized that what this switch meant was a retraction of state care for housing and indeed increasingly all the various parts of the urban infrastructure that sustained it. Without making it explicit, the old social contract was smashed and it was not clear if or how it was being replaced. In fact, few were aware that virtually nothing had been spent on housing since perestroika kicked in. Even where charges were spent on repairs, it was a drop in the ocean, and still is. Endless scandals in the poorer suburbs told of drug gangs of youths on the streets, kidnappers who stole children and took them to slave farms out on the steppe. Everyone knew a neighbor who had a relative who knew someone to whom this had happened. And always the stories came back to the lack of care by the police, the abandonment by the state of its obligations to citizens. The other related subtheme provoking outrage and grief focused on children (Pilkington 1997), once the hope and pride of the nation: now, endlessly, citizens lamented that nothing was spent on playgrounds, funfairs were no longer free, kindergartens were closed, sold, and on one tearful occasion reported as being converted to a brothel. Some rumors seemed, rather hopefully, to counteract this perceived breaking of the social contract. At this time another strand of gossip whirled through the grapevine in the microregion where I was living: “Have you heard? They’re going to re-house us.” “Who?” “I don’t know, the Akimat I suppose.” “Where did you hear?” “My neighbor’s friend told her, she heard, I’m not sure on the television, newspaper. But it’s true.”

A week later the rumor had vanished.

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So, in the Soviet period there were dual systems that contradicted each other and these paradoxes or mismatches between the experience of actually existing socialism and the rhetoric of Soviet rationality; these contradictions were often expressed through jokes. But otherwise different ways of reasoning dominated at different moments. Although people became disenchanted, as Yurchak (1997) suggests, cynical reason was not a complete response. That would not explain the shock as apparently the material and social world appeared to reform, disengage part from part, and become reconfigured into unrecognizable parts. With the withdrawal of the state and along with it the system of reciprocal rights and obligations which incorporated buildings (Palaces of Cultures, kindergartens, and housing), it seemed that both state and state buildings disappeared. In post-Soviet Almaty even buildings seemed alien, threatening, and invisible.

Absurdity: The Thought, the Unthought, and the Unthinkable Privatizing domestic space made palpable the contradictions of everyday Soviet living; jokes and the anekdot allowed such paradoxes to be expressed by conflating contradictions, playing on ambiguity, and enacting the sheer impossibility and horror of mutually exclusive systems of order or morality being yoked together. Thus the famous Stalinist anekdot, “1937, it is night and an old couple is asleep. Suddenly they are woken by a knock on the door. Trembling the old man goes to investigate, but returns a few minutes later saying, ‘nothing to worry about, it’s only burglars.’ ” Although most closely associated with the shattering of established orders by the two World Wars, the absurdist tradition has a much longer literary genealogy encompassing myth, allegory, and satire. Essentially, it foregrounds the irrational and as such has usually been associated with the subversive, the Dionysian, the anti-authoritarian. Greek satire ridiculed human pretensions to be in control of their lives, to possess civilization in the face of whimsical deities and human nature; this theme became the undertow to Renaissance celebrations of human capacity, the heroic flaw. Martin Esslin’s (2001) definitive work on the Theatre of the Absurd saw it as a largely European phenomenon, rooted in the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and responding to the savage, widespread rupturing of familiar conventions and values during the twentieth century—sometimes seeing only suicide as a means of achieving liberation from the anguish of understanding that the world

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was fundamentally meaningless, the only reasonable response to unreason. The same social break up of old orders also ushered in the rise of anthropology as a professional discipline, cubism, and modernist literature, all of which positioned themselves against single explanatory narratives. Anthropology demonstrated alternative systems of thought and reason showing where and how this incorporated the chaotic and the carnivalesque; thus ethnographies of absurdity (even if not so called) tended to construct pressure valve studies seeing in jokes and carnival a means of temporary release that allows the dominant order to continue. The other face of absurdity, the continuing bleakness and terror of existence not tractable to understanding, tends to be underplayed. At the same time, a Slavic brand of absurdism was emerging, arguably from similar sources but with a keenly different impact on the experience of the everyday and its translation into self-exegesis. Within the European avant-garde the emphasis was on the arbitrary nature of human existence in the widest cosmological sense, the fundamental lack of any decipherable driving force. The Russian and later the eastern European version was different. Although a strand of nihilism threaded through nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary movements, and Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) drew on Menippean and Rabelaisian satire for his work on carnival as undermining and providing the core of existing orders, Russian and later Soviet absurdism was characterized by the here and now. This genre was structured round the assumption that not only was everyday life quintessentially absurd, but that that very senselessness was produced by the uniform application of rational procedures. Seasoned by fatalism, this was heady stuff. The most familiar expression of this genre is perhaps the Russian joke or anekdot, usually poking fun at authoritarian figures, though latterly rich businessmen. The anekdot is more well-known perhaps for its painful black humor. Soviet science fiction and satire equally provide a rich seam not just of hidden or evocative transcripts (Humphrey 1994, Scott 1990) but also of a sense of the absurdity of the Soviet human condition; this is achieved in the Menippean tradition of alienating the locale or scale of human practice; the perspective afforded by cognitive distance foregrounds the absurdity of state rationality. The epigraph to this chapter cites Freud’s 1932 discussion of the Bolsheviks’ attempt to impose a worldview on Soviet society that brooked no dissent. Unsurprisingly, the official Soviet line from the 1930s onward repudiated Freud’s teaching as unscientific mumbo-jumbo and the idea of the unconscious as fundamentally

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bourgeois: the concern with the private life of the individual being anathema to the grander project of building socialism and the right kind of socialist man to inhabit the new world. In this view, the notion of an unconscious distorted objective processes of nature and social structures. In his famous science fiction novel We (1993), Yevgeny Zamyatin made explicit, and satirized, the parallels between that desired human transparency, the prized readability of the soul on the skin, and a modernist architecture of uncompromising severity that allowed no curtains, no knick knacks, and no cozy, reactionary jumble to block the gaze of the external viewer. That rationalist endeavor to streamline people, domestic space, and the collective space of production was constantly undermined in the subsequent years of the Soviet period. Miller (1998) notes that psychoanalytic theory resurfaced in the late 1980s as a crucial weapon against the Soviet government, even as it was falling out of general favor in a North America newly entranced by “hard science” and evidence that individuals were in control of their own lives, in a curious echo of Soviet-style scientific rationality. What I have suggested in this chapter is the coexistence of inimical ways of ordering lives, especially domestic lives and spaces. Soviet jokes and the genre of the absurd anekdot brought that dissonance to the fore, allowed contradictions to be expressed in a form that neither state rationality nor everyday reason could accommodate. The privatization of state-built apartments continued this tradition albeit with different disjuncture between experiential knowledge and universalizing rationality, the latter, this time, enjoined upon Almaty’s citizens by those promoting the freedom and equality of a market-based economy based on private property.

Notes 1. See Vidler (1994) and also Buchli (2007) for a discussion of the changing surfaces of the built environment. 2. In what follows I use Alma-Ata to denote the city in the Soviet period and Almaty for the postindependence city. This is a convenient but slightly inaccurate shorthand as the city was only renamed in 1992. 3. The semantic link between “seeing” and “understanding” holds for Russian as much as English. 4. See Schatz (2005). 5. The conversion of state held and managed assets to fragmented privately owned holdings after the collapse of “state socialism” frequently resulted in individuals finding themselves in possession of land that was worthless without the previous technical and social infrastructure in which it had

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

C at h e r i n e A l e x a n de r been embedded and that had served to maintain it (see Verdery 1994, 1998, 1999, and 2003). See Alexander (2004) for a discussion of the privatization of industry in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which showed that property objects drew their value from the social networks in which they were set. Marxist–Leninism was nominally based on the same Enlightenment project as that followed in the West, which placed the highest value on scientific rationality as a means of apprehending and understanding the world. In the former Soviet Union, however, this became transmuted into the scientism of modernism where belief in universal rules of science and history trumped local practice (Alexander 2007a). In effect, the right was given primacy over the good or, in the terms of this volume, the specificity of moral processes and actions gave way before abstract ethics. Nazpary’s take is quite simply that there was chaos as informants reported it and that this was deliberately created by the powers. My version is that unfamiliarity with new systems was rendered as chaotic at the time. Many of these apartment blocks were built under Khrushchev’s drive in the 1960s to provide each family with their own apartment in place of the overcrowded communal apartments (Gerasimova 2002, 2003, Reid 2002). The short-term result was welcomed by many, but the haste with which they were built, the often substandard materials, the lack of attention to local climatic exigencies, and the dwindling amount spent on maintenance during perestroika means that now such apartments are often in a terrible condition. I use it as a metaphor here, but Almaty is peculiarly susceptible to natural disaster, exacerbated by human endeavor. Twice, in the nineteenth century, the little Russian town of Verniye, later to be Alma-Ata, was devastated by earthquakes. Twice mudslides have borne huge boulders down from the mountains mowing down streets and housing in their path. Unshored-up tunnels from an incomplete metro project burrow through the unstable, shifting territory of the city center. Rumor has it that the city floats above a huge underground lake into which it could fall at the next shudder of the earth. All in all it is a rather unlikely location to found a city. Considerable sequestration of nomadic pasture lands had already taken place by the 1920s under the Tsarist regime. According to Martha Brill Olcott (1986) by the time the Bolsheviks acceded to power, only a third of Kazakhs would have been able to sustain a transhumant way of life. This was during an interview in 2000.

Bibliography Aitmatov, Chinghiz. 1983. The Day Lasts More Than a Thousand Years, trans by J. French. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Alexander, Catherine. 2004. “Values, Relations and Changing Bodies: Industrial Privatization in Kazakhstan.” In Property in Question: Appropriation, Recognition and Value Transformation in the Global Economy, edited by Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2007a. “Rationality and Contingency: Socialist City Planning.” In Ways of Knowing: Epistemologies in Practice (selected Papers of the 5th Decennial ASA conference), edited by Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey, and Peter Wade. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2007b. “Almaty: Rethinking the Public Sector.” In Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia, edited by Catherine Alexander, Victor Buchli, and Caroline Humphrey. London: UCL Press. ———. In press. “Waste Under Socialism and After: A Case-Study from Almaty.” In Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution, Transformation and Restoration, edited by Harry West and Parvathi Raman. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indian University Press. Brill Olcott, Martha. 1986. The Kazakhs (Studies of Nationalities in the USSR). Washington D.C.: Hoover Institution Press. Buchli, Victor. 2007. “Astana: Materiality and the Nation.” In Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press. De Soto, Hernando. 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books. Esslin, Martin. 2001. The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Methuen. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1999. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times; Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1964. New Introductory Lectures. Lecture XXXV (“The Question of a Weltanschauung”). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. 2003a. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 2003b. The Uncanny. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Gerasimova, Katerina. 2002. “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment.” In Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, edited by Susan Reid and David Crowley. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2003. “Public Spaces in the Communal Apartment.” In Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies, edited by G.T. Rittersporn, M. Rolf, and J.C. Behrends. 165–93. New York: Peter Lang. Humphrey, Caroline. 1994. “Remembering an ‘Enemy’: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia.” In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, edited by Ruby S. Watson. 21–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

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Kaufman, Walter, and Ilya Lipkovich. 1995. Housing in Kazakhstan: Recent Trends and Statistics. Almaty: International City/County Management Association. Koestler, Arthur. 1984. Darkness at Noon. London: Bantam. Kotkin, Stephen. 1998. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization. Berkeley: California University Press. Ledeneva, Alena. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Thomas. 1996. The Magic Mountain. New York: Vintage. Miller, Martin. 1998. Freud and the Bolsheviks. Durham: Duke University Press. Nazpary, Joma. 2001. Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press. Payne, Matthew. 2001. Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Pilkington, Hilary. 1997. “ ‘For the sake of the children . . . ’ Gender and Migration in the Former Soviet Union.” In Post-Soviet Women. From the Baltic to Central Asia, edited by Mary Buckley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pohl, Michaela. 2002. “ ‘It Cannot Be That Our Graves Will Be Here’: The Survival of Chechen and Ingush Deportees in Kazakhstan, 1944–1957.” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4, No. 3, 401–30. Reid, Susan. 2002. “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and Consumption in the Khrushchev Thaw.” Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2, 211–52. Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika. Cornell and Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schatz, Edward. 2005. Modern Clan Politics and Beyond: The Power of “Blood” in Kazakhstan. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shayakhmetov, Mukhamet. 2006. The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin. London: Stacy International. Smith, Adam. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szelenyi, Ivan. 1983. Urban Inequalities under State Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1994. “The Elasticity of Land: Problems of Property Restitution in Transylvania.” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, 1071–109. ———. 1998. “Disambiguating Ownership: Rights and power in Transylvania’s Decollectivation.” In Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, edited by Chris M. Hann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization.” In Uncertain Transition Ethnographies of Change in

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the Postsocialist World, edited by M. Burawoy and K. Verdery. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ———. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vidler, Anthony. 1994. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yurchak, Alexei. 1997. “The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot.” Public Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1993. We, trans. by M. Ginsburg. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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C h a r i t y : C on v e r s at ions a bou t Ne e d a n d Gr e e d

Soumhya Venkatesan

Introduction In this chapter I examine ethnographically some of the ways in which people discuss what they or others should and should not do, and what they do do in their attempts to live good lives. I ask how people reason in different kinds of conversation about norms of social behavior, and what they say they are doing when they follow or break those norms. The chapter focuses on conversations, gossip, and rumor about one specific aspect of the lives of a group of Muslims in the Tamil town of Paiyur in South India.1 This is one of the most discussed yet most elusive aspects: the quest for money and one of the ways members of the group seek to obtain it. I will discuss the practice itself in detail later; suffice it to say now that I have been told that it involves approaching strangers and asking them for money in the name of charity. My knowledge of this practice is only second-hand—indeed, can only be second-hand as I will explain later—but even what little information I have is acquired in noteworthy ways: reluctantly parted with by those most involved in this practice, and most avidly by those who take no direct part in it but are interested; part envious and part disdainful, sometimes also sympathetic. There is an imbalance here then. One that seems to be born out of shame on the part of some, and a kind of ambivalence made up of notions of rightness and desire

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on the part of others. But, there is also a kind of satisfaction that comes out of doing something, however problematic, successfully. I suggest in this chapter that the relationship between what might be called competing emotions—shame and satisfaction—is a complex one. The two can be not just coeval but also co-penetrating. I also take up here James Laidlaw’s (2001) call for an anthropology of ethics and freedom. According to Laidlaw, anthropologists need a way of “describing the possibilities of human freedom, that is, how freedom is exercised in different social contexts and cultural traditions” (311).2 We need to think about what people do, feel they can do, and choose not to do. Gossip, I believe, offers an ethnographically rooted way of approaching freedom because it is a specific form of moral reasoning about it. I want to bring out two connections between gossip and freedom. First, the emphasis that gossips place on the freedom of people to choose to do “bad” or “immoral” things. Indeed the self-righteousness that gossips lay claim to is incumbent on their belief that the subjects of their censure could have acted in some other less exceptionable way but did not. Second, gossip is, among other things, a way of exploring what one can in fact “get away with”—of what one can do, albeit that it isn’t approved, if one wants to. I suggest that gossip, rumor, and conversations are important parts of social life—people are included or excluded, evaluated, judged, justified, social norms are prodded, boundaries explored. The rich life of the mind—suspicions, intentions, desires—imperfectly known yet, possibly therefore, interesting, is held up to discussion, scrutinized, and speculated upon. The exploration of another’s desires and actions opens up a discussion of one’s own life and choices. Gossip is also interesting to the anthropologist because it may not only reinforce social norms but can also invite participation in breaking them. It limits yet enables social action. As gossips discuss the actions of others they are also made aware of what they themselves may attempt. Notwithstanding condemnation, people do not always stop doing things that go against dominant mores. They may however justify their actions in conversations with others or the anthropologist, presenting their projects as moral or at least undertaken to fulfill moral obligations.3

Paiyur Paiyur is in Tamilnadu, South India. The town’s population numbered around thirteen thousand according to the 1991 census. This is a

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mixed population of Hindus and Muslims with the latter constituting 40 percent of the population. Various Hindu castes are represented. Different groups are spatially segregated though in recent times the segregations are less rigid. Within the Muslim population, there are two main groups: the numerically superior and higher-in-status Rauther, and the Labbai.4 Labbais and Rauthers form part of the same mosque congregation and as such, even though there are separate Labbai and Rauther areas, there is some contact between them. With other groups contact is more sporadic despite physical proximity.5 Everyone I work with in Paiyur is Labbai Muslim. The Labbai population comprises around 650 people whose houses are grouped together in two localities in the town. Considered to be of low status among Muslims, Labbais say their traditional occupation is the performance of ritual activities for client households.6 In Paiyur, another of the traditional Labbai occupations is mat weaving. Neither occupation allows for the making of much money or for achieving financial security. However, money is a crucial concern—both to subsist and to fulfill social obligations, which can be expensive. Labbais of Paiyur do not own agricultural land. They also have few fixed assets. Men, young men especially, migrate to other parts of India and the Middle East on short-term work contracts. Women stay behind with children, often working from the home. Men also engage in petty trading within and beyond the town. Most Labbais are related to each other—often in multiple ways. Even when they cannot describe a direct relationship, they can, at the very least, show how they are related to someone else who is related to the person whom we are discussing. Marriages are normally arranged either to someone whose family lives in the town, or to someone who has relatives in the town though they themselves might live elsewhere. Marriages are extremely important and occasion much activity, anxiety, and interest, as will be seen. For an adult, being married, with a living spouse and children, is the ideal state. However, there is a more particular question as to who one should marry. In Paiyur where every Muslim from the Labbai subgroup claims kinship relations with every other Labbai, and where both parallel as well as cross-cousin marriages are permitted, marriage may be seen as a way of foregrounding particular kinship relations. It remakes kin by aligning people and households in new configurations. We have here a classic “community”—high levels of face-to-face interactions, association with a particular place, and knowledge of one another’s movements and concerns—whether passed on when people are just sitting around and talking, or purposefully transmitted

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and acquired in the course of enquiries about a potential marriage partner for a son or daughter, nephew or niece, brother or sister. Few Labbais in Paiyur conduct abstract discussions about how one ought to live one’s life.7 If a dilemma arises it is discussed, but mostly people just carry on with the business of living. However, there are some practices—especially the one of asking strangers for monetary help—that are the subject of general discussion and act as a focus for what I would describe as moral thinking because they directly address the question: how ought one to live one’s life well? This is why I describe the gossip, rumors, and conversations around this practice as hedged about in moral issues—questions of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, need and greed. As has already been mentioned, the ethnography described in this chapter is noteworthy in one important respect—it is based entirely on conversations people have had with me, in or without the presence of others, about a practice that happens far away, the circumstances and actions of which are partly known, partly imagined. Conversations, gossip, rumor, and verbal justifications, rather than participation in and direct observation of the practice under discussion, form the material I work with. For the anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Paiyur, a small place with very dense verbal networks, the question of what is public space and what private can become rather blurred. One may be in a house with just one occupant currently present—your conversation may be seen as being in the private sphere and yet, there is an element of performance, of acknowledgment that the anthropologist is other, not necessarily in some absolute sense, but just other in relation to one’s own self. Also talking about someone else may be a way of eliciting some information about them. Someone else comes in. Depending on who that is, the conversation might continue, or it might change tenor, becoming more general or even changing track completely. Should the second person catch wind of what was being discussed prior to their entry he may want to carry on the discussion, sometimes adding juicier tidbits that make the first person uncomfortable (and sometimes the anthropologist too, who is walking the tricky tightrope of wanting to know, and yet not quite!). Or he may berate the first person for disclosing something that ought not to have been said. He may even deny the substance of the conversation by alluding to the original speaker’s unreliability or lack of discretion about things of which they know nothing. Verifying something one has heard then becomes problematic, not least because it may cause strife. The notion of the small community

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as a space where everyone is known and knowable becomes less sustainable, and yet the ambiguities, the possibilities, become productive in themselves as people discuss others as a way of framing themselves, of justifying their own choices, actions, and perspectives. The anthropologist here is a foil, as indeed are other people, present or absent.8 So, I am setting up a kind of tripartite relationship. Those I am close to tell me about things other people do, why this is not good, and that they themselves would not act in this way. The people who are the objects of this censorious gossip also talk to me about why they do what they do. In justifying themselves against the censorious gossip, they are simultaneously presenting themselves as moral people.

Arif’s Dilemma The year was 1996. Arif and his wife Amina were in a state of crisis. Arif, along with his son, had started a small business in a nearby city. The business failed. They lost a huge amount of money. Following this, Arif’s son found a low-paid job in Delhi. Most of the son’s salary was sent home to his parents and he had little to live on. Delhi was seen as a good choice because Arif’s sister lived with her husband and two daughters in a small house in one the city’s shanty towns. The son could stay in his aunt’s house. This would help cut down his living expenses. Arif’s son was unmarried, but there was a long-standing agreement that he would marry the elder of his father’s sister’s daughters. When it became clear that he would share his aunt’s house and live in close proximity to his betrothed, her mother insisted that the marriage take place as soon as possible. A strong woman, there was no brooking her, and indeed there was no real problem with this except that Arif had a younger unmarried daughter of marriageable age, Noor. It is considered unseemly for a brother to get married before a sister unless she is very young. Noor therefore had to be married off before Arif’s son’s wedding. A match with the son of a not very close relative was quickly arranged. The groom’s family demanded a cash dowry of around one hundred thousand rupees and some jewelry.9 In addition to the losses suffered as a result of the failure of the business, the household had also spent a large amount of money on the marriage of Noor’s elder sister a few years earlier. They were already in debt. Organizing Noor’s marriage before the household had had time to marshal its resources plunged them into further debt. The local moneylender lent them money at an interest rate of 5 percent per month and against their

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home as security. But more money was required. Arif decided to borrow even more money and use this to make a month long trip to Malaysia. He hoped to make enough money to cover his travel expenses and to alleviate the crushing burden of debt and the potential loss of their house. Arif knew no one in Malaysia at the time and had no job there, but this trip was not about finding work, nor was it about running drugs or any of the obvious things one might assume. It was about finding people with whom he had some things in common, Islam and Tamilness, and then mobilizing these commonalities. What was Arif doing in Malaysia?

Need and Greed Every year especially during the month of Ramadan, holy for Muslims, several men from Paiyur take the train to Chennai [Madras] (where there is an international airport) and fly from there to Singapore or Malaysia.10 They have paid huge sums of money—almost a year’s normal income—to agents who, on receipt of a nontrivial fee, obtain tourist visas and flight tickets for them. These are not tourist trips, or, not entirely. Locally called dasagam trips, the purpose of these stints abroad is to make money. While there is, for some men, an element of exploration, of excitement in new encounters, especially with technology, and with different ways of life, these trips are to make money. These men, I am told, ask for money in the name of charity.11 Sometimes they may offer to perform ritual services in the households or work spaces of those they approach. Sometimes armed with lists given to them by the travel agents, of names and addresses of Tamil Muslims who live in the cities they are visiting, the men of Paiyur work at making visible and instrumental connections between themselves and those they seek. These connections are based on shared religion, shared language, and the kind of relationship specified within Islam between the rich and the poor. They are not, and it is important to remember this, personal relationships. This is what in part seems to make them problematic, difficult to talk about for the men who undertake these trips, and worthy of condemnation by those who do not. Not all men make dasagam trips, and few of those who do are willing to talk about them, describing them as a “shameful thing.” However, some people from the group who do not make these trips discuss them extensively, both among themselves and with the anthropologist. Their comments are a mixture of the disdainful and

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the envious. The disdain appears to stem from their understanding of these trips as “begging trips.” Censure is reserved, in particular, for those men who make several dasagam trips even after all their daughters have been married off and their need for money is less understandable. There is also an element of envy. Currency conversion rates mean that even small amounts of money in these currencies translate to large sums of Indian rupees in Paiyur. Men who are supplicants abroad (often also needing to borrow money at home to pay for plane fares, visas, etc.) may return financially well off. Since his first trip in 1996 Arif has made one practically every year. He, like others who make these trips, is reluctant to talk about what he does when he is in Malaysia. Even after years of knowing him and being very close to his family, only once did he refer of his own accord positively to one of his Malaysian trips. We were talking and he pulled out a newspaper cutting from a file in which he kept important and treasured pieces of paper. “Look,” he said, “this newspaper has an article about me. I led the prayer in the Tamil mosque in Malaysia one time I was there.” Intrigued and excited I tried to ask him what else he had done in Malaysia. He withdrew very quickly. “It is not nice to ask. We go because we have no other way. It is a matter of shame (avamanam).” What are the needs that force Arif to do something he finds shameful and difficult to speak about? Moreover, why does he go repeatedly? Some people in Paiyur say that it was only the first time Arif went that he really needed to go. His daughter’s marriage needed to happen at that time; he did not have the means to pay for it, and had few choices. Subsequent trips, they imply, have happened not because of need, but because of greed. It is not as if Arif cannot do other things—he and his wife are both skilled weavers and there are traders who will buy every single piece that they weave. Weaving can bring them a regular and quite comfortable income. It has some negative connotations within Paiyur but not of the same order as the dasagam trips. Weaving is not an activity that is highly regarded by those who pursue other kinds of work in Paiyur. The negative perception of weaving stems from its characterization as low-status and old-fashioned manual work. Take, for example, Arif and his wife. Arif’s wife weaves but Arif, though he knows how, prefers not to. He would rather try his hand at business, or, as critics would have it, beg. This latter, unlike weaving, is morally problematic. Not only does it go against the Prophet’s insistence that a man who is able should work to support himself and his dependents, it leads one into dubious

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practices, misrepresentation, and conscious illegalities, and, last but not least, humiliation. So, why does Arif go year after year if he feels as much shame as he says he does in asking for money? While this is not really a question I can answer, it is a question that raises much speculation, even though, perhaps because, there is no sure way of knowing and so much can be imagined. Part curious, part condemnatory, and part congratulatory, discussions about dasagam trips are essentially about morality: about obligations to others—both known and unknown—and to oneself. Gossips often foreground greed as the driving force, rather than need, which is what Arif would emphasize. But neither need nor greed is wholly justifiable. Being in so much need is pitiable but shameful. Giving in to greed and demeaning oneself in the process is shameless.

Ends and Means Arif, and others who make dasagam trips, justify their actions through a clear logic of ends and means. Here, the argument is that if the ends are worthy enough, then some means, even if they raise moral dilemmas, are justified. The ends most often cited in Paiyur are the fulfillment of moral obligations usually within the household: dowries for marriages, expenses of circumcisions, menarche ceremonies, and funerals. Of these, the successful arrangement of the marriages of dependents is the most expensive. Marrying off one’s dependents well is seen as a crucial parental duty in Paiyur, as it is in other parts of India. Males are usually married between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, females between the ages of seventeen and twenty. Parents who delay in marrying off their children, especially daughters, come in for criticism. Arranging a daughter or female dependent’s marriage is not cheap. High dowries, around four–five times a household’s regular annual income are demanded and paid, the bride has to be given an agreed amount of gold jewelry as has the groom, a marriage feast has to be arranged to which kinsfolk of both bride and groom have to be invited as well as all the Labbais of Paiyur, friends, patrons, well-wishers. Discussions about marriage are thus often intertwined with discussions about money. It is not surprising that some of the most creative strategies in Paiyur center around the acquisition of enough money to either get a girl married or to pay off debts incurred in successfully organizing a marriage. While there are many ways of making money, for our purposes we may usefully divide them into two categories. The first is the

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generation of regular but small incomes through household-based work—weaving, leaf cigarette rolling, tailoring. These jobs are generally the province of females and are often described as dull and tedious. The second way of generating money is capital-intensive and high risk but with potential high gains. Men engage in trading or migrate to cities or even abroad for short periods of time to work. Large sums of money may be acquired through participation in rolling savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) or borrowing from money lender. This latter option is ruinous. Interest rates are high—3–5 percent a month with the added proviso that houses be pledged as collateral and that interest and principal be repaid as one lump sum at the end of the loan period. Many households have lost their houses in this way and now live in rented accommodation. This further reduces their choices. It is not an exaggeration to say that for many of Paiyur’s financially insecure Muslims, the fulfillment of one of their obligations—that of marrying off dependents well—brings in its wake other dilemmas. These do not all have to do with dasagam trips. Let us now turn to Dawood to see what these might be. Dawood is the head of a prominent Paiyur household. He decided to marry his twenty-five-year-old son to the daughter of another of Paiyur’s relatively well-off Labbai households. Dawood’s son who has reformist ideals refused to take a dowry on the grounds that it was un-Islamic. Dawood’s household also included a granddaughter aged fifteen who would need to be married off at some stage. As Dawood was well aware, no one else in Paiyur would decline a dowry. Money would have to be found for the girl’s marriage and with no dowry being taken for his son’s, where would this sum be found? Dawood thus arranged the girl’s marriage with the brother of his son’s betrothed. Both marriages would take place on the same day. No dowry would be given or taken but both girls would be given jewelry “as a token of affection—after all,” he said “they want to give their girl something and so do we.” At Dawood’s insistence the marriage feast, the cost of which was shared between the bride’s and groom’s side’ was lavish. Dawood was torn between wanting to make sure that no one would say he was stingy in fulfilling his obligations as a father and grandfather, and between wanting to emphasize his essentially moral position in refusing a dowry for his son. This position, though thrust upon him by his son, was justified by Dawood on three grounds. First that the practice of giving or taking dowries was un-Islamic, that dowry was one of the social evils prevalent in India that the state was

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trying to do away with, and finally that the practice caused distress to the families of girls. “But what could I do,” he said to me, “if there was to be no dowry for my son, we would have had to get in debt for her marriage. She is young, but . . . ” In fact, fifteen is three years under the legal age for marriage of a girl in India. My reason for recounting the way in which Dawood organized his granddaughter’s marriage is to make a point about the ways in which people make choices. Like Arif, Dawood could have made a dasagam trip to raise money for his granddaughter’s marriage at a later date. He could thus have avoided marrying her off at a very young age— something he once regretted in a conversation with me.12 But Dawood unlike Arif has a certain social standing in Paiyur that makes him an unlikely candidate to consider a dasagam trip as a way of raising money. Doing so would lower his status in Paiyur. Dawood is a big man. A trader, he is part of large open networks beyond Paiyur. He can raise money from diverse sources: relatives, well-wishers, and other patrons, even the state. These are a testimony to his effectiveness. Indeed, to be able to say, “so and so gave or lent me money in my time of need because they know me, respect me and trust me” is in fact to say something very important about oneself. Dawood did, in fact, tell me how many gifts and loans of money he had received at the time of the wedding from various people he knew, not all Labbais. He spoke of these with pride as an index of the connections that he has made and the goodwill that he commands.13 It will immediately be seen that dasagam or charitable donations are not about the individual recipient and his or her individual achievements or connections. Quite the opposite—they are given to a poor person without any other means. Unlike cash gifts given between kin or friends or by a patron to a client, there is no previous personal relationship that the recipient can invoke. This renders him powerless even within his own narrations of self. Dawood did make one dasagam trip many years ago. This gives us a clue to understanding how, for different people who occupy different positions of status, the logic of ends and means may vary, as do judgments about their actions. Dawood told me about this dasagam trip with disarming candor. He wanted to go abroad at least once and see the world, and this was the only way he could do it. He did not like asking for money, but could not afford the trip any other way. As it was he had to borrow a huge sum of money for his tickets and visa. He never went again. He did not tell me what he said when asking for money. I could not ask

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him either. The interesting thing however, is that even Rahman, of whom I will speak later and who is the harshest critic of those who make what he calls begging trips, merely says that Dawood’s desire to see the world was an understandable one. There was even an undertone of admiration.

Gossip I must reiterate that all my knowledge of dasagam trips comes from conversations about them in Paiyur—with people who make these trips (usually only the men whose families I am very close to), and people who do not make these trips but are curious about them or outright condemnatory. The men of Paiyur who travel beyond the town seeking their livelihoods, living in male-only spaces within and beyond India including in mosque complexes would be horrified at the very idea of a female anthropologist traveling with them. In some of the sensitive things they do, including asking for charitable donations, there is no place for an observer.14 I have never been with anyone on one of these trips. I would not be welcome. I do not know how the supplicant approaches a potential donor, how he frames his request, each person’s body language, the spaces where meetings take place. This is equally true of those who do not go on dasagam trips but who talk about them. Indeed, it seems to me that dasagam trips form an interesting topic of conversation for those who do not go precisely because they take place far away. There is room for imaginative conjecture, for the analysis of moral issues that this semiimagined, semi-known practice affords, and for the re-presentation of the self through a discussion of the actions of others. Let us return to Rahman, one of the most outspoken of critics about dasagam trips. Rahman, like Arif, is in his mid-to-late fifties. He has a daughter whom he was marrying off around about the same time as Noor. Unlike Arif, however, Rahman has no entrepreneurial ambitions. Both he and his wife weave. That is their only source of income. It is not high, but is sufficient for their ordinary needs. When they need more money, they resort to ROSCAs or to moneylenders. Rahman has a strong moral streak. This, as well as his cautious approach to things, makes him a slightly dull figure to Paiyur’s more swashbuckling and risk-taking males. However, while deploring his own poverty and lack of choices, he uses both to support his view of how one ought to live one’s life: “It is better to eat plain rice in Paiyur than to

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eat biryani in a place where one has to compromise one’s principles or be humiliated.” Rahman classifies those who make dasagam trips into two groups. First are those men who go when their need is very great. They should be pitied even if they do something that is not quite good. Second, the men who should be condemned are the “frauds [he used the English term] who go and lie about having daughters or debts or that they are collecting for worthwhile causes whereas in reality they are just collecting money for themselves. They will have to answer for this [to God].” But whatever the reasons for making a dasagam trip, Rahman said, one has to be thick-skinned in order to ask for money from people. I cannot do this thing. For me it will be like a stinging slap if someone refuses me. And people there are getting suspicious (sandegam) as more and more beneficiaries go.15 Furthermore you have to know whom to ask. Only Tamils will give you anything. Others will hand you over to the police as begging is a crime.

Rahman sees his own poverty and his lack of desire to leave Paiyur and try and make more money as a moral choice—one that means he does not have to be thick-skinned, or lie, or do things he finds dubious or that lower him in the eyes of others. Notwithstanding this, there have been times when Rahman has regretfully said to me that he wished he had some skills that he could use in a dasagam trip. He meant being able to perform ritual services for Tamil Muslims abroad and thereby get some money. However, he told me that as a boy he had deliberately avoided learning these as he felt that Labbais were held in low esteem because they were called upon to officiate at funerals and other inauspicious events, as well as at more pleasurable ones. This meant, he said, that other Muslims felt that the Labbais themselves were inauspicious and tried to avoid seeing them first thing in the morning.16 I have already indicated that Rahman does not hold Dawood’s single touristic and audaciously self-seeking dasagam trip in as bad a light as he does those of others. I believe the answer lies in the ways in which these men are respectively perceived within Paiyur, and Rahman’s knowledge of the resources Dawood does command. Dawood’s taking a dasagam trip is seen as a typically bold venture, not the act of a desperate or greedy man. The judgments of shamefully

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needy or shamelessly greedy that Rahman applies to Arif do not work in the same way for Dawood. Dawood is frequently referred to as vellai sattai kaarar or “white-shirt man” in Paiyur. This refers to the kind of clothing he habitually wears: a white collarless shirt, white lungi or sarong, and white cap. A few other men affect similar clothing and also have beards. The majority of men wear checked lungis and vests, pulling a shirt over this when visitors arrive or when they go to the mosque or out of town. The white-shirt men are therefore quite visible within Paiyur. Most of them are prominent in the public life of the town. Since my first visit to Paiyur in 1996 and my most recent one in 2003, more and more men are adopting white clothing or what one man referred to as the “devout Muslim uniform,” mostly since or because of trips to Malaysia or Singapore. It seems to me they are trying to deflect verbal criticism of their actions through nonverbal means. This does not work very well. Rahman is frequently cutting about this garb: They wear white clothes and have beards. [They act] like devout Muslims, but this is to mask their true nature. [They are ambitious] and seek to influence people through their clothing and their honeyed speech. Poor people like me, we wear checked lungis and can be mistaken for Christians or Hindus, but we are the ones who live with the fear of Allah in our hearts.

The regret Rahman felt about being poor and unable to wear “proper clothing” was mitigated by his judgment about the people around him who could afford to dress well. Their clothing, for him, indicated their desire to hide their greed, and to fool people into thinking they were more god-fearing than they really were. Poor people like him, on the other hand, could not make their piety visible, but their very poverty was an indication of their more innocent and god-fearing ways of life. To be a person of means (vasadhi ullavanga) itself becomes suspect, although desired. Certainly neither the few men who make dasagam trips nor their households step up their consumption or buy fancy goods. The main visible change is the donning of white clothing. This is perhaps to emphasize that they make these trips out of need, not out of greed. This is one of the things censorious gossip achieves: while it seems to have little direct effect on what people decide they want to do, it serves to deepen feelings of shame. It may even create shame. Unless a man who makes dasagam trips changes the terms within which he

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makes his money and is able to change as well the ways in which people view him and his effectiveness, shame continues to be the accepted verbal idiom for him when he talks about dasagam trips. But is shame all that he feels? Rahman would say that a man who felt so much shame would find some other way of doing things.

Shame and Satisfaction Arif once told me about one of the things people, including himself, did on dasagam trips. He would sometimes make an agreement with a charitable institution—an orphanage or an Islamic school—to collect money on its behalf. The institution would not pay any of the costs of the trip but it would give him a book of receipts issued in its name. Identifying himself as a fundraiser for the institution Arif would give donors receipts in the name of the institution. On his return to India the monies would be divided with the institution getting a third of the takings and Arif two-thirds. The donor was not told about this division of his donation. Arif told me it was not easy to link up with an institution. One has to look respectable and speak well. One also needs to work at making contacts within the institution. Similarly donors too should feel reassured and happy with the way he was presenting himself. Dasagam trips that fail bring strong condemnation especially if seen to have harmful consequences. An elderly man who was in great need of money having married off four daughters went on a dasagam trip. Not only did he not make any money, he was also robbed of what little he had and returned destitute. Consequently, I was told, he married off his son to a “disabled girl” taking a large dowry and moreover agreeing that his son would live in the girl’s father’s house. “He has sold his son,” a close kinswoman of his told me. “He should have known he did not have the ability to do this.” It is not surprising that while Arif primarily refers to his dasagam trips in terms of shame, hidden behind the words seems to be a sense of achievement over his having made a success of them.17 It is by no means certain, as he and others point out, that one will return with more money than was required to go. Satisfaction, an emotion that sometimes shines through briefly before it is quickly suppressed, comes partly out of the knowledge that he, Arif, has been successful in his gamble each and every time. Not only that, what he wanted to show by bringing out the newspaper article was that he was respected in Malaysia. He had gone as a supplicant and ended up being recognized as a ritual expert. From a

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“nobody” he became, at least once, a “somebody” in a foreign place with all its glamor and strangeness. My clumsy attempts to try and use this opportunity to know what it was he did on his dasagam trips brought an immediate retreat into the dominant and acceptable idiom of shame. Knowing that Arif feels satisfaction does not cancel out his feelings of shame. I suggest that gossip about dasagam trips is where we can see the deepening of the division between these two feelings such that shame becomes the publicly acceptable one. Thus while there is little challenge to the freedom to act in a particular way, ways of speaking about one’s actions are circumscribed by what is considered publicly acceptable and good. Both shame and satisfaction, which come out of different modes of reasoning and different ways of valuing action, albeit seemingly contradictory, are co-present. They work on each other. To do something that is seen as morally dubious and yet come out the winner financially (something that is highly valued) is satisfying. It is equally satisfying to know that even though one is despised now, one might at the same time be blazing a trail for others to follow. Thus the first woman from Paiyur to make a dasagam trip was heavily criticized for being so bold and shameless. But one of her critics said to me quietly, “we will see. If she is successful maybe I will go too.”

Three Men, Three Strategies Arif, Dawood, and Rahman are all Labbai Muslim men in their late fifties to late sixties, born and brought up in the same town. All three have similar obligations—children whose marriages they have to arrange, grandchildren for whom they are also expected to provide, as well as the regular needs of their households. All three men own their own homes. Two of them, Arif and Rahman, have had to pledge their homes to borrow from moneylenders. Both have managed to redeem their houses having repaid the loans. Dawood has more resources at his disposal than the other two. This includes larger networks on which he can call in times of need. Keeping up with these relationships, working at them, giving and taking—all of these are important to Dawood. His sense of obligation—to himself as well as to those with whom he claims a relationship—drives his actions and the ways in which he reasons through and justifies them. To his mind, he is the true “white-shirt” man unlike the upstarts who make a bit of money and aspire to the dignity that he has worked at. Arif is one such man that Dawood dismisses in this way. His way of discharging his obligations to his daughter came out of a crisis. But

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the means to end the crisis, that is, making dasagam trips, took on a life of their own as Arif started to make them regularly. What happens when the means become the ends? When money is not needed for something that is of moral worth, but is wanted for itself? When others condemn one for one’s greed and there is no recourse apart from ceasing to do what one does? But, what if one does not want to stop doing these things? Arif’s problem is to turn a bad into a good—to make his trips abroad into laudable rather than morally problematic ventures. One way in which he can do that is to turn himself from a seeker of charity into a ritual specialist who is actively sought after abroad. His pride over the newspaper article mentioned earlier points to his desire to create relationships. This is not easy, though possible. Indeed, one man who is skilled at fortune telling and healing and who goes abroad year after year has managed, through the ways in which he talks about his trips and because people know about his skills, to do just this thing. The money he makes abroad is now seen in Paiyur as payment for services rendered rather than as charity. Relationships with others where he is valued for what he can contribute—rather than non-relationships where he is a supplicant who may be sent away with some money—would allow Arif to be more open about his satisfaction and bury the shame. This might change the talk about him. However, perhaps neither emotion—shame nor satisfaction—can fully disappear. The gossips may attribute different ends over time but these may have always been there. Shame and satisfaction are co-present—they just occupy different spaces in different people’s narratives. It is important to reiterate that Arif’s saying that he feels shame has not stopped him from making dasagam trips. Rahman, both very similar to Arif and very different, is quick to seize upon this point. Like Arif he has not the kind of resources Dawood has. Rahman pities people who claim they have no choice but to beg but he also despises their action because he himself, though equally poor, has managed not to beg. His morality is a self-denying one, one that celebrates poverty even as it regrets it. Of the three men, Rahman is the only one to explicitly talk about religion and God when speaking about his choices and those of others. Arif uses shared religion as a resource. Dawood is devout, regular at his prayers, and a member of the Paiyur mosque committee. Rahman too attends the Friday mosque regularly and keeps the Ramadan fast. In this he is not dissimilar to Dawood or Arif. But Rahman explicitly uses the language of judgment to condemn what he sees as dishonest behavior— pretending to be poorer than one is, tricking people. These, he says,

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will have to be reckoned for to Allah who sees all and knows all. Furthermore, Rahman feels very strongly his obligation not only to his God, but also to himself. This is why he asserts that he would rather starve than humiliate himself. The temptation to do otherwise is nevertheless present and there have been times when Rahman has regretted not trying things others have. His project is a traditionally moral one in that it is simultaneously self-denying and self-affirming. Arif’s project too is a moral one. He has ways of justifying what he is doing to himself and to others; yet others also have their ways of evaluating his actions. These are usually derogatory yet intermingled with a kind of envy that he can make money “so easily.” In talking to others he foregrounds shame as his dominant emotion because that is what is acceptable; yet satisfaction does shine through in his pride over certain things he has achieved. It is usually quickly checked and he returns to a discussion of ends and means—what he needs to do, and why this is his only way of doing it. Arif’s sense of obligation to himself, like Rahman’s, is strong but takes a different form. Insofar as one can know such a thing, it seems to be wrapped up in his desire to make a mark in Paiyur and beyond, to show that he can achieve something and not be chained to the life of a weaver. This is a life that, for a man especially, carries connotations of powerlessness in Paiyur. Any insights I have can only be partial answers because, like the gossips, my knowledge is only partial. Nevertheless, it serves to show how actions that are deemed immoral are, perhaps especially, subject to processes of moral reasoning. Decisions may be made on the basis of obligations to oneself, to one’s family members, to one’s social norms, or to one’s God. However these decisions are judged by others, these are all moral projects justified by different kinds of moral logic: that of ends and means, that which does not admit any end that permits deviation from a code of conduct, that wherein goods are sought to be balanced with “bads.” But even if there are few sanctions that enforce clear paths of action, there are nevertheless ways of talking about some practices that foreground negative emotions such as greed and shame and condemn actions on the basis of these. These affect how people present themselves; nevertheless they cannot wholly suppress other, more self-congratulatory feelings. This coevality of what may simply be categorized as opposed emotions is one that is recognized by the gossips. It aids them in their self-presentation as moral beings. But the gossip also does something else. Maybe some people first make one of these trips out of sheer necessity. Those who go repeatedly

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and successfully may enjoy their forays abroad and want the benefits even though they are simultaneously ashamed. That one can do such things is of course a direct and inescapable consequence of freedom. The gossip here may be seen as an important part of how one negotiates with such possibilities—both in finding out what they are, and in terms of accommodating one’s sense of self to the thought of doing things identified as problematic—of figuring out just how bad one thinks they are and whether or not one wants to act in these ways.

Conclusions I have focused in this essay on ways in which people of one group in a small town gossip or talk about other people whom they know well, indeed have known all their lives, when they do something that is seen as morally problematic. I have also focused on what the subjects of their criticism say and do to justify their actions. That the action takes place far away (incorporating transnational networks) makes it extremely interesting partly because it is then open to imaginative speculation. Certainly, it would be illuminating to conduct research on the other side—the givers of charity and what they think is happening. But that would be another kind of project, one that would take away the focus from processes of moral reasoning within a tightly knit group. Uncertainty, imagination, and the sense of incomplete knowledge are at the heart of gossip as a form of understanding. Gossipers say that care must be exercised to moderate needs against greed. In highlighting others’ greed and one’s own restraint in the face of need gossipers re-present their choices as moral and others’ as immoral. Conversations with men who make dasagam trips do not reverse this identification but combat it through a re-presentation of means and ends. While another’s need nor another’s greed are fully knowable, the closeness of the lives of the Labbais of Paiyur, their knowledge of each other’s circumstances, as well as their shared sense of financial and other obligations makes need more guessable, and therefore also greed. This is what gives rise to criticism and to justifications. However, neither need nor greed is wholly justifiable. As has already been said, extreme need is seen as pitiable though shameful; greed is shameless. Both occasion talk and gossip. But this does not necessarily curtail the morally dubious actions of others. Rather, I would suggest, it does something altogether more interesting. First, gossip can facilitate a potential break with social norms by exposing the infractions to public judgment and enabling people to

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imagine whether they should break these norms or not. It can also confirm social norms by redirecting the speaker’s personal judgment (about whether the norm is good to adhere to or not) onto the behavior of another person, or through the reported speech and words of another person. Gossip is about the exercise of freedom within social constraints and the confirmation of those restraints. Second, consider the relationship between gossip and freedom. Gossips take it as self-evident that those they are criticizing were free, like themselves, to act in a more moral way but chose not to. This is what makes the gossiper able to represent himself as a moral being— the gossiper too could take part in this activity, but chose not to. At the same time, talking about it allows the exploration of possibilities that the gossiper might avail himself or herself of one day should the necessity arise. This is an important point. Talk creates moral persons, but talk also gives rein to the imagination by allowing the speaker to put himself in the position of the spoken about. I have focused on three men in the main. Arif, Rahman, and Dawood all share some moral values and differ in some. All of them hold some obligations as inviolable, yet each differs in the means he adopts to discharge these obligations. Islam, Tamilness, Paiyur culture, and pannpadu (customs) are both standards of value by which each seeks to live, and resources in their attempts to live well. This is an important point to make. It is all too easy to assume that religion and shared culture provide all encompassing rules for living a good life. However, though their choices are historically contingent and constrained, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge that people exercise their moral judgment as they live their lives. They do not just do what is “right” even if they know clearly what that is; indeed what is right may not seem appropriate or even attractive when seen in the light of a different value system. Also, even doing the right thing, or what is generally accepted as right, is also an exercise of freedom. Several men from Paiyur make dasagam trips regularly; some have only made one trip, and many have never made any though they would not rule one out entirely if the need arose. Of those who go regularly, one man stands out. His wife was allocated a sum of money by an NGO to have a cataract operation, the man wanted to use this money to make a dasagam trip. His argument was that rather than spend it straightaway on the operation, the money could first be used to make more money. That would help the household. The cataract operation, he said, could take place on his return in a month or so. His wife said she could see the logic of his argument. The household

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was in debt. Here, even if one does not consider the people from whom money is solicited, it is difficult to know what to think. Knowledge of what is right and what not is shared and negotiated in different forums—the mosque, the home, the shop, through discussion of newspapers and television, in conversations, and gossip. Negotiations may be arrived at, exceptions made, new values adopted. Even though a person may feel shame and satisfaction concurrently, they will reveal one or the other according to their judgment of the prevailing social climate and company that they keep. Shame may be put aside and satisfaction revealed as acceptance becomes widespread. But where acceptance is guarded and not freely given, or an action acknowledged but censured, there freedom to act on the basis of one’s desires, needs, and moral judgments, and freedom to speak about it become two different things.

Notes 1. Names of people and the place have been changed. Fieldwork was conducted between 1997 and 2003 with the bulk of time spent between 1997–98 and 1999–2000. This essay has been in gestation for a very long time. Fieldwork was made possible by the generosity of the Smuts Fund at the University of Cambridge; the Horniman Fund; Christ’s College, Cambridge; and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The workshops on moral reasoning organized by Karen Sykes encouraged me to tackle this material. I thank participants at the workshops for their comments and suggestions. I also thank participants at the Living Paradoxes workshop, the Social Anthropology seminar at the University of Manchester, and the South Asian Studies seminar at the University of Sussex. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Karen Sykes, James Laidlaw, Stef Jansen, and Jonathan Woolf for their careful and constructive readings of this essay. I would also like to thank Joel Robbins and Niko Besnier. For gossip, conversations, and generosity I thank the people of Paiyur. 2. Laidlaw is quick to point out, and I agree, that focusing on freedom does not mean automatically subscribing to an atomistic social ontology, and denying the place of the social or cultural. 3. My data supports Paine’s assertion (1967) that “it is the individual and not the community that gossips. What he gossips about are his own and other’s aspirations, and only indirectly the values of the community” (281). Gluckman’s (1963) point that gossip is important for maintaining the unity of the “we group” seems less clear to me especially given that he insists that gossip only takes place within a group and not with outsiders. This is not the case in the material I discuss in this essay. 4. See Bayly (1989), Fanselow (1989), and More (1997). 5. This is not to say that different groups do not know about each other and their customs. This is also not to discount personal friendships and other

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kinds of relationship (business, etc.) between members of Hindu and Muslim groups. The low and intermittent pay that Labbais commanded in their roles as ritual specialists has historically made them among the poorest of Muslim groups (Fanselow 1997). Although this is changing with the advent of reformist Muslim movements. The anthropologist is caught by gossip as a form of social life. For a comparative account, see Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words (1981) on how witchcraft and witchcraft accusations catch the ethnographer because witches intend to speak indirectly about other people, and also redirect their intention to communicate meaningfully into the mouths of others. This ethnography shows how ethnographers are used by language as a form of social life. Also see Besnier (2000) for an extremely interesting discussion about the ethics of field research and the anthropologist’s involvement in, and decisions about, working with gossip. The average annual income of Arif’s household was around thirty thousand rupees at the time. In 2006, one pound was approximately equal to eighty rupees. Tamil Muslims have been found in South East Asia from around the thirteenth century as small-scale independent traders, and are also involved in shipping and manufacturing. Their numbers as well as those of other migrants from India went up during the colonial period (Sandhu 1969, Shankar 2001). Shankar points out in his unfinished albeit posthumously published dissertation that contact between diasporic Tamil Muslims and their counterparts in India has been fairly constant in the twentieth century. This is sadaqah or voluntary charitable contributions, rather than zakat—one of the five pillars of Islam where believers are enjoined to help others less fortunate than themselves by donating a proportion of their wealth (see Benthall 1999). Charity given during Ramadan is said to accumulate seventy times more merit than when given at other times. In a light-hearted moment, Ali, a collector of charitable gifts, once said he was doing the rich Muslims a favor by giving them the opportunity to help poor people like him. By another reckoning fifteen is not too young to marry off a sexually mature girl—indeed, among Muslims, there are those who believe that it is a parent’s responsibility to marry off a girl as soon as possible after her menarche in order to safeguard her virtue and uphold the honor of her family. Dawood did not use this argument to me. See Mines’ Public Faces, Private Voices (1994) for an ethnographically rich discussion on Tamil individuality. Mines shows how for Tamils what is seen as making a person unique includes his or her relations with others. This is an important methodological point: in a world characterized by “flows,” to use Appadurai’s term (1996), where people, ideas, money,

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images, and technologies are in a constant state of movement, should one take Marcus’s call (1995) for multi-sited ethnography seriously and step beyond the spatially bounded field-site? What if this were not possible? I would argue that this can be a strength. To be in one place as people come and go, make their lives here based on what they have done there—these give us a perspective that cannot be replaced by a methodology that insists on following people to wherever they go, should that even be possible. I want to thank Matei Candea for stimulating discussions on this subject and refer readers to his 2007 paper. 15. According to several people, it is not just men from Paiyur who make dasagam trips. Men from all over Tamilnadu state make them. 16. No one else in Paiyur has ever said a similar thing to me. 17. I must emphasise here that I am talking about personal shame and satisfaction. This is not to be confused with izzat, which corresponds to the shame and honor discussions of the Mediterranean region. The shame and satisfaction here are about narrations of the self to the self and to others. They do not impinge on the ways in which a man’s household is seen nor do they seem to affect others’ relations with members of a household.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bayly, Susan. 1989. Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benthall, Jonathan. 1999. “Financial Worship: The Quranic Injunction to Almsgiving.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 5, No. 1, 27–42. Besnier, Niko. 2000. “The Politics of Representation on a Polynesian Atoll.” In Ethnographic Artifacts: Challenges to a Reflexive Anthropology, edited by S. R. Jaarsma and M. A. Rohatynskyj. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Candea, Matei. 2007. “Arbitrary Locations: in Defence of the Bounded Field-Site.” In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), Vol. 13, 167–84. Fanselow, Frank S. 1989. “Muslim Society in Tamilnadu (India): An Historical Perspective.” Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1, January, 265–89. ———. 1997. “The Disinvention of Caste among Tamil Muslims.” In Caste Today, edited by C. J. Fuller. New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks. Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1981 (1977). Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, translated from French by C. Cullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gluckman, Max. 1963. “Gossip and Scandal.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, 307–15. Laidlaw, James. 2001. “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), Vol. 8, 311–32. Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, 95–117. Mines, Mattison. 1994. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley, London: University of California Press. More, J. B. P. 1997. The Political Evolution of Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras, 1930–1947. Madras: Orient Longman. Paine, Robert. 1967. “What is Gossip About? An Alternative Hypothesis.” Man (NS), Vol. 2, No. 2, 278–85. Sandhu, Kernial S. 1969. Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shankar, Ravi A. 2001. Tamil Muslims in Malaysia and Singapore: Historical Identity, Problems of Adjustment, and Change in the Twentieth Century. Kuala Lampur: A. Jayanath.

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C on t e s tat ions of t h e Sta n da r ds of Va lu e

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C us t om: Th e L i m i t s of R ec i proc i t y i n Vi l l age R ese t t l e m e n t

Keir Martin

The SDA (Seventh Day Adventists) don’t like kastam . . . They want to follow Western ways . . . They think the tubuan is the Devil’s work . . . The tubuan is part of the way by which we help each other. The Bible says we should help each other. The only reason they don’t like getting involved in the circulation of tabu is because they want to live a selfish life . . . You help whoever is in need. That’s our way. Martin, you have to condemn this idea that people have to support their father and mother’s tubuan after they die, in your book. The tubuan has attendants like flight attendants. You have to pay these lazy buggers . . . We Adventists are getting rid of it. It’s rich man’s work, this stuff. We don’t say some customs are no good, just burdensome . . . I have to busy myself with my immediate family not the extended family, only occasionally with the extended family. I waste my time and get nothing in return. Some of them are realizing. Some of ToNgala’s line are running away from ToNgala and kastam . . . All the time he’s making them work hard to get tabu just for him. Who is he? Idi Amin? Your (white people’s) style is better. When you want to go and see your friends you don’t overload them all the time.

I

begin my analysis of the contradiction between family and other kinship obligations by highlighting the importance of the use of the concept of kastam to evaluate the extensions of customary behavior

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and belief in social life.1 These speeches show how attempts to live with that paradox of daily life, between local family and extended kin, is judged as a matter of custom. Both speakers are grassroots men in their middle age, living at the resettlement camp of Matupit–Sikut, discussing kastam. My main aim in this essay is to analyze the uses of the term that perhaps more than any other embodies the living paradoxes with which Tolai, of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea (PNG), 2 struggle on a daily basis: kastam. It is the term that perhaps more than any other exemplifies the ongoing social revolution that Tolai have been a part of for the past century. It is my argument that kastam very often marks an attempt to set the boundaries of reciprocal interdependence and obligation, and it is in this regard that the contradiction between family and other forms of kin is of central importance. Papua New Guineans today inhabit a world in which different kinds of kinship relations coexist, often in a relationship of great tension or even open conflict or contradiction. Kinship is still one of the main ways in which social relations and obligations are negotiated and contested, but kinship relations of one kind are often opposed to kinship relations of another. In this chapter I examine the contradiction between family and more extended kinship networks, in particular the clan. My argument is that people are faced with conflicting moral obligations between family and clan based social relations (whether to other members of their own clan or to other clans to whom they are related). In particular the extent to which the family based household should be seen as an independent selfsufficient unit or the extent to which it is seen as being constituted through ongoing relations of reciprocal interdependence with wider clan based kinship networks is a matter of great concern. The term kastam, I argue, often serves as an attempt to mark the appropriate boundaries of reciprocal obligation and interdependence versus nonreciprocal interdependence. The area around Rabaul has long been famous as one of the most “developed” regions of PNG, and the local Tolai people have long been viewed as a kind of indigenous elite, having been among the first Papua New Guineans to receive the missions, and extensive education, and being among the first to develop their own cash-cropping, to build permanent houses, and to forge politically strong anticolonial movements. The area differs from much of the rest of PNG in that ethnographies of the area have long concentrated on cultural change, as much as they have on cultural differences from Western societies (see Epstein, T.S. 1968, Epstein, A.L. 1969, Salisbury 1970). The situation has been complicated by the partial destruction of

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Rabaul and Matupit in a volcanic eruption in 1994, and the subsequent removal of much of Matupit’s population to the government resettlement camp in the bush, at Sikut. These drastic changes have lead to an intense questioning of the role of kastam in the process of rebuilding shattered lives and communities. My field notes are full of comments similar to those with which I open this chapter. One issue that arises starkly from these comments is the perceived contradiction between the “immediate family” and the “extended family.” On this occasion my Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) informant was using these terms to draw a commonly made distinction between one’s obligations to one’s family or household and one’s clan based obligations; whether to one’s own clan or to other clans to whom one was reciprocally obligated. The desire to look after one’s family first and foremost is often associated with the SDA. This desire is characterized by many of their practitioners as responsible, but is denigrated by many others as “selfish.” Tensions between the nuclear family and extended kinship networks based on the vunatarai (matrilineal clan) have a long history among the Tolai. My eldest informants told me that in their youth they had been told by old people that disputes over secret ritual knowledge between a ritual expert’s sons and his clan nephews were not uncommon. However Tolai have long and convincingly asserted that these tensions have been intensified by changes that have occurred in the course of East New Britain’s integration into a global commodity exchange economy. In particular a population explosion that eclipses any seen in other regions of PNG, and the introduction of permanent assets such as cash crops and modern houses are widely believed to have led to an increase in land disputes (see, e.g., Epstein, A.L. 1969: 148). The claim to kakalei (named pieces of land) is held by the matrilineal vunatarai. This claim however has not always best been understood as an example of exclusive “ownership” (110–37). A wide range of other claims are often expected to be recognized as part of ongoing cycles of reciprocal interdependence based on kinship. In particular it was usually expected that children of the clan (i.e., people whose fathers were members of the clan) would be allowed to use clan land even after their father’s death, provided that they were attentive to their customary obligations toward their father’s clan; in particular distributing large amounts of tabu (shell-wealth) at mortuary feasts for members of their father’s clan (see ibid., 135–7). Over the past century the situation has moved from one of land abundance in which these kind of interests were welcomed by the clan as keeping alive a kakalei that might otherwise fall into abeyance through lack of use to

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one in which attempts are increasingly made to limit the claims that children of the clan can make on clan land (see Epstein, T.S. 1968: 7, Martin 2006b: 39). In particular there is great suspicion when a man starts to build a permanent house, as the fear is that he will expect his children to be able to inherit it upon his death, thus establishing a permanent claim upon the land. He in turn will fear that his clan nephews will covet the investment that he has made on their land, and assert their clan’s kakalei, removing his children from the house that he has built, after his death. The same problem applies to cash crops such as cocoa or coconut trees that can live for over half a century and are still the major source of Tolai cash income. All Matupi could give examples of this kind of situation in which permanent investments on land that have arisen as a result of integration into a global cash economy have led to tensions in a relationship between a clan and its children that is ideally represented at customary ritual as one of ongoing mutual reciprocal interdependence. During the postwar period these tensions were often expressed at land dispute hearings (Epstein, A.L. 1969: 197–200). However in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption of 1994, land dispute hearings have trickled down at Matupit. As we shall see, there are other arenas in which these tensions are now often made visible. It is the example of the emerging indigenous elite, locally referred to as “Big Shots,” however, that provides the best illustrations of how the family versus clan contradiction embodies the contradictions of a global capitalist economy in East New Britain. The common complaint made between grassroots villagers that a man forgets his extended obligations to his own clan or his father’s clan by “selfishly” protecting the interests of his own family is repeated five times as often and with ten times as much force and venom behind the backs of Big Shots. If there is one figure at Matupit that embodies the distrust that many feel for Big Shots, it is ToNgala. ToNgala, like most Big Shots, no longer lives in Matupit, but as the owner of an East New Britain based business he has to remain in the area, and has lived in Rabaul Town for many years. This means that although not part of the give and take of everyday life that those Matupi living at Matupit and Sikut engage in, he has been able to remain involved in village politics and customary ritual to a greater extent than other Big Shots, and at the time of my arrival was the undisputed customary expert and ritual leader at Matupit. One afternoon, toward the end of my first year of fieldwork in East New Britain, I was walking to someone’s house in Sikut when I

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bumped into my informant who had criticized the SDA for their “selfishness.” He brought up a subject that many Matupi often raised with me; what he described as the “weakening” of the clans. The major problem, he felt, was that too many people were favoring their own families over clans, thus leading to splits and conflict. I already knew this individual to have good reason to see the world in this way. He had a large number of brothers and sisters, some of whom were more economically successful, having white collar jobs in government or private business. When I asked him to give an example however, I was not totally surprised to hear him mention the name of ToNgala. My informant told me that he had bumped into one of ToNgala’s clan nephews on the previous Friday, and that this nephew was saying that they were planning to break away from ToNgala’s apik or clan section3 as they were sick of having to do kastam with him while he favored his own children over them. I attempted to clarify what “breaking” from the apik meant, and I was told that it did not mean forming a new apik, but rather it meant that they would, “stand at the back,” withdrawing from all but the bare minimum of customary ritual clan obligations and look after their own business first. If land disputes no longer provide such a public arena for the expression of tension between different kinds of kin, then there is another arena that still does, and that is the performance of kin based ritual that is often described using the Tok Pisin word kastam. When I returned to Matupit around Christmas 2004 for a month-long visit, after having left the previous February, the event that had occurred during my absence that many people were most keen to tell me about was the raising of a new tubuan. The tubuan is the masked dancer of a male secret ritual society, and is the iconic emblem of Tolai kastam. Most tubuans are owned by individual apiks and often represent them at customary rituals, in particular, at mortuary feasts where they mark a relationship between the apik and that of the deceased. It was younger members of ToNgala’s apik who had raised the tubuan, in which, as one Matupi with knowledge of these things described it to me, ToNgala, “was on the outside looking in.” My informant who first alerted me to this situation told me that what had happened was the continuation of what we had talked about two years before; at first it was hidden, but now with this action it had burst out into the open. Everyone I spoke to on the issue agreed that this act marked a new stage in the expression of discontent with ToNgala among his own clan. “Now they have raised a new tubuan, when they previously stood under ToNgala’s tubuan.”

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I did not get the chance to question ToNgala directly about these issues. Everyone admitted that he had helped with the preparation of the event, and indeed his tubuan was one of the one’s that attended the event. I have no doubt that he would have presented this to me as an example of his good relations with his junior clan members and his desire to help them establish themselves in customary activities. For his grassroots critics, however, this was clearly something that he had done in order to avoid embarrassment. His nephews had provided so much assistance for him in terms of kastam in the past, it was argued, that it would have been impossible for him to refuse to help them now, even though he knew that the whole village would see it for the rejection that it was. As one grassroots Matupit man told me, “You already know Martin, they give help but help doesn’t come back.” It strikes me that this sentence encapsulates the difference in social perspective between grassroots Tolai and Big Shots. ToNgala’s sympathizers could have pointed to several instances of how he helped his relatives. As the Matupi wealthiest in tabu, he had undoubtedly helped his relatives on many occasions with tabu without which their involvement in kastam would have been impossible. However, as we shall see, the new political economy of tabu production and distribution makes the moral status of Big Shots’ tabu a subject of great controversy. The real issue is one of whether or not grassroots Tolai get adequate recompense for their assistance in the preparation of kastam. It is impossible to go into too many details concerning the preparation of customary ritual without making public the knowledge that many Tolai still consider should be taboo. It is possible, however, to say that “payment” for customary preparation has in general become a vexed issue among Tolai. I often heard from grassroots Tolai a feeling that Big Shots who were preparing kastam did not “straighten” them properly for their work of preparation. From the perspective of Big Shots, especially those who considered themselves experts in kastam, such complaints were by and large viewed as bogus and opportunistic. There was widespread agreement that there was a greater tendency today toward demanding direct payment for such work. To me this clearly fitted into a wider tendency to demand direct payment for work. For example in my research into how people had built houses at Sikut, although there were many examples of people giving and receiving assistance on the basis of informally contracted or kin based reciprocal relations, in most instances I was told that to get someone to help with chopping wood, or transporting materials or clearing bush that they would demand a cash payment. All of my informants

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contrasted this with the situation that would have prevailed forty years previously. With regard to kastam, again the interesting contrast was with New Ireland, where kastam was said to be similar to Tolai kastam, but still more “traditional.” I was often told that in New Ireland there was less direct demand for payment for help with kastam (see Martin 2006b). Big Shots in particular were keen to stress this point to me as an illustration of how grassroots’ Tolai had “forgotten” how kastam really worked, and saw it as an excuse to make money, or to “consume” and be “spoon fed.” From a grassroots perspective the situation of course looks a little different. As every Tolai would acknowledge, they are, more than almost any other ethnic group in PNG, a group that “lives by money.” To give up large amounts of time to pursue customary activities on behalf of one’s clan is to pass up on opportunities to improve one’s family’s financial position. Here it is the grassroots’ desire to protect their families’ interests that comes into conflict with the customary demands of clan. Even Big Shots themselves are capable of acknowledging this. So ToNgala, in the course of the same conversation in which he claimed that there was no tension within his clan could tell me that there had been a decline in the amount of work done “free” for the clan. In the past people had done work for the Big Men, but now, “people are worried about survival, and they need to think what comes back for me and my individual family.” He then volunteered the example of one of his nephews at Sikut, who was known to be one member of the new generation of customary experts among the Matupi. If I asked him about helping with kastam, he would say, “what about my cocoa,” because that’s where he gets his living. Thirty years ago we were doing nothing in the village. You were sitting on the beach. You might as well go and do kastam. It’s more difficult today.

Again we see how Matupi tend to explain changes in how they organize their own social relations in the light of wider political economic changes. In this quote, the condemnation of the grassroots is replaced with an argument that shows a degree of sympathy with their position. Possibly it is the geographical and social proximity to the grassroots that leads to ToNgala being one of the most distrusted of the Big Shots, that paradoxically leads him to be one of those who is most sympathetic to their position. Perhaps the most significant part of this statement is the contrast with the past that is drawn when ToNgala tells us that in the past people worked for the Big Men, whereas now they demand direct payment. As I have argued elsewhere

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(Martin 2006a), the traditional Tolai Big Man’s power was a result of his conscientious observance of and willingness to enforce customary obligations of reciprocal interdependence between his clan and other clans and between members of his own clan. If one wished to marry, obtain good land, or gain assistance in customary activities, then one had to have the support of Big Men who would be impressed by one’s willingness to play one’s part, perhaps by not shaming the clan by nonattendance when the clan needed to perform ritual to honor its reciprocal obligations to another clan. This is what I believe is meant by working for the Big Man rather than demanding immediate payment. Conversely the Big Man only became a Big Man if he was willing and able to organize such assistance for one who had proven himself worthy of it. T.S. Epstein (1968) describes a situation in which Big Men (here described as “elders”) and young men were part of a “system” of ongoing, “reciprocal obligations,” within the vunatarai, in which “the elder did provide for the needs of young men of his matrilineage while in return they worked for him and helped him cultivate his gardens” (84). Already by the early 1960s, however, T.S. Epstein reports that “some of the young men were getting dissatisfied with the system” (ibid.), and relates a “typical dispute,” in which a young man complained that after planting cocoa with the Big Man’s permission, he had begun pocketing the profits. The Big Man’s response was that he had supported the young man for several years in various ways. T.S. Epstein notes that the dispute “shows a breaking down of the traditional reciprocal obligations between elders and young men” (84–5). In this context increasing demands from the grassroots for direct payment for working kastam begin to become intelligible. So far I have described the word kastam as referring to a set of ritual practices that express and constitute ties of reciprocal interdependence, in which most Tolai are to a greater or lesser extent embedded. However, as we have seen, the moral valuation that is placed on kastam as a category can vary widely. In one of these the word is fairly unambiguously presented as something positive to be defended. This is the use that is closest to the one that readers of Melanesian ethnographies will be most familiar with, and is perhaps closest to the one that most Tolai would give if asked to describe what kastam meant. It is this meaning that my first informant is describing in contrast to the alleged Westernized greed of the SDA. Socially valued activities are frequently described as kastam. Often this refers to day-to-day patterns of respect, such as the ongoing reciprocal sharing of small items such as food, betel nut, cigarettes, and so on,

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although this kind of activity would also often be described as “pasin” (way, or lifestyle). Bigger ritual events that are often presented as being tied into this day-to-day reciprocity are nearly always described, with reference to the word kastam, in order to highlight their value, especially in contrast to the perceived corrosive effects of modernization on respectful social relations. The involvement of Big Shots in ritual is often dismissed as not being kastam, as they are accused of many sins, most notably “commercializing” kastam in general and the tubuan in particular. Some of these stories seem a little far-fetched. For example, ToNgala is alleged to have sold photographs of the tubuan to a “German internet company” for ten million Kina.4 On another occasion, I was told that he had sold the right to paint a picture of one of his tubuans to a Chinese owned supermarket in the nearby town of Kokopo. Again the story seemed unlikely, as dozens of Matupi visited the store every day and would instantly have noticed it. However the story served to illustrate a general and ongoing fear that the Big Shots used kastam for their own commercial advantage, and also served to illustrate their alleged hypocrisy. ToNgala often accused the grassroots of having abandoned the meaning and correct practice of kastam and saw it as his role as a customary leader to tell them so (see also Moran 2003: 295). But look at the hypocrisy, my informant demanded, adding that this is the same man who is firm about stopping men selling kastam to other people, (ToNgala was well known, in his capacity as a custodian of kastam, for having stopped outsiders, in particular Australian businesses, using tubuan images for commercial purposes, giving his alleged actions here an even greater ring of hypocrisy). It is perhaps no wonder that the Big Shots, who due to their financial power often have leading roles in the organization of customary ritual, are often distrusted when they attempt to enforce what they see as the correct decorum or rules for the conduct of kastam. Their attempts to enforce rules forbidding the selling of kastam are cast by many grassroots villagers as nothing more than a hypocritical attempt to preserve their monopoly on the ability to profit from kastam’s “commercialization.” However unlikely some of these stories may be, and however much they are disparaged by Big Shots and their supporters as “cargo cult” thinking, they have a resonance and a persistence that perhaps suggests that they deserve to be taken as seriously by anthropologists as the cargo cult stories of forty years ago, stories that were similarly denounced by the colonial masters of that time. Other more commonly told stories that seem to be more within the realm of possibility provide the context within which seemingly

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taller tales make more sense. In particular the often-repeated accusation that “customary” dances that were organized for the benefit of visiting Japanese tourists involved large profits for ToNgala who had set up the tourism company that organized the events, but that he gave the boys from the village nothing but a few uncooked bananas as payment. Such activities are denounced as not being kastam as they are organized for spurious reasons that are a cover for the real purposes of promoting tourism, making money, or as my previous informant put it, “selling kastam.” Real kastam of the kind that was supposedly organized by the real big men of before was only ever organized in response to the needs of village life; marking marriages or deaths or the relations between clans or other social groupings. Not just tourist dances organized for commercial profit, but even government organized cultural events (that were partly designed to promote tourism), such as the PNG Mask Festival, held annually in Rabaul, were attacked by some on this basis. One informant told me that You can’t just raise a tubuan. Tubuans have work pulling clans together, showing who is related to who when someone dies. In the past the real big men would never have allowed a tubuan to be raised just for tourists. They would have said if a tourist wants to see the tubuan, they have to wait until the time for the tubuan to do its work. But now they just raise the tubuan to make money so they can pay off their debt to the lousy World Bank.

By contrast one of the Big Shots heavily involved in kastam and the planning of the Mask Festival told me at a later interview that all the talk about commercializing kastam and the tubuan could not be true as he followed all the rules for preparing these events. People who criticized him on this score obviously did not know kastam. For him commercialization would have meant breaking the rules on raising tubuans or performing kastam—perhaps skipping the elaborate secret preparations that some customary events require and simply performing the eye-catching dances when the tourists arrive. For his critics, however, he and others like him had already broken an important “rule” by raising tubuans and performing kastam for an illegitimate and allegedly commercial reason. The desire to use kastam to make money, and the lack of attention to reciprocal village relations in and of themselves made these events not kastam but “commercial.” Even village based kastam is also open to the same criticism however. I remember the mortuary feast for a well-respected Big Man

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in a nearby Tolai village that many of the great and the good from the Tolai area and “expatriate” Tolai Big Shots, senior public servants, and the like, working and resident in the national capital of Port Moresby, had made the journey to attend. Afterward I sat talking with a Tolai friend of mine, who himself had been a senior Moresby public servant in the early 1970s in the last days of the colonial regime. He was extremely well educated with the very large English vocabulary that often marks former public servants of his generation. He described to me what had happened at the feast, in particular the rounds of distribution of customary shell-wealth (tabu) and the relationships, in particular the relationships between the dead man’s family and clan, and “children” of the clan (people whose father’s had been members of the dead man’s matrilineal clan), that it marked and cemented (see Simet 1991: 279–80). After his description of the relations that were acknowledged in the exchanges of the feast, he turned his attention to one of the Tolai politicians returned from Port Moresby for the feast. When he comes and throws around the tabu that he bought in Port Moresby, my informant told me, “it’s not kastam, it’s a fucking pastiche.” Rather than symbolizing, and most importantly, confirming and remaking, the careful attention to the ongoing day-to-day reciprocal obligations of village life and clan affairs by which previous generations of big men were described as having accumulated their stocks of tabu, the Big Shot’s distribution was merely a display of his financial wealth, perhaps having been bought in bulk from the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu where some people made a business out of selling shells in bulk to wealthy Tolai who could afford to fly to these places and buy shells by the case-load. As far as my informant was concerned, such a display could not be described as kastam.5 Likewise the Big Shot may have “bought” the customary knowledge that enables him to prepare these events with tabu, just as the previous generation of Big Men did; but whereas the tabu that they acquired in the village reflects the respect that they built up in the village, in the eyes of some, the Big Shot’s tabu reflects nothing but his “money-power,” leading to muttering about his involvement in kastam. The Big Shot attempts to defend his right to be considered customary against charges of commercialization by reference to the observation of customary rules that are removed from any moral evaluation of the extent to which their observance demonstrates attention to what the grassroots consider to be suitable displays of day-to-day reciprocity, beyond the observance of rules for the distribution of wealth at customary events. The attempt by Big Shots to claim customary legitimacy on the basis of

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adherence to codified rules that they have privileged access to is disputed by some as an attempt to escape moral accountability to the village. As one informant told me when I asked him to sum up the difference between the Big Men of today and before, “You had to be chosen by the community. You had to have the respect of the community. With ‘money-power,’ yu yet yu holim pawa (you hold the power yourself).” Events such as the one described earlier, unlike the dances organized for tourists, appear on the surface to fit the criteria for “real” kastam, being organized for legitimate customary reasons. But the involvement of Big Shots in them is still open to criticism from a grassroots perspective. Both the criticisms of the “tourist” events and the Big Shot involvement in real kastam have a common basis; that the activities of the Big Shots are not imbued with the reciprocal spirit that marks kastam as it is ideally described. The “fake” kastam of events such as the tourist dances were not part of the recognition of reciprocal obligations of the village, but instead were portrayed as a disembodied pastiche designed for commercial enrichment. The distribution of the fruits of these enterprises, with nearly all the profit going to the customary entrepreneur, also lead to the Big Shot being devalued in customary terms. Rather than make payments in a manner that acknowledged any ongoing reciprocal relations, with those young men who danced for him, he allegedly treated them, as one informant angrily put it, as “work boys” by paying them a simple (and allegedly low) wage from which he profited, as he treated kastam as a “business.” The phrase “work boy” (Tok Pisin, wokboi) has powerful connotations drawing on memories of the colonial era and the alleged heartlessness of colonial overseers who forced Melanesians to work like slaves on plantations in return for a pittance. This perspective is not universally held. Big Shots and their supporters among the village’s grassroots present things differently. The tourist dances can be presented as providing a valuable opportunity to “learn kastam.” One young man who had a marginal involvement in kastam, largely as a result of his distrust of the Big Shots, once described to me an argument that he had been involved in a couple of years previously. ToNgala had returned to the village one day to recruit young men to dance for a Japanese tour party that was soon to arrive in Rabaul. This young man told other young men that they were fools to get involved for the reasons already highlighted, that they would be “exploited” as he put it. They angrily responded that it was their only chance to learn kastam. Although my informant told me that subsequently many of them had come round to his way of

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thinking as the result of bitter experience, the ferocity of their initial response demonstrates how strongly they felt at the time that this was a transaction from which they stood to gain more than simply the “payment” on offer. But from the perspective of those who have a negative moral evaluation of these events and the Big Shot’s role in them, these customary performances are described as the commonplace opposite of kastam—they are business in which ongoing reciprocal obligation is allegedly not acknowledged, but instead fellow Matupi are demeaned as work boys paid off with a one-off wage. Another informant told me how arguments sometimes erupted when village men agreed to work for returning Big Shots preparing kastam. “Why should you want to be his laborer?” others will challenge them. I must once again stress that this vision of these events is not held by all; their social relevance is contested; but this perspective is widely held and the decision to withhold the description customary from these events provides a powerful moral critique of what is perceived to be an unpleasant social change. Likewise the Big Shots’ involvement in real kastam could still be denounced as non-customary for the same kind of reasons. The tabu that they distributed was not the result of ongoing reciprocal obligations, but a commodity that they bought with what one informant described to me as “money-power.” This informant told me that there wasn’t this kind of money-power before, and then went on to disparage Big Shots who came back to the village for kastam and gave out five bags of rice. People may not publicly voice their discontent; grassroots people find it hard to find the money to buy rice in postcolonial PNG, and not many people in that position are going to reject patronage. But they often describe the Big Shot’s gift differently from a smaller one given by someone with less money. The Big Shot’s gift shows nothing but their money-power my informant explained. Despite the fact that they show up to the village for kastam to distribute rice, as far as he was concerned, “They’re not involved in village life.” Because they gain their power from a cash economy rather than from the day-to-day reciprocal interdependence of village life, it is possible for them, whether by choice or by necessity, to isolate themselves from requests for day-to-day assistance in a manner that would have been impossible for a previous generation of village-based Big Men and this is seen here as the problem. The way that they often distributed gifts at customary events likewise betrayed in the eyes of some grassroots villagers a lack of understanding or concern for the recognition of the ongoing ties of reciprocal obligation between

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persons and clans that are supposed to underpin the customary ethic. Instead they allegedly ignore those whose reciprocal indebtedness they should acknowledge and instead give gifts that cement their relationship to others of similar high esteem. In all of these examples a negative moral judgment has been made that the Big Shots do not embody customary values, even when they are performing kastam. It is common to read in Melanesian ethnography of the ways in which kastam absorbs Western commodities and turns them into gifts of the kind by which Melanesians make explicit their reciprocal interdependence with each other (see, e.g., Strathern 1988: 81). Even a writer who places great emphasis on the importance of describing social change, such as Gregory (1997), largely adopts this schema. So, for example, in a discussion of ritual gift exchange depicted in the film The Trobriand Islanders, he does start by observing that [a]s one might expect, the chiefs have appropriated the symbols of commodity status and wealth . . . of importance today are the things that money can buy such as Benson and Hedges cigarettes, watches, cement for the graves of deceased chiefs, Toyota four-wheel drive vehicles, and so on. The borrowing and lending of money among chiefs has introduced a new element into their power game. (55)

However, his main point is this: “the crucial transformation of . . .” commodities (via intermediary stages) into gifts (56). This roundabout way of acquiring a gift keeps the alien world of commodities at bay, not by erecting a cordon sanitaire around the island, but by providing a means by which commodities can be domesticated and transformed into gifts (ibid.). However, what the examples that I have cited earlier suggest is that this description of events does not fit all situations in contemporary PNG equally well; in this instance the commodity origin of the tabu or the rice being distributed still shines through; hence the claims that its money-power origins make it non-customary. It is not the case that customary tabu is a commodity in these contexts (although tabu does function as a commodity at these events, where women sell crisps, ice-creams, betel-nut, and cigarettes for tabu at the end of the events, hoping to gain some of the tabu that has been distributed; see Bradley 1982: 110). But it is the case that the commodity origin of the tabu is often not forgotten and hence it is not worthy of the positive description of kastam. Elsewhere (Martin 2006b), I have discussed how Big Shots seek to “de-limit” kastam, and the ethic of reciprocal interdependence

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associated with it to the sphere of customary ritual, as part of their self-constitution as possessive individuals with no inherent obligations. Yet it is precisely this attempt that transforms their attempts at kastam in the eyes of many into pastiche. The gift that is given is partial by virtue of its delimitation of social life, rather than being the “total social phenomenon” in which “all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic” (Mauss 1970: 1). Its effect on emerging social and economic relations of inequality is certainly minimal. Hence the money that bought it as a commodity is still visible to many Matupi, even as it is exchanged as a gift. Rather than domesticating the commodity, in the eyes of many, the gift’s commodity origin and its delimitation turns it from a powerful total social phenomenon into a partial pastiche–gift. So far I have concentrated on the moral judgments made about Big Shots’ involvement in kastam, and the perspective on cultural change that the judgment that their involvement is in some way not customary reflects. However this is far from being the only attempt to make a moral judgment on cultural change by describing something as “not kastam.” Other groups are described as having “commercialized” kastam, for example. My informant who denounced the way in which the money-power of Big Shots devalued kastam described the habit of other ethnic groups in PNG, such as the Papuans who live around Port Moresby to charge customary bride-wealth payments of up to fifty thousand Kina in the following terms. I can’t see kastam in this . . . It’s not kastam. You sell—you feel like you’ve gone to a kind of a market . . . another man’s competing with you . . . it goes to the highest bidder . . . the highest bidder pays the “bride-price.” Another group wants to buy this woman, they try to outbid the other group.

He went on to describe how he had a Papuan friend who was the son of a politician, when he was living in Port Moresby. Because of his father’s supposed wealth, this friend was expected to pay thirty-five thousand Kina “bride-price” when he married.6 Again the same kind of contrasts are drawn as were drawn in the example of the tourist dances; in that case a contrast between kastam and business, and in this case between kastam and “a market.” In both cases kastam is clearly defined on the basis of the morality of exchange practices, with certain kinds of customary practices, be it traditional dances or the exchange of valuables at marriage being denied the positive evaluation of kastam as they have allegedly become “commercialized.”

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This example also illustrates the way in which kastam becomes a marker of group ethnic identity in postcolonial PNG, with my informant contrasting this habit of the Papuans with Tolai bride payments that, according to my informant, was “still customary,” as it was only shell-money, and maybe a little money. Just as kastam in general can be presented by Papua New Guineans as something that distinguishes them and marks their difference from “Westerners” (“our” custom that is based on sharing and respect, etc. is what distinguishes “us” from “you” with your lifestyles based on individualism, etc.), so it can in other contexts be presented as the thing that distinguishes one ethnic group of Papua New Guineans from another. Here the distinction is quite similar to the archetypal distinction between Melanesians and Westerners that is often marked with the word kastam. What this example also illustrates is the manner in which what is referred to by the word kastam is clearly context dependent. There is a seeming contradiction in the way this informant describes Tolai kastam. In one conversation it is positively morally evaluated, as still being kastam by virtue of the non-market ethic it embodies, by contrast to commoditized Papuan bride-price customs. Yet in other conversations, he dismisses it for precisely the same reason, as having been corrupted by the money-power of Big Shots. Yet these different perspectives only constitute an insurmountable contradiction if we imagine that kastam is a word with a fundamental meaning; a linguistic sign that references a single concept. But what is referenced by the word kastam is clearly context dependent. Instead of just being a word that refers to a certain set of practices or actions, kastam is often used as means of evaluating the morality of people’s actions (whether the speaker’s or others), and as such helps to form perspectives on social change. In particular it is used to form judgments regarding reciprocity and nonreciprocity. Is Tolai kastam kastam? That depends on what one is attempting to morally evaluate with the word kastam at any given time. By describing something as customary one is not necessarily assessing whether or not it fits within a list of certain practices that come under the heading of kastam in the Tok Pisin dictionary. Sometimes one is forming a moral judgment as to whether or not one judges it to still embody the requisite acknowledgment of customary reciprocity in an era of social change. So far I have concentrated on the ways in which kastam is presumed to be a positive evaluation, in particular by examining the contexts in which one can express moral disapproval of an action or sentiment by declaring it to be non-customary. I would like to briefly mention the

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ways in which kastam can also be given negative evaluations as part of the ways in which people form perspectives on social change. The most common of these is the argument that kastam is a large part of what holds PNG back. Expectations of sharing of material goods, and the performance of customary rituals, such as those outlined earlier, are derided as costly and wasteful remnants of the past that leave people unable to develop business or look after their own family properly. On general election day in June 2002, I spent time outside of the Matupit polling station chatting with people waiting for their turn to vote. One voter put clearly to me why he felt that the problems facing PNG in general and Matupit in particular could not be solved by politicians. “Lots of money goes on kastam . . . it’s expensive.” Lots of businesses failed as a result, he told me, pointing to the big ceremony that had been held at Matupit the previous year as an example. “Men don’t look after their own backyard, but they spend up to a thousand kina on kastam, even if they’ve got leaking roofs.” Here as in many of the idealized descriptions of the “true custom” of the Big Men of forty years ago, kastam is a thing of the past, but this time it is a hangover from an inferior past, counter-posed to a superior modern way of living, much as living without cannibalism is counter-posed to the previous state of “darkness.” One example of this is a story told to me by a senior member of the SDA Church at Matupit. He told me that as a young man, although the church tabooed nearly all customary ritual, in common with many church members he had a quite deep involvement with them in practice. As he became older, he claimed to have become increasingly aware of the wastefulness of kastam and its role in exacerbating the poverty of grassroots Papua New Guineans. In common with all Matupi senior enough to take a leading role in kastam, he kept a kind of ledger of accounts of customary “debts” (Tok Pisin, dinau) owed and due. If a person helps with a relative’s initiation or mortuary rituals, one is supposed to keep a record of this and wait for a suitable opportunity to repay the “debt,” which are most likely to be of food or tabu. Sometimes one may have to wait decades for a suitable opportunity to repay, but when one occurs the parties involved will normally recognize it as a suitable opportunity, and “repayment” will be expected. This person made a decision that he wanted to remove himself from these wasteful cycles of obligation. So one day, he collected all of his tabu and his ledger book and publicly went around the village “repaying” each customary debt that he was owed. He simultaneously told everyone who “owed” him that their debt was written off. Following this he gave all of his remaining tabu to a

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relative who was still involved in kastam, keeping back just a little for his son in case he needed tabu to buy a bride. He told me that this action “bought him out” of kastam, and clearly was not a customary act. And this view was shared by everyone else at Matupit who I discussed this story with. It was not a customary act as the timing of the repayments was inappropriate. To pay off his debts at the “wrong” time robbed them of the meaning that they would have if he had patiently waited to pay them at a time that publicly acknowledged the importance of his relationship to that person. By publicly making a point of his right to discharge his obligations at a time of his own choosing, he was asserting the ability to treat his obligations as a pure commodity debt, and therefore cutting himself out of ongoing ceremonial cycles, even while he simultaneously acknowledged that he had previously been enmeshed in them. For some people kastam is so intrinsically “corrupted” that at certain points they use it in a negative sense precisely because it is viewed as a central part of the inequalities that are viewed as being characteristic of social change. Sometimes kastam is described as being nothing more than a tool by which Big Shots use their financial power to assert control over the grassroots. During one Mask Festival, I pointed out to the senior SDA mentioned in the story earlier that a female German tourist had gone right up to the dancing tubuans to take photographs, something that was allegedly strictly taboo. The tubuan organizers who were very strict to enforce customary rules in other contexts did nothing. My Adventist informant was clearly angry, and responded by saying, “they can commercialize their kastam if they like, and that’s their business.” He had previously been very heavily involved in kastam, and it was clear to me that although his statement carried the explicit meaning that he had given up on kastam and he didn’t care what happened to it, it also expressed a great anger about the perceived abuse of kastam as well—in particular the feeling that customary rules could be broken for a few tourist dollars. And that anger clearly expressed a feeling that kastam had been corrupted. Although this criticism relies upon the understanding that kastam is ideally supposed to be non-commercial, this informant seems to go further than other critiques of the alleged “commercialization” of kastam, claiming that it is nothing to do with him, that he has no interest in claiming it. Although based on the same moral criticism of Big Shots as that of other people who denounce the commercialization of kastam, rather than engage in a battle over the tenure of the word, his rhetorical strategy is different. He cedes tenure to them (“they can commercialize their custom”) in the hope that by doing so

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he can make explicit the fact that it is owned by them and therefore does not embody the ethic of reciprocity that underpins its positive evaluations. Rather than contest the Big Shots’ right to claim the reciprocal ethic underpinning kastam, he instead aims to expose how kastam had been tainted by their ownership, in his view to the point where it was inherently a negative value. This is backed up by the number of other occasions that this informant told me that kastam was a “con,” or a “trick,” a way by which Big Shots got the grassroots to work for them. These different tactics of dealing with kastam as a positively valued trait, either contesting the right of the elite to use it, or claiming that their ownership of it makes it inherently hypocritical, may seem contradictory on the surface. Yet we are familiar with a similar shifting of orientations toward key terms in political debates in Western societies. We would not find it hard to understand that radical critics of capitalist society may reject the concept of “democracy” as being fundamentally bourgeois as they would see it as being based on a separation of the people from the state, but that those same critics could also denounce the bourgeois state for being “undemocratic” on occasion, that is, for proving itself unable to even live up to its own limited ideals. The strategic use that one makes of the concept of democracy depends upon the context of one’s utterance, on who one is addressing, and the issues being discussed. It is this that gives democracy its meaning as a “construct between socially organized persons in the process of their interaction . . . conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction” (Volosinov 1973: 21). The same applies to the different meanings that kastam acquires in the interrelationship between speaker and listener at Matupit. My aim in this chapter has been to present a short ethnographic description of some of the ways in which the word kastam is used at Matupit today. As a marker of adherence to reciprocity, as we have seen, kastam has no single meaning. And this should be no surprise. There is no consensus as to the appropriate limits of reciprocity at Matupit today, so we should not expect consensus as to the remit of words that refer to that ethic. So many disputes and arguments turn, not on whether or not reciprocity is a positive value, but on the appropriate limits of reciprocity—at what point should one cease to acknowledge the interlocking obligations of oneself or one’s group to others to whom one is socially related? The fraught relationship between a man’s children and his nephews, or put another way the fraught relationship between family and clan, is an oft-repeated example. Likewise the

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working through of the moral dilemma of how much do the Big Shots owe the grassroots, how much of their obligations are discharged, and their relationships offset by what can be dismissed as wage-labor payments is also a process by which social change arises. In both these cases, and others, the word kastam becomes central to the positions that people hold and to the eventual resolution of disputes. Sometimes kastam is presented in self-essentializing terms as the marker of a Tolai or Melanesian identity based on reciprocity that is opposed to the nonreciprocity of whites in a manner that will be immediately familiar to the student of Melanesian ethnography (see, e.g., Thomas 1992: 75–6). Both of my informants with whose views I opened this chapter present this perspective; although they differ radically with regard to which form of sociality is the most desirable. However, more often than not, rather than simply being a positive reference to a reciprocal ethic, appeals to kastam are better seen as a means by which people attempt to fix the appropriate limits of reciprocity, or attempt to fix the points and contexts at which ongoing relations need to be acknowledged or not. It reflects and constitutes differences of opinion with regard to the appropriate limits of reciprocity between grassroots Tolai, as much as it does the emerging social cleavage between the grassroots and the Big Shots. So, for example, our kastam says that we have to help the children of the clan with this or that ritual performance, but we are not obliged to recognize demands for royalties we get from the government for use of clan land. I have fulfilled my customary obligations by going through secret preparations for a dance in the bush (and by implication what I do with my money is not an issue), or conversely that dance is not kastam because it was done with the intention of making money (that will not be shared with the rest of us). I have to largely ignore demands of my kin on my business to keep it afloat, but I am still respectful of kastam, as I give more than most to sponsor ritually important feasts. His involvement in kastam is a fake as it is based on his money-power and he ignores our needs as kin in other contexts. It should be clear that family versus “extended family/clan” is not the only basis upon which attempts can be made to draw a limit to claims that can be made on the basis of reciprocal interdependence. Elsewhere (Martin 2006a, e.g.), I have described how the tendency of clans to describe their kakelei as making them “landholders,” diminishing inclusive interests to the land from others such as children of the clan, can be seen as part of a process by which the clan attempts to present itself as a corporate individual whose capacity of ownership is inherent and not reliant upon ongoing reciprocal relations with others. The family

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versus clan contradiction is however the most powerful and commonly commented upon living paradox for Tolai today. Even the SDA member that I quote at the start of this piece acknowledges that he is concerned “occasionally [with] the extended family.” At one point in the discussion cited earlier, he described how he had turned down the request of one nephew to help with kastam, telling me that “lots of people come and ask me for tabu and I say no. I’m self reliant, a one man army.” At a later point, however, he told me that Sooner or later I will bring food straight to ToBenjamin. It’s a bridge over troubled waters. I will explain to him that this is for you and your family. They need to keep an eye on our relationship as they are our father’s nephews. We are tied together.

Likewise, my more kastam-oriented informant was at many times dismissive of those that he felt pushed inclusive claims based on reciprocal interdependence too far in certain contexts. My SDA informant tended to associate kastam with overly inclusive claims and thus liked to present those moments when he did acknowledge them as not being kastam, instead carefully explaining that the assistance was for the family and delaying it so that it was not clearly linked to customary demands. My customary informant pursues a different tactic, rejecting overly inclusive claims on the basis of reciprocal interdependence as being just as non-customary as exclusive claims based upon nonreciprocal independence. Although kastam is rhetorically based upon an ethic of reciprocity, it is actually the measure of what a speaker thinks that he or she can assert as being the appropriate bounds of reciprocity in any given context. As such both kastam and its axiomatic opposite, non-kastam, vary in different social contexts. Both of these informants use the word kastam, whether positively or negatively, as a yardstick by which the bounds of appropriate reciprocal obligations can be measured and hopefully maintained. Neither (of course) totally accept or reject demands based upon reciprocal interdependence in every context, but they do accept and reject them in very different contexts from each other, and their different uses of the word kastam reflect and express those differences. This moral dilemma of where to place the limits of reciprocity is far from being a uniquely Melanesian one. As Mauss (1970: 63–82) recognized it is perhaps the most pressing dilemma for “modern” societies. And it is in this sense that kastam is best understood as a modern Melanesian concept. For as Mauss also recognized such a

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dilemma is far from being a uniquely modern dilemma either. Mauss’s discussion of Malinowski’s description of the distinction between kula and gimwali carries many echoes of the distinction that one of my informants drew between kastam and a market. According to Mauss’s reading, kula is distinguished from the straightforward exchange of useful goods known as the gimwali . . . which . . . is distinguished by most tenacious bargaining on both sides, a procedure unworthy of the kula. It is said of the individual who does not behave in his kula with proper magnanimity that he is conducting it “as a gimwali.” (20)

This little passage reveals a lot. It reveals that the contestability of the status of customary exchanges is not new; just as my informants accuse those who claim to be conducting kastam of conducting a market or a business, so Malinowski’s informants accused those who claimed to be conducting kula of actually conducting gimwali. Many transactions cannot be unambiguously categorized; kastam/business, kula/gimwali (or indeed gift/commodity), but instead the different uses of such terms by those with different social interests to describe the same transaction reveals those divergent interests. It also reveals the necessity of such concepts to any analysis of the transactions that make up social life, be those analyses academic or indigenous. Even if these oppositions do not always neatly, empirically, and unproblematically describe every kind of transaction, they are essential to the ways in which people involved in them take positions on them, and in the course of doing so lay the ground for future transactions. In both examples a commonplace opposition is set up between two kinds of exchange practice based on (but not simply reducible to) an axiomatic contradiction between the reciprocal interdependence of gift exchange, and the nonreciprocal independence of market or “straightforward . . . useful” exchange. To acknowledge that drawing the appropriate boundaries around exclusive claims based on nonreciprocal independence and inclusive claims based upon reciprocal interdependence has perhaps always been a moral dilemma across time and geographical location is not to deny social change. Far from it; it is to draw attention to one of the main ways in which that change is constituted and expressed. The kinds of moral dilemmas around the appropriate boundaries of reciprocity expressed by the commonplace contradiction between kula and gimwali in a world of chiefs and canoe trading expeditions are very different from those expressed by the commonplace contradiction

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between kastam and business in the world of tabu bought by Big Shots with money when they fly to Vanuatu. And that contradiction, in its turn, is very different from some of the other contradictions expressed by uses of the word kastam in other contexts, even if these too are often related to an axiomatic contradiction between reciprocity and nonreciprocity. As kastam’s different uses are part of the process by which the appropriate limits for reciprocity are morally debated and settled in different contexts, those different uses simultaneously act as an index of where those limits are being drawn. It is both a marker and a maker of cultural change, or as Volosinov (1973: 19) describes the evolving meaning of words, “the most sensitive index of social changes.” It is in this sense, as a means by which Melanesians draw and redraw the boundaries of reciprocity in response to an ever-changing world, that kastam can be understood as being a cultural phenomenon that “continues in relation to and frequently in opposition to the claims of [the] world system” (Jolly 1994: 10). The different changing accents carried by words such as kastam act as one of the best markers we have of the ways in which Matupi themselves form moral perspectives on these changes and in doing so themselves become part of the processes by which such changes are made.

Notes 1. I am not offering a definition of kastam at this point because the purpose of this essay is to describe the ways in which it is precisely the lack of agreed definition of the term, and contests over its meaning, that give it its social power. 2. I conducted fieldwork primarily at the village of Matupit and also at the government-sponsored resettlement camp of Matupit–Sikut between February 2002 and February 2004 with an additional one month follow-up visit made at the end of 2004. I would like to acknowledge assistance from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC Research Studentship R42200134324), and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant Number 6860) as well as financial assistance from the Friends of the Mandeville Special Collection at the University of California at San Diego Library for visits to their archived material, and an additional Overseas University Visit grant for this purpose also made by the ESRC. I would also like to thank the Royal Anthropological Institute for granting a Sutasoma Award to assist with writing up of my research. 3. Small sections of vunatarai are also referred to as vunatarai, but are sometimes described as apik or apiktarai when it is necessary to distinguish them from the larger group. See Epstein, A.L. (1969: 321).

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4. At the time of my fieldwork 1 PNG Kina was worth 0.15–0.2 GB Pound Sterling. 5. See Martin (2006a), and also Eves (2000), for a discussion of similar denigration of “store-bought” customary shell-wealth from nearby New Ireland. 6. The term “bride-price” being the term used by this and most other of my Tolai informants.

Bibliography Bradley, S. C. 1982. Tolai Women and Development. PhD thesis. London: University College London. Epstein, Arnold, Leonard (Bill). 1969. Matupit: Land, Politics and Change among the Tolai of New Britain. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Epstein, Trude, Scarlett. 1968. Capitalism, Primitive and Modern: Some Aspects of Tolai Economic Growth. Canberra: Australian National University Press Eves, Richard. 2000. “Sorcery’s the Curse: Modernity, Envy and the Flow of Sociality in a Melanesian Society.” JRAI, Vol. 6, No. 3, 453–68. Gregory, Christopher. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood. Jolly, Margaret. 1994. Women of the Place: Kastam, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers. Martin, Keir. 2006a. “A Fish-Trap for Custom: How Nets Work at Matupit.” Paideuma, Vol. 52, 73–90. ———. 2006b. “After the Volcano: Land, Kastam and Conflict in East New Britain.” PhD thesis. University of Manchester. Mauss, Marcel. 1970 [1925]. The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton and Company. Moran, Michael. 2003. Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. London: HarperCollins. Salisbury, Richard. 1970. Vunamami: Economic Transformation in a Traditional Society. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Simet, Jacob. 1991. Tabu: Analysis of a Tolai Ritual Object. PhD thesis. Canberra. Australian National University. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 1992. “Substantivization and Anthropological Discourse: The Transformation of Practices into Institutions in Neotraditional Pacific Societies.” In History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology, edited by J. Carrier. Berkeley: University of California Press. Volosinov, Valentin. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press.

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C or ru p t ion: I nsigh t s i n t o C om b at i ng C or ru p t ion i n Ru r a l D e v e l opm e n t

Alpa Shah

I

nternational development and aid agencies see corruption as an obstacle to development: the corrupt actor is an economic man, usually with dubious moralities, who misuses state resources, meant for the collective good, for his private economic gain. This chapter is about the complex moral economy regulating “corrupt” practices surrounding state-based welfare provision in rural Jharkhand, Eastern India. It argues that we need to understand how people talk about such practices in their own terms as economic action is underpinned by moral reasoning, situated within a particular normative context, and not necessarily matched by the standards of financial utility that have become prevalent with the spread of the neoliberal state. In rural Jharkhand, while the state is an abstract idea, it is also widely acknowledged to be formed by the personal agency of those that make it and shape it. As such the moral set up of everyday life in rural Jharkhand does not always agree with official norms. State development schemes are often thought to be inappropriate for the rural areas and targeting the “wrong” beneficiaries. A local discourse on rules and norms in implementing development construction schemes is prevalent in which monetary aspects of corrupt activities may be eclipsed by a whole range of other motivations, expressed as moral reasons for engaging in those activities. Anthropologists, with their focus on situating events and actions in wider social processes, are well equipped to make a critical analysis

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of the subject of corruption in a way that is difficult for those who are constrained by narrower methodological disciplinary remits. Some of the most insightful anthropological commentary on corruption has, in fact, emerged from research that can be called a kind of “accidental anthropology”1—research that did not intentionally focus on corruption but came across a discourse on corruption, or an evaluation of moral actions some would call corrupt, in a wider ethnographic framework.2 This research has enabled a move away from treating corruption as a theme of moral denunciation, and has promoted an interest in corruption that is parallel to that of other research objects: it has enabled an analysis of how so-called corrupt practices are embedded in wider social logics that give them legitimacy and anchor them in everyday practices.3 In an international development context where transparency, accountability, and combating corruption have become catch-phrases of neoliberal globalization, tools with which the market economy reaches the world, these ethnographic contributions are particularly important to question what have, in some circles, become received wisdoms about corruption. In fact, as recent anthropological studies suggest, the recent fashion for buzzwords such as “transparency” actually signal a phase of modernity that conceals far more than it reveals, generating the very opacities of power that it claims to obviate.4 The grounded field level data and analysis of anthropologists can contribute to demystifying some of the myths that surround the issue of corruption. One common definition of corruption in international development is that corruption is some form of misuse of public office, resources, or power for private gain.5 Corrupt people hinder the developing economy because they use public resources for goals for which they were not officially meant, for their personal gain. There is a moral dimension to this argument—the aim is to work for the common good and needs without diversion from that end. When people use public resources to satisfy a number of personal interests, rather than the collective social good of development, corruption is thought to spread. The corrupt actor is thus portrayed as a rational economic man, usually with dubious moralities, misusing state resources meant for the collective good by expropriating them for his private economic gain. While seductive, this perspective is highly problematic because it glosses over a complex relationship between economy and morality. In this chapter I take lessons from historical, anthropological, and political science analyses that have emphasized that the lives of ordinary people in many places illuminate the fact that their economic

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actions are defined by moral reasoning and not just financial utility. In “Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” E.P. Thompson (1971), for instance, argued that these popular protests were not just a consequence of hungry “mobs” reacting to soaring prices and malpractice among dealers. In fact, the protests were a response to the introduction of market practices of laissez-faire capitalism that violated the popular normative framework of what constituted legitimate and illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking: “the moral economy of the poor.” Moreover, these social norms and obligations (the moral economy) were, until the introduction of market practices, supported by the paternalist traditions of the authorities. James Scott (1979) developed this concept in “Moral Economy of the Peasant” where he showed that the subsistence ethic of the precapitalist agrarian order (especially in Southeast Asia) was experienced as a pattern of moral rights or expectations. In this normative context, the concerns were not maximum returns or profits for particular villagers but a series of social arrangements to assure a minimum income to all inhabitants. These practices in fact acted as a form of social insurance system for the poor. So while the desire for subsistence security grew out of peasant economics, it was socially experienced as a pattern of moral rights and expectations. Economic actions, in these instances, are defined by a moral economy of rights and expectations that, though they may be rooted in economic practices and social exchanges, are not just determined by financial utility. In the South Asian case, as Olivier de Sardan (1999) has argued in the case of Africa, this moral economy perspective can be particularly illuminating in the debates around corruption. In this chapter, I focus on ethnographic fieldwork carried out around the Block Development Office of the Ministry of Rural Development in Bero Block, Jharkhand, to desegregate some of the international development discourse on combating corruption. I do this by exploring the relationship among economic action, moral reasoning, and the state. Jharkhand gained independence from Bihar within the federal Indian union in 2000. Having given India the status of the seventy-second most corrupt nation in the world, Transparency International (2005), the leading global nongovernmental organization devoted to combating corruption, has defined Bihar as the most corrupt state in India with Jharkhand not far behind. Like most anthropologists writing about corruption, I did not set out to research corruption. Some of the data that emerged from my wider research around understandings of the state in rural Jharkhand led me to reflect on the international discourse on

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corruption. The main point I make is that defining corruption as underpinned by economic action tells one little about the nuances of moral reasoning and debates about legitimacy attached to these practices at the local level.

The Plans for Road Development Let us turn to one day in January 2001 in the village of Tapu, where I was based between November 2000 and June 2002.6 Tapu is in Eastern India, in the Jharkhand region, known to be one of the poorest states in the country. In Tapu, everyone lives in mud houses, without sanitation facilities, running water, or electricity. I was speaking to a Yadav caste descendant of the ex-landlords of the village who make up about 20 percent of the village population and form the rural elite in the area. Generally of higher caste (and locally called sadans in order to differentiate them from the Scheduled Tribe or adivasi majority7), these elites once derived their relative wealth and status (with respect to the lower caste and adivasi tenant families who make up 80 percent of the rural population in the area) from their control over land. With the abolition of the landlord system in the early 1950s, these rural elite have been struggling to keep their local dominance through resources from the state (through jobs or government contracts). “But how are you going to save ten thousand Rupees building that road?” I asked Dharmesh as I gave him some tea in a tall steel glass and settled down opposite him on my mud floor. I had invited him over when I had bumped into him on the trail that connected the main village of Tapu to the hamlet by the river. He had been dripping sweat over his pick axe as he worked alongside the adivasi laborers he had recruited from the village in order to turn the trail into a mud road. The road was one of the rural development schemes of the Indian Ministry of Development. The scheme was being implemented in the area via the Ministry’s most localized office, the Block Development Office, which was responsible for the surrounding 114 villages. Dharmesh had been chosen as the village-level contractor. Before Dharmesh could reply, I added, “It seems to me that your cousins Neel and Anand have been rather clever with this scheme. They knew they could not get chosen as contractors this time since the rest of you (the sadans of Tapu) would create a big commotion if they continued reaping the benefits of state resources. So instead they put forward a condition that none of you

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could argue against—the contractor had to give ten thousand Rupees to build the Hanuman temple. Together with all the bribes and percentages you will have to give the Block Office staff, how are you meant to make a personal saving under such conditions? It’s hardly surprising, don’t you think, that, unlike all the other schemes, nobody else in the village volunteered to be the contractor for this one?”

“You watch me,” said Dharmesh, “I have my eye on that Honda motor bike.” Although there was only one motorbike in the village, I knew that all the young men from the landlord descendents aspired to buy one. “I’ll make the money with ease,” continued Dharmesh. “First, there is the usual saving on labour costs. I’ll give the adivasis who are working as manual labour Rs 50 a day instead of the government rate of Rs 51.50. And, of course, they will all sign, with a thumb print, that they have worked three weeks when in fact I will only pay them their due for the one week they will have worked.”

I wasn’t convinced. Dharmesh, who couldn’t have been more than thirty, was quite a straightforward young man, not quite the cunning, plotting, and scheming type like some of the others; but he clearly wanted to show off. I persisted. “But how much money will you save from such small measures? You’re clearly struggling otherwise you wouldn’t have to work as manual labour on your own road.” “The real savings will come from the three culverts. On the official plans they’ve estimated these at thirty-three thousand Rupees, but all I’ll need to buy them is sixteen thousand Rupees. And then there is the mud. The estimate says ten trucks. I’m going to use seven, and of the lower quality.” “What if the supervisor comes to check what’s really been going on?” “But they never do. They’re far more interested in making sure I give them their dues. And, on the unlikely off-chance that the Block Officers come to the village, I’ll just give them a few rupees to keep their traps shut.”

“So how did you learn about how to save money, deal with the Block Office, negotiate with the Officers and give them their percentages?” I asked, knowing that the implementation of any Block Office construction scheme was a highly skilled affair because of the mediation of system of “percentages,” or “pcs,” that were a routine

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procedure. The contractor had to give a series of percentages to the Block Officers to release the money for construction. For example, in the technical wing of the project, the junior engineer could take 10 percent, assistant engineer 3 percent, executive engineer 1.5 percent. In the administrative wing of the project, the block development officer could take 5 percent, the supervisor 3 percent, the head clerk 3 percent, the cashier 2 percent, and the assistant clerk 1.5 percent.8 If the scheme could be done at lower prices, the cuts could be higher. Altogether, approximately 30 percent of the scheme money went to the Block staff.9 I continued, “It’s clearly not easy to know how to deal with the officers. These things have to be learned. It seems that Shiv has learnt from the MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) Vishwanath Bhagat and his workers and Neel has learnt from the NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) worker who stayed in their house for a couple of years. What about you?”

“To me it comes naturally. I’m cleverer and better than all of them,” said Dharmesh boastfully. On hearing some shuffling, we turned our heads to the wooden doorway. Rajan was standing there with a beautiful red-breasted blue-headed cockerel on his left arm. With his right hand he was gently stroking the bird’s arched neck. He looked a splendid sight in his spotless white vest and crisp green longyi (wrap-around cloth) that stretched right down to his ankles. With a hint of mischief in his voice, Dharmesh asked Rajan, “How’s the training going?” He was making fun of his elder cousin who loved rearing cockerels for the cock fights in Bero bazaar. Rajan ignored him and in his characteristically relaxed manner, with his head poised to one side and his weight on one foot, said, “Your mother’s been looking for you everywhere. You’ve got to go and tie your cattle up when my brother brings them back from the forest. Come on, go and do your duties.” Dharmesh left and I went out to admire Rajan’s cockerel. A much more serious and reserved character, Rajan looked down with disdain at his younger cousin’s happy-go-lucky attitude. He did not approve of Dharmesh’s latest flirtings with the Block Development Office, which he saw as “dirty.” He had been applying for state jobs for the last five years in the hope that he could follow in his father’s footsteps and become a clerk. His lack of success, and his lack of desire to try out the alternative route to making a living through mediating

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development funds, had made him slightly bitter in his attitude toward some of the other young sadan men. Neel and Shiv were walking past and seeing Rajan and me, they walked toward us. As they joined us, Rajan asked me, “Has Dharmesh been bothering you again? Has he been boasting to you about his road contract?” “He is quite foolish,” interrupted Neel. “We were very willing to help. After all we are far more experienced than he is, but he refused to take any advice from us. He insisted on doing it all by himself.” “The problem is his pride,” reflected Shiv. “He could have made a lot of money on the road. But now, together with the fact that he has to contribute to the village temple, it looks like he will have to put in money from his own pocket into the road!” Almost exactly a year later, I found myself standing at the end of the road with Dharmesh, looking at adivasi laborers unearthing sal saplings that were growing through the mud. Apparently there was a new project to construct a new road going from the main village to the riverside hamlet. It was to be built along exactly the same route as the one Dharmesh had built the year before! Not many people in the village knew much about it—apart from the fact that they could work on it as laborers. This time the scheme had come through a Member of Legislative Assembly development fund and the contractors were from Bero. The debates over contractorship had taken place at the regional, Bero level, where many of the landlord descendants from neighboring villages have moved to live, rather than among the landlord descendants within the village.“Well,” sighed Dharmesh, “At least this time there is no bad feeling in the village over who gets to be the contractor. I’ll find some other way to buy that motor bike.” When I came back to live in Tapu and as I got to know people like Dharmesh, Neel, and Shiv, I slowly began to understand the roots of my discomfort with the World Bank perspective on corruption. If viewed with the “combat corruption” attitude, these young people, struggling to rise up the social hierarchy, would essentially become amoral, profit-seeking, money-maximizing, private-gain-pursuing individuals. But from their point of view, there is a much more complex relationship between economy and morality. The young people I knew valued some relationships differently than others, and acted toward friends, relatives, and workmates according to the values that underpinned those relations. They did not think they engaged in corrupt practices when they met obligations to specific relations, and certainly did not indulge their immediate and extended family and friends for private gain.

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Morality and Corruption One of the first things that struck me about Dharmesh seeking to make cuts on his culverts, his labor costs, and the poorer quality mud was that all the other young men of his caste expected him to do so. The issue, for Neel and Shiv, for example, was not that he would make the cuts but whether he could do it well enough to take the savings he expected as a contractor. One might wonder that perhaps these sadan men did not know that such pocketing of money from development schemes was illegal. While both the rural elites and sometimes the local officers were often uncertain about the precise boundaries between legal and illegal actions, in the case of cuts from Block Development schemes the situation was different. It is indeed, quite common, as Veena Das (2007) suggests of her informants in Sultanpuri, Delhi, for the distinctions between the legal and the illegal to be very blurred. In Jharkhand, money earned from the savings, do number paisa, or money of a second order (i.e., distinct from ek, or first-number work and money from, for instance, farming or hard manual labor) was thought to involve illegal activity, do number kam. The point is that for them illegality did not equate to immorality. In fact, as Olivia Harris (1996) has discussed, laws often put people in moral predicaments by the fact that they forbid, even criminalize, actions that the people concerned consider acceptable or even desirable within their own moral code. In the Bero area, illegal activity was legitimized through a moral discourse about the state that showed a general lack of commitment to the state as it manifests itself in rural Jharkhand.10 In rural Jharkhand, the state is thought to be incapable of fulfilling the promises of a servant of the people, the guarantor of a certain social order, and a power above partial interests. It is recognized to be administered by people who have their own personal agendas and whose idea of what constitutes the common good may be very different from the desires and needs of local people.11 Moreover, engaging in illegal practices is legitimized in rural Jharkhand because most development schemes are seen to be inappropriate for the rural areas given that they are designed by New Delhi officials who know little about local conditions. For instance, why would a village in rural Jharkhand need a community hall for village meetings? Or more problematically, why should development schemes target the poorest adivasis who are considered by the sadans as too jangli too wild and savage, to care about or know what to do with state development schemes? In fact, many members of these rural elites actually

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legitimized their activities arguing that they were in fact reappropriating state resources for more useful purposes. In doing so, they even called themselves sevaks or “social workers” to outsiders. Of course, as Adrian Mayer (1981) has shown in his fascinating analysis of sevaks in Central India, “true seva [the work that sevaks do] was that which was done in secret [and therefore] people who do selfless service were by definition not publicly known.”12 The second thing that struck me about Dharmesh’s experience of the road contract was that engaging in “corrupt practices” did not preclude intense moral debate among the rural elites around these activities. Even if the projects themselves were often considered of little importance, highly morally charged discussions regulated the choice of contractor, why a particular person was chosen, and how the contractor’s cut ought to be spent. For instance, while landlord descendants such as Neel saw contractorship as their hereditary right, other men wanting to join these elite networks took the more democratic approach that all educated young men should have the opportunity to be a contractor. Faced with this rising conflict over contractorship, Neel and his family used Dharmesh’s road contract to introduce in a new politics of redistribution whereby contractors of Block Development Schemes had to contribute to the “betterment” of the village by purifying “do number” money into “ek number” sums. In Dharmesh’s case this meant helping to build the Hanuman Temple they had begun to erect in the middle of the village. This was a moral cause that no contractor could argue against. More generally in the area, as the number of potential village contractors rose, there was an increasing trend toward competitors condemning each other for using public money for individual ends. As a result, competing village elites have started to pressurize contractors to diverting their cuts from individual to collective causes. Most commonly these have been demands for donations for the collective village cause of religious celebrations. This has been the case in other parts of India too. David Mosse reports that, in Tamil Nadu, income from tank-fish and trees, controlled by village contractor–leaders, are mostly accounted for by spending on temples and hardly ever on tank repair or other public goods. Indeed, as Mosse also argues, it is now common to hear contractors complaining that “between the demands of state officials and those of (particular) villagers, there is no longer a livelihood from contracting.”13 In Jharkhand, increasingly, a new moral discourse around money siphoned off from construction contracts has emerged that, in many ways, appears to mirror the relationship between shortterm and long-term exchanges as described by the anthropologists

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Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (1989). Wealth acquired from potentially individualistic short-term exchanges of do number kam can be converted into the long-term transactional or cosmic order of religious capital. A third important issue is that the many practices involved in the informal economy of state resources were not equally condemned. For instance, the giving and taking of chai-pani (literally meaning tea-water),14 the pagdi (the bribe), and the pc or percentage15 were all differently morally evaluated. Gift-giving was regarded as the least reprehensible activity: not only was it a part of a broader social system of maintaining relations between people, but it was also considered a transaction that was willingly engaged in. The bribe, on the other hand, was sometimes enacted with resentment as it was not only rarely given voluntarily but also because its negotiability engendered feelings of unethical practice, especially if one had to give more than others. The least morally reprehensible were the commissions or the pcs. This is because they were fixed: they involved the contractor giving a nonnegotiable percentage of the value of a development scheme to different officers involved in the implementation of that scheme. Indeed, it was in the logic of treating pcs as the norm that acts deviating from what was considered normal, or “fair,” were deemed morally wrong. For example, if an officer tried to take more than his or her allocated percentage, he or she would most likely be regarded as greedy. Yet if an officer did not take his allocated percentage he or she may be regarded with respect, not because he or she was acting legally, but because people who are not greedy were usually praised. In a similar vein, a contractor trying to get away without paying the commission would be considered immoral as would those who tried to escape payment due to having caste or kinship relations with the officer concerned. Morality, in the discourse of corruption, was often judged in the context of values such as caste, negotiability, gift-giving, hierarchy, and greediness. My point is that Dharmesh, Neel, and Shiv were not morally dubious characters but were acting within locally established norms that did not correspond to the rule of law, which were evolving, and against which deviations were evaluated as corrupt and immoral.

The Multiple Reasons for Engaging in the Informal Economy of the State So what were their motivations for engaging in the informal economy of the state? The World Bank perspective would have it that corrupt

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actors are rational economic individuals maximizing personal gain. Since the abolition of zamindari in the 1950s direct and indirect state benefits have been a central means through which many landlord descendants have attempted to maintain their wealth and patronage status. However, while the objective may be to obtain material benefits, being a contractor is not solely about financial gain. Dharmesh, for instance, hoped to buy at least a motorbike from the cuts he made on the road, but he was rather unsuccessful. However, controlling a bright shiny machine with a revving engine was only part of the attraction of gaining a contract. Like Neel and Shiv, he too wanted to be a “worldly” actor, hobnobbing in the streets of Bero, wining and dining in its restaurants, becoming a particular kind of man. Securing contracts was also about a new, exciting, and challenging lifestyle circulating among elite networks in Bero and away from the more mundane environment of Tapu. The challenge was to become accepted among a new group of men acquainted with state activities and state officials who were “in the know,” and who had developed the skills of being in the right place at the right time. In some of the literature such young men are described as “unemployed” or berozgar—that despite being educated, they do not have formal employment. However, networking in Bero is also seen by them as a form of employment.16 In this new environment, becoming accepted was one thing but acquiring status among the peer group was quite another. Whereas in the village, as descendants of landlords, status came with birth, in the new community of worldly actors in Bero, young men had to secure their credibility and position in the “new” and bigger field of predominantly landlord descendants. There was much tension and conflict over state resources. Block Development Office contracts were few, there was stiff competition, and securing the outcome was difficult. The young village men negotiated relations with the more experienced older men based in Bero, who had greater leverage over state officials and who were usually working for a political party and as such also seeking village-level workers. The most prominent of these Bero men, who belonged to a Scheduled Tribe, would also attempt to win seats in the Legislative Assembly every five years. In supporting a particular candidate the young men assumed that their efforts would be paid back when the candidate won as the candidate would then influence the distribution of government development contracts in favor of their supporters.17 To be successful in becoming accepted, acquiring status, and securing a contract, one had to be skilled at performing and “doing”

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“politics.” One had to be shrewd, intelligent, and willing to engage in dirty activities.18 Dirty not just because of the cunning alliance building involved, but also because of the violence, secrecy, caution, and the potential to stab one’s own allies in the back if they became a threat. Doing politics was thought to be dangerous and while many young men of landlord descent tried their hand at doing politics, only some sustained their involvement in political networks for more than a couple of years. For many, as it turned out was the case for Dharmesh and Shiv, doing politics was a transitory and transient activity—an experience of a particular stage in life, after which one settled down to a more “peaceful” village or town existence. In much of the literature these men are called “mediators,” “intermediaries,” or “brokers,” blurring the boundary between the state and society.19 These mediators are, however, by no means uniform and there is much difference and hierarchy between them. For instance, at the village level, while Neel was much more experienced, better connected in Bero, and very calculative, Dharmesh was young, in some ways naïve, and merely trying his luck in this new domain of worldly actors and with not much success. And while for Dharmesh brokerage activities became a transitory period of his youth, which he gave up after marriage, for Neel they became a way to secure a business in Bero and become a distributor of food for the poor through the public distribution system. And there was a significant difference between such village-level mediators and those based in the administrative town of Bero who were usually older, far more experienced, and often involved in more than one scheme at any one time. For these men, brokerage of state resources was an ongoing source of activity, albeit a subsidiary one, alongside a more stable source of income, for instance, through owning a shop. In summary, then, the financial utility of pocketing illegal money from Block Development Schemes were not the only attractions for the rural elites to interact in activities that some would call corrupt. Instead of solely being rational economic maximizing concerns, engaging in corrupt practices was also about the nonmaterial interests of becoming accepted and acquiring status among a particular group of people and a life-cycle experience of the challenge and fun of doing politics.

Combating Corruption? Faced with an increasingly powerful international development discourse condemning corruption in the developing world, we need to

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understand people’s moral reasoning about actions that some would consider corrupt in their own terms to get away from the idea of corruption as somehow pathological.20 This does not mean understanding how different cultures perceive economic practices, a culturalist understanding of corruption, but it does involve understanding how people reason about their practices and exploring the complex moral economy determining social action. A number of wider lessons emerge from anthropological analysis of construction-related state development schemes in Jharkhand. Monetary aspects of corrupt activities may be eclipsed by a whole range of other motivations, governed by a set of moralities, for engaging in those activities. In Jharkhand, the assumption that corrupt acts are explained just by financial utility and material interests fails to take account of other motivations such as power relations between individuals, nonmaterial interests of social pressure, the desire to belong to a particular group of people, or the importance of the relationship between a short- and long-term cycle of exchange in which the long-term exchange for a social cosmic order is positively associated with the central concerns of morality. Economic action is underpinned by moral reasoning. Furthermore, the institutional dualism at the heart of moralistic good governance discourses on corruption, forcing people to separate personal agency from the state, might well be less honest than an open acknowledgment of their interdependence (Hart 2005: 29). While it might be accepted that the idea of the state should be impersonal in order to serve for the greater common good, it is also accepted that the state after all consists of real people doing things to and with each other and who are often designing policies and development schemes without having any idea about their relevance for the people they should allegedly serve. The moral set up of everyday life does not necessarily agree with official or dominant rules and moralities. Moreover, what is legal is not necessarily that which is the most legitimate. Often, the violations of state norms may be determined by their perceived inadequacy to live up to the idea of the state as a public body working on behalf of the common good. Moving beyond a bureaucratic perspective on corruption, one that measures corrupt action against reputedly legitimate uses of public finances entails explaining more precisely the wider social relationships surrounding corrupt transactions and what they mean to the people involved. It involves treating people as morally reasoning human beings and striving to understand from their perspective what they are up to and why.

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Notes I have encountered many debts to those who have enabled me to present versions of this chapter and who have commented on and discussed the issues that are central to it with me. I’d like to thank, in particular, the Brighton Syndicate, Stuart Corbridge, Chris Fuller, Rob Higham, Jonathan Parry, Orlanda Ruthven, Edward Simpson, and Karen Sykes. Most of all I am grateful to my friends and informants in Jharkhand, whose practices and perspectives it took me a long time to understand and empathize with. 1. This is a term used by some scholars who have been working in violent contexts (see especially, Frank Pieke 1995). 2. See Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten (2007), Akhil Gupta (1995, 2005), Dieter Haller and Chris Shore (2005), Italo Pardo (2004), Jonathan Parry (2000), and Aril Ruud (2001). 3. See in particular, the work of Oliver de Sardan (1999) who, focusing on Africa, argues that corruption has to be studied from the viewpoint of the participants, and if seen as such can be shown to be socially embedded in “logics” of negotiation, gift-giving, solidarity, predatory authority, and redistributive accumulation. 4. See Todd Sanders and Harry West (2003). 5. World Bank (2007). 6. Tapu as well as all names of people in this chapter are pseudonyms. 7. I use the word “tribe” here to refer to a range of lower castes and Scheduled Tribes who are descendents of the tenants of the ex-landlords of the villages they live in. Today they generally live off a subsistence economy based on farming from their fields and forest produce supplemented by contract work as hard manual labor. I do not wish to engage in the familiar debates about what is a tribe (Bailey 1961, Ghurye 2000 [1943], Majumdar 1937, Mandelbaum 1970, Sharma 2001, Weiner 1978) here nor do I condone the colonial exoticization and romanticization of “tribals” (Elwin 1955) by using the term. While I do not want to reinforce such colonial perspectives, I believe that other terms that are often used, such as adivasi, or indigenous populations, are just as politically constructed and have their own sets of problems. 8. The percentages are fixed slightly differently for different schemes. The two main construction schemes in 1999 were Employment Assurance Scheme and Jawahar Rozgar Yojna. (See Gupta [2005] for an account of the implementation of the latter by a Block Office in Uttar Pradesh.) Assistant engineers and executive engineers come from the Ranchi District Office if the project is above two lakh rupees and they take their own set commission too. 9. Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, and Rene Veron (2005: 166) estimate that fund leakage from Employment Assurance Schemes in Bihar is between 30 and 35 percent of the total flow of funds. 10. Some anthropologists have recently also commented that corruption is in fact not law’s negation but that corruption and the law are actually

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constitutive of each other (Anders and Nuijten 2007). In this argument the failure of the law to reduce levels of corruption is not always attributable to the well-known imperfections of the law, but rather to the secret endorsement of corrupt practices by state authorities. This is an extension of the point made by Josiah Heyman and Alan Smart that states and illegal practices, be it terrorism, black marketing, or illegal immigration, enjoy some variety of coexistence (Heyman and Smart 1999). The point is not simply that this is a symbiosis of default, that the boundaries produced by one enable the definition of the other, but rather that states often tolerate, or even foster, forbidden activities. Underlying the international discourse on corruption is the idea that for progressive economic development, people in modern society should submit to the state the ability to define and police the principles of morality, or good behavior, for the collective good through impersonal rules—such as the rule of law. As the anthropologist Sandy Robertson (2006) reminds us, “what in modern times we have been calling corruption is a by product of the formal rules that seek to separate persons from the offices they hold” (8). There is, as pointed out by Keith Hart (2005: 29) a huge effort involved in separating the impersonal state from personal agency. When people step across this division, the word often used is “corruption.” This is perhaps one reason why some commentators explain the origins of corruption as the extreme personalization of power relationship (Bayart 1993). Corruption violates the fundamental idea of the state as an impartial servant of the people, as the non-personal guarantor of a certain impersonal social order—a crucial idea because the legitimacy of modern states, to a large extent, rests on this claim (Mooij 1992). However, much recent work on state–society relations has in fact shown us that this separation of the impersonal state from personal society is highly problematic. Personality/agency are intrinsic to the bureaucracy and there is a complex relationship between personal agency and impersonal institutions (Brass 1997, Fuller and Harriss 2001, Gupta 1995, 2005). Adrian Mayer (1981: 165–3). The blurring of the boundary between community workers and politicians has parallels elsewhere and is well analyzed by Steffen Jensen (2004) on the Cape Flats in South Africa. David Mosse (2001: 190 fn 47). Chai-pani literally means “tea–water” but it usually indicates food and drink that are bought for the officers. These can range from tea, a box of mangos to bottles of alcohol. Less commonly, and then more so for higher officers, the gift can extend to presents of suiting material or sarees for officers’ wives. In many cases it is often money that transfers hands for the purpose of buying the proposed items rather than the actual items. However, the transaction is always depicted as one of things (and not money). As Yunxiang Yan (1996) succinctly describes in the Xiajia case, the exchange is conditioned by existing power relations whereby the recipient (officer) gains prestige because the exchange

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A l pa Sh a h shows that he or she possesses resources that are in demand to attract gifts. Moreover, it indicates the donor’s perception of the recipient as someone who can be bought off and the recipient’s acceptance of such an identity (171). Matching Jonathan Parry’s (2004) useful distinction between the gift, bribe, and commission. See Gerald Heuze (1996) and Craig Jeffrey et al. (2002). Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) played a large role in the distribution of state development resources not only because they had their own funds but also because they influenced who Block Officers allocated contractorship to at the village level. The MLA’s influence is very well explained by Robert Wade’s corruption-transfer mechanism (1985) in Andhra Pradesh: He explains that bureaucrats of the Indian government departments are eligible for transfer to a new post every three years. Different posts have different degrees of desirability usually linked with the amount of money going into the region thus making the price offered for the post equal to that amount expected to be earned in the post. Wade suggests that depending on the strength of the governing party and the influence of the local MLA, politicians can be actively involved in the transfer system and usually participate in auctioning posts. They are one of the main means by which officers can influence their posting and for villagers to exert influence on their government officers. The politicians, in return, will be able to endure the cost of maintaining themselves as the dominant party as they will get a certain number of contracts from the bureaucrats, and from the villagers, a certain percentage of benefits. The circuit of transactions is thus that the bureaucracy acquires the control of funds that are channeled upward to higher ranks and politicians by paying for transfers, and the politicians can then use the funds for short-term material inducements in exchange for electoral support. See Marcio Goldman (2001) and Aril Ruud (2001). See for instance Frederick Bailey (1969); Akhil Gupta (1995; 2005), M Neocleous (1996) and Monique Nuijten (2003). There is another dimension to the argument here that I develop elsewhere (Shah forthcoming). This is the perspective of the likes of the laborers who were working on Dharmesh’s road—the majority of the rural poor, primarily the Munda and Oraon Scheduled Tribe tenant descendants of the old landlords—and their relationship with the rural elites. In brief, these ex-tenants wanted nothing to do with the state (Shah 2007), did not accept the idea of the state as acting for the public good, and did not get involved in knowing about the practices of the state. These were not merely cultural imaginings of the state, but a moral discourse that was encouraged by the village elite in whose interests it was to promote the idea of the state as alien, dangerous, and so beyond the moral pale that Mundas and Oraons ought not to engage with it. Perpetuating such views of the state, the rural elite was better able to

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block the rural poor from interacting in the public sphere and the moral economy of state development schemes on the same terms as they interact. Ideas of morality in this instance were historically constituted, managed, and reproduced (Shah forthcoming).

Bibliography Anders, Gerhard, and Monique Nuijten. 2007. Corruption and the Secret of the Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Bailey, Frederick G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bayart, Jean Francois. 1993. The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly. London: Longman. Brass, Paul. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in Representation and Collective Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Corbridge, Stuart, Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, and Rene Veron. 2005. Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Sardan, Olivier. 1999. “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, 25–52. Fuller, Chris, and John Harriss. 2001. “Introduction: For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State.” In The Everyday State: Anthropological Perspectives on the State and Society in Modern India, edited by C. Fuller and V. Benei. 1–30. London: C. Hurst. Goldman, Marcio. 2001. “An Ethnographic Theory of Democracy. Politics from the Viewpoint of Ilheus’s Black Movement.” Ethnos, Vol. 66, No. 2, 157–80. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, 375–402. ———. 2005. “Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictional Accounts of the Indian State.” Ethnography, Vol. 6, No. 1, 5–34. Haller, Dieter, and Chris Shore, ed. 2005. Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Harris, Olivia, ed. 1996. Inside and Outside the Law: Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity. London and New York: Routledge. Hart, Keith. 2005. “Formal Bureaucracy and the Emergent Forms of the Informal Economy.” http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/ uhpchapter. Heuze, Gerard. 1996. Workers of Another World: Miners, the Countryside and the Coalfields in Dhanbad. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Heyman, Joshua, ed. 1999. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford: Berg. Jeffrey, Craig, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffery. 2004. “ ‘A Useless Thing’ or ‘The Nectar of the Gods?’ The Cultural Production of Education and

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Young Men’s Struggles for Respect in Liberalising North India.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 4, 961–81. Jensen, Steffen. 2004. “Claiming Community: Local Politics on the Cape Flats, South Africa.” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 24, No. 2, 179–207. Mayer, Adrian. 1981. “Public Service and Individual Merit in a Town of Central India.” In Public Service and Individual Merit in a Town of Central India, edited by A. Mayer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mooij, Jos. 1992. “Private Pockets and Public Policies: Rethinking the Concept of Corruption.” In Law as a Resource in Agrarian Struggles, edited by F. von Benda-Beckmann and M. van der Velde. Vol. 33. Wageningse: Wageningse Sociological Studies. Mosse, David. 2001. “Irrigation and Statecraft in Zamindari South India.” In The Everyday State: Anthropological Perspectives on the State and Society in Modern India, edited by C. Fuller and V. Benei. 163–94. London: C. Hurst. Neocleous, M. 1996. Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State power. London. Nuijten, Monique. 2003. Power, Community and the State: the Political Anthropology of Organisation in Mexico. London: Pluto Press. Pardo, Italo, ed. 2004. Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society. Hampshire: Ashgate. Parry, Jonathan. 2000. “The ‘Crisis of Corruption’ and ‘The Idea of India’—A Worm’s Eye View.” In Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System, edited by I. Pardo. 27–55. Oxford: Berghan Books. Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pieke, Frank. 1995. “Accidental Anthropology: Witnessing the 1989 Chinese People’s Movement.” In Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, edited by C. Nordstrom and A.C.G.M. Robben. 62–80. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robertson, A.F. 2006. “Misunderstanding Corruption.” Anthropology Today, Vol. 22, No. 2, 8–12. Ruud, Aril Engelsen. 2001. “Talking Dirty About Politics: A View from a Bengali Village.” In The Everyday State. 116–37. Sardan, Olivier de. 1999. “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, 25–52. Scott, James. 1979. Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia. Yale: Yale University Press. Shah, Alpa. 2007. “Keeping the State Away: Democracy, Politics and the State in India’s Jharkhand.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 13, No. 1, 129–45. ———. Forthcoming. “Morality, Corruption and the State: Insights from Jharkhand, Eastern India.” Journal of Development Studies. Thompson, E. P. 1971. “Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present, Vol. 50, 76–136.

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Transparency, International. 2005. India Corruption Study. London: Transparency International with Media Studies Centre, Delhi. Wade, Robert. 1982. “The System of Administrative and Political Corruption: Canal Irrigation in South India.” Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 18, 287–328. ———. 1985. “The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is not Better at Development.” World Development, Vol. 13, 467–97. West, Harry, and Todd Sanders, eds. 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press. World Bank. 2007. Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption. Washington D.C.: World Bank. Yan, Yunxiang. 1996. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Fa k e s: Fr au d, Va lu e-A n x i e t y, a n d t h e Pol i t ic s of Si nc e r i t y

Susanne Brandtstädter

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n 2001, on a trip to Shanghai I visited the city’s well-known Xiangyang market—famous for its quality replica of Western designer clothes and bags that were hugely popular with locals and Westerners alike. Burberry scarves and umbrellas, Versace sunglasses, Gucci bags, as well as the newest Hollywood blockbusters on DVD were all on offer; and young and chic Shanghainese roamed the stalls in search of the latest fashion statement. Xiangyang market was different from other forms of selling “fakes” in China in that every customer who came here, with maybe the exception of the most naïve foreigners, knew that he or she was buying not an original but a replica, and valued the accessibility also for those with a small budget to one of the most important forms of cultural capital in post-Maoist China— the ownership of mingpai (famous brand commodities). Although the goods on offer were of a strikingly high quality, what made the sale of replica “honest” to everyone were not only the low prices, but also the setting that stood in such contrast to a designer outlet that no one could possibly be duped: a vast flat of mud, covered with small stalls and stands sheltered by plastic covers, and with women and men who were clearly of working class or peasant background selling the goods. Lookalookalook was the usual call to attract the attention of foreigners, and after I responded in Chinese, a middle-aged female shop owner, with ruddy cheeks and clothes that betrayed her

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background as a nongmin gong (peasant–worker), cried out Ahh-yoo! She speaks better Putonghua1 than I do. China is known worldwide as the center for the production of pirated goods, and while in the past this concerned mostly Western brands, in more recent times the machinery of forgery in China has also copied the more famous Chinese brands themselves. The clamor of Western companies over intellectual property rights has attracted much international attention. It is not so well-known, however, that the proliferation of counterfeit and substandard goods has also led to veritable consumer movement in China that demands “truth,” quality products, and quality services—in other words, value for money— for the new Chinese “consumer citizen.” The post-Maoist government, in support of this movement, has instituted the International Consumer Day as an important annual event and made consumer education a priority of government policy (see Davis 2000, Hooper 2005, Yan 2000). How does the scare of fakes and the search for real value in postMaoist China relate to our topic of living with moral paradoxes and moral reasoning? As a visitor to China I was often struck by the strikingly explicit connection ordinary people make among the degree of a nation’s fazhan (development), the suzhi (quality of its citizens), and the zhiliang (quality of the goods) it produces and consumes.2 I remember more than one taxi driver who, wanting to pay me a compliment, praised the quality of products “made in Germany”; and one even enthused that the clock of Qingdao city’s old train station, originally built by German colonizers around 1900, had not stopped for a single day until, in the 1990s, the city government decided to replace the colonial with a much larger, super-modern railway station. Increasing “citizen quality” or suzhi has been the central concern of a more technocratic type of “progressive” politics that emerged after the socialist party-state embraced global capital in the 1980s. Suzhi is understood as the root and precondition of both personal and national modernization, while the total amount of suzhi present in society is seen to represent its overall level of “developedness.” What links suzhi to the value of goods produced and consumed by and circulating in the “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” is the modernist state’s concern with evaluating and increasing the productivity of citizens—a concern also represented in the theory of interlinked wuzhi wenming (material civilization) with jinsheng wenming (spiritual civilizations) that informs contemporary politics.3 Such citizen productivity is today being objectified and represented in the quality product, or even in the masses of quality products, and it

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is the figure of the discerning consumer who is called upon by the state to test and attest to it. As the suzhi/zhiliang dialectic has replaced the Maoist emphasis on ideological redness, jieji douzheng (class struggle), and public labor; so too consumerism has replaced “productivism” as the motor of development that creates public value and that teaches Chinese citizens to successfully navigate the “sea” of the market (Yan 2000).4 The Party is here to secure quality standards, ensure wending (social order), fazhi (governing through law), and daode jiaoyu (moral education). On the other hand, the new urban-based consumer movement in China fights not simply for individual consumer interests, nor does the state promote individual consumer rights as an end in itself. Rather, the contemporary consumer movement resembles a yundong (collective Maoist movement) that addresses the consumer as an agent of social progress, and that celebrates the discovering and “beating” of da jiahuo (fakes) as a patriotic act that promotes the formation of quality in economy and society (Hooper 2005): significant here is the use of a language that recalls the Maoist duty to discover and “beat” class enemies. As I have noted, suzhi is “citizen value” rooted in the modern state’s regime of authenticity (Duara 1998), which defines the nature of the timeless good.5 However, suzhi, which can also be accumulated in practice, is a national “currency” that can be earned, invested, and that is differently distributed in society. Under Mao, such a value currency was linked to the work point system that accounted for public labor in its quantity and quality. With the end of the planned economy, accounting for such productivity became linked to money itself and to the price-building national, and increasingly also the global, market. In other words, as a maximizing practice, suzhi has become linked to what has classically (and also historically in China) been perceived as the regime of inauthenticity, self-interest, and the copy, mixing a definition of value as an substantive citizen quality with a definition of value as whatever the market can pay. This double bind, and the resulting difficulties to locate a fixed value-standard, results in pervasive anxieties about false appearances and a search for new techniques to reveal real substance and fix true value. Consumer movements are today a new arena where both law-abiding subjects (toward the state) and rightful consumers (toward the market and society) are made, and where the post-Maoist state can rehearse its capacity to engage the population in a particular vision of national development. Is thus not surprising that spotting fakes and being able to tell them apart from real quality goods is depicted as both a

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liberating act and as a central capacity of qianjing (advanced) citizen. But living with capitalism as a form of socialism and the celebration of consumerism as progressive has also generated an enormous demand for fakes, which has resulted in the widespread social phenomenon of the impostor in China.6 The contradictory desires to appropriate value by “beating fakes” and by “faking it” led to an even greater obsession with revealing value and a fear to be duped, not only to be cheated but also, in the eyes of the others, appear like a bumbling peasant who does not know. In my Shanghai market, local stalls owners catered to both—contrasting—desires for fakes and for true value by producing Gucci bags that not only looked like the “real thing,” but also came with a fake certificate of authenticity. . The following is an ethnographic exploration of the condition of living with post-Maoist paradoxes in rural China. What in China is officially called the “socialist market society with Chinese characteristics” fused Maoism as a politics of sincerity and a regime of authenticity with the spectacle of commodities as the truth of the global market. For nongmin Chinese peasants in particular, who since the 1950s had formed an administrative and political category strategically opposed to the shimin (urban citizen), this fusion meant a world turned upside down: no longer were the laboring peasant masses the motor of progress and the backbone of the revolution, and no longer was jianku pusu (the ability to “eat bitterness and live a simple life”) hailed as the national ideal, but the modern consumer citizen and consumerism; and no longer was China’s desired modern future represented by liberated workers and peasants but by the new leisured, urban middle class. As I could observe during fieldwork in southern Fujian and Shandong provinces, such value anxiety expressed itself in a deep concern over the substance of moral relations. The villagers I met worried over the deterioration of social relations, the rampant corruption in local governments, and the new “hunt” for money that appeared to threaten even the most fundamental ethics of family life. Also the arrival of a multitude of unknown and potentially deceptive things and persons in village space led, as Beth Notar (2006) notes for Yunnan, to profound value anxieties and the search for true value. I do not believe, however, that the value anxieties of rural Chinese and of Westerners can be traced back to the same “search for authenticity.” This is because “money talk” or “corruption talk” (see Brandtstädter 2006) was rooted in anxieties over the state of Chinese society and one’s moral–political worth in it as a peasant, and expressive of a very particular articulation of personal value, productivity,

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and moral practice. Even the most successful local peasant entrepreneurs I encountered, or the nongmin gong, the “peasant– workers” who had become a new urban underclass, felt a deep anxiety over the peasants’ status as modern China’s nongmin wenti (peasant problem).7 In the more “developed” rural areas of south-eastern China these anxieties frequently express themselves in worries over the right form of consumption, even regarding body care (Joseph Bosco, personal communication). For peasants who interrogate each other in terms of their moral–political value, the post-Maoist state can no longer provide a tool to probe appearances, resolve contradictions, and reveal the true value of persons and social relations—a tool that was class struggle, lead by revolutionary peasants and workers, at least during the early years of the Maoist era. In the following I focus on a new politics of sincerity as a practical form of moral reasoning through which Chinese nongmin contest official narratives of quality and try to reconstruct valuable selves. The politics of sincerity does not simply represent a regime of authenticity, but it involves the active setting down of a new value standard rooted in situated ethics. In Fujian, as I will argue in the following, this was the moral standard of the bendiren (literally, the “local soil person”) against the waidiren (“outside soil person,” i.e., outsider), and in Shandong that of the altruistic nongmin against the newly individualized peasant–citizen (see Keane 2001). The politics of sincerity allows local people to “uncover” fake people and things and cut through the maze of reified language and moral paradoxes. But in contrast to class politics, the politics of sincerity no longer supports a comprehensive narrative of value (which has become problematic from a peasant position in contemporary China). Instead, they are a form of moral reasoning based on testifying in practice one’s sincere commitment to the social good. Also because value can no longer be narrated, there is no local term for the politics of sincerity: renqing, renzhen, zhende 8 are the expressions most closely related to what is basically a form of action. As they focus on the materiality of social relations, I argue that the new politics of sincerity contest the post-Maoist regime of authenticity but remain rooted in Maoism as a tool for testing commitment and making justice through collective action.

On Contradiction and the Aftermath of the Maoist Revolution Contradiction and struggle are universal and absolute, but the methods of resolving contradictions, that is, the forms of struggle, differ

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Sus a n n e Br a n d t s t ä d t e r according to the differences in the nature of the contradictions. Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not. In accordance with the concrete development of things, some contradictions which were originally non-antagonistic develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.” —Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction” (August 1937)

This section describes Maoism as a moral–political code (a language and a tool) that kept relations in perpetual revolution by focusing on sincerity. Maoism claimed to be a great “contradiction-resolving-machine”: a tool to reconstitute the social through Maoism as a political practice on the basis of one axiomatic truth, namely, Maoism as a scientific language of society. As a new regime of authenticity, Maoism founded its own comprehensive value standard derived from the ideal citizen–subject: the productive peasant worker or soldier who relentlessly worked for socialist construction. The most authentic socialist, and a national treasure, was Lei Feng, the altruistic model soldier whose image was reproduced on countless wall posters during the Maoist era. In Lei Feng, the “split” nature of value linked to the modern state was realized in its particular Maoist version. Such split value is represented, for example, in the “heads” and “tails” of coins (see Hart 1986), where tails represent the quantifiable, equalizing, fluid, and maximizing aspects linked to the market and change— what Duara (1998) calls the “temporal time’ of the nation—while heads visualize national treasures, eternal virtue, and legitimate political authority, embodied in the timeless nation or state.9 Maoism, of course, abolished the market, and ideologically also the vagaries of history. But measuring, comparing, abstracting, quantifying, and maximizing human productivity were as central to Maoism as to other types of modernisms. Lei Feng here embodied both the timeless values linked to the socialist state (the total altruism that came with the sincere appropriation of Mao Zedong thought), as well as the “restless” transformative labor that speeded up China’s progress. Where these two things came together like the heads and tails of coins, when value contradictions were bridged by the socialist state, socialist value was created. The first task faced after the revolution was thus to reveal the contradictions that divided common folks from elites, the old from the young, workers from capitalists, and men from women, by putting into place political mechanisms that instituted a radical critique of the pre-Revolutionary society and its fengjian mixin (feudal superstitions).

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Instrumental here were jieji chengfen or the class statuses, which from 1950 onward represented the essential truth about the historical value of different groups of people. Instrumental also were such highly emotional political rituals as suku (speaking bitterness) where people publicly recalled the hardships of the pre-Revolutionary era, piping (criticisms and self-criticisms), and the infamous struggle sessions themselves, where “class enemies” had to stand on makeshift tribunes or kneel on broken glass, wearing high hats and placards around their necks, while “the people” denounced them and recalled their crimes (see Anagnost 1997, chapter 1). The Maoist system of class statuses also instituted the paradox of permanent revolution: on one hand, class legitimized class struggle throughout the Maoist period, characterized by countless attack on class enemies; on the other, class status became the unshakable objective foundation of the new order, inheritable in the male line (similar to the kinship statuses in “old China”) and pinning everyone in his or her place. These class statuses were abolished only in 1978, with the beginning of the Reform period.10 Maoism here caught the temporal and eternal time of the modern state in one process, demonstrating the truth that class as one’s true nature is more substantive then the ownership of property (and thus could not be eliminated simply by expropriation), and that all history is the history of class struggle. Class was the truth of the new order, the objective essence of its regime of authenticity, and the cause of perpetual struggle and national progress. To put it differently, while class struggle was a tool to ensure progress through keeping relations in perpetual revolution, it also helped to established Maoism as a new universal truth and language. The Maoist Truth was that the true value of people and social relations was exactly the opposite as they had appeared to be under the ancient regime; it was thus necessary to rectify “false appearances” and to name people and things for what they really are. Only those who had fully embraced the new ideology, such as Lei Feng, could exert such rectification. At the same time, class struggle was a politics of sincerity: a tool to test and to testify to true revolutionary value through sincere demonstrations of loyalty to the revolutionary cause and the goal of building a great socialist society.11 But Maoism as an axiomatic truth and single, overarching value standard also created new contradictions that it then had to suppress through thought work: for example, the often blatant contradiction between being a good person—a person with renqingwei, as villagers would call it, who would respect human feelings and relations—and a good Maoist. Those people who gave all for Mao could often be

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lousy parents, fervent Maoists could be brutal and revengeful, and Red Guards were extremely destructive and violent against their own kin, friends, and neighbors. In a striking example of such contradictions and their ideological repression, a former Red Guard reports how during the Cultural Revolution, when China’s youth streamed to Tiananmen Square riding trains for free, he watched two male Red Guards raping a female comrade on the roof of a train. Rather than concluding that what he saw revealed truth, he concluded that those two men must be impostors, since true Red Guards could never do such a thing (Gao 1987: 114). The early Maoist politics of sincerity, which stressed the necessity of “learning from facts” and of demonstrating commitment through public work, had soon reversed fully into the politics of truth, which demanded from individuals unswerving loyalty to the great chairman and his political guidelines, whatever these might be.12 When I undertook fieldwork in south-eastern China in the early 1990s, after fifteen years of economic reforms, many of the villagers I encountered felt that they had, after all, been duped by official propaganda. An old man in Meidao village, situated on a tiny island off the Fujianese coast, who had suffered badly during the Maoist campaigns for being a landlord’s son, told me that no one believed anymore in such oxymoronic constructions as “socialist market economy” (it was just capitalism, pure and simple). And the old Maoist loyalty dances, which he and his fellow villagers once had performed with sincerity, now seemed in retrospective kexiaode (ridiculous). Again, the villagers’ world had been turned upside down. Being pusu (simple and plain) had qualified poor peasants under Mao for political leadership. Deng Xiaoping’s government, in contrast, praised the first “10,000 yuan”13 households of the reform era as models that others should emulate, and as the new vanguard that could help to advance those who had fallen behind (Anagnost 1989). In an even more radical reversal, quality consumption—a practice that creates and demonstrates value and that advances the self and the nation toward the new development ideal—is today being hailed as the distinguishing practice of the new progressive citizen. Consumerism as the new ideology of post-Maoist China has here shaped both the life–world of ordinary people and central politics. Its most profound expression is the official slogan nengzhen huihua, meaning “being able to make money and knowing how to spend it.” In direct contrast, Maoism had celebrated austerity, hard work, and savings as progressive practices. Lei Feng had epitomized the corresponding slogan of jianku pusu or “hard work and plain living”

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(Yan 2000). Relatedly, Chinese peasants are today not just seen as poor and in need of political enlightenment. They have become the other of the modern Chinese consumer citizen, as they are seen as categorically lacking in suzhi (Pun 2003; Yan 2003). Consumerism also produced new model heroes such as Wang Hai, who rose to national fame in the late 1990s.14 After a new law allowed duped costumers in 1995 to claim back twice the price they had paid in compensation, Wang Hai began buying up fake goods in Beijing’s department stores, in a one-man battle against fakes and for consumer rights that also eventually allowed him to make a handsome profit. Soon he could expand his business to other cities, and even hire employees who searched shops for fake goods. Wang Hai became an instant celebrity with local media, and his actions unleashed a “Wang Hai phenomenon” in China with others following his footsteps. His fame peaked when he was officially chosen to meet President Clinton as a representative of China’s budding consumer movement, and presented on national TV as one of the central figures of the reform era. But Wang Hai’s story evidently also represents the inversion of the moral–heroic tale and the craftiness of the impostor or trickster, as Wang’s patriotic zeal barely covered his self-interest in using the law to make money. In the late 1990s this ambiguity culminated in the talk show “Looking at Wang Hai Once More,” where the hero was officially denounced as a fraud. Only a year earlier, however, the Chinese consumer association’s secretary-general had endorsed his actions as “good for both society and himself.” For peasants in particular, stories such as Wang Hai’s are representative of the moral ambiguities of the post-Maoist era, and also of urban China, where crafty people can play the system to their advantage, where good and bad can no longer be easily distinguished, and where those “who have no education” (mei you dushu, i.e., peasants) are easily tricked out of their rights and money. Rural people might find it difficult to navigate the new world of consumerism so much removed from village life, they are also, in their own evaluation, more straightforward, trustworthy, and honest than urbanites (Kipnis 1995). Many urban Chinese, while sometimes developing nostalgia for the simple life, tend in contrast to evaluate peasant workers entering and existing in Chinese cities as, at worst, a source of chaos (luan) and, at best, as fake citizens (see Pun 2003)—just like the masses of counterfeit goods on Shanghai’s Xiangyang market. To return to my initial anecdote, many counterfeit goods are indeed produced in the countryside, and brought to the city by fellow nongmin gong who sell them in specialist markets or deliver them to urban shops. Not

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surprisingly, the missing quality of the countryside is again and again evoked in public scare stories that include counterfeit goods or other fakes. For instance, in 1998 there were reports of two hundred injuries, and twenty-two deaths caused by drinking fake liquor in China. The liquor contained methyl alcohol nine hundred times the officially permitted amount and had apparently been produced by peasants in Shanxi province (Yan 2000: 171). The value scare of urbanites and peasants here mirrors each other—whereas urbanites might fear that an avalanche of fake goods and fake citizens will derail development, the peasants’ anxiety concerns both their own citizen value, which is radically questioned by post-Maoist consumerism, as well as the alienated forces that impinge on village life, threaten to dupe villagers, and undermine the morality of social relations.

The New Antagonism between Peasants and Progress Maoism as a politics of truth depended on new, revolutionary categories inscribed with unchanging essences, whose reproduction in daily life could shore up the hegemonic and social fabric of the new state. Political stereotyping obviously produced contradictions when people did things not in line with their categorization and when this was recognized; such people were then brought back into line with social or political pressure, or they were simply ignored.15 Even I noticed the powers of stereotyping when I stayed in 1994 at a hotel in the Fujian city Xiamen, where the staff knew that all “Americans” drink milk for breakfast and, despite my protests, insisted on presenting me the same glass of hot water with milk powder every morning. In the People’s Republic, the split between nongmin and fei nongmin (non-peasants) has been foundational for subject and state formation, two categories that under Mao together made up the people. Both had their own system of class statuses, their own relationship to the socialist state, and their own opposite, backward self they had to overcome. Peasants here were the most backward and the most revolutionary category of the people, a value contradiction in the nongmin body that could only be resolved through the leadership of the Party. The nongmin category has remained central for imagining modern China. But while under Mao nongmin symbolized the unity between the party and the people, contemporary peasants are cut loose from the new ideal of fadade guojia, developed nation. As a result, for example, a village party secretary, who is the local representative of the Party and also a nongmin, can no longer successfully

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demonstrate this unity. Instead, he (it is typically a he) is caught in the new antagonistic contradiction between peasants and development, making him appear unreliable from both perspectives (and turning him into the very symbol of corruption in contemporary China). Diane Dorfman (1996) has described such a split and its effects on the case of a revived cult of animal spirits in northern China. In an interview focusing on the cult, the local party secretary, speaking in his office, denied any belief in the spirits, while the same evening, in his own house, he admitted to being mixin (superstitious) just like any peasant. Dorfman argues convincingly that the issue was not that the party secretary “lied” in the first instance, but that he was speaking from two different subject positions: in the first encounter as a party member, in the second as an ordinary nongmin. In my own fieldwork in Meidao, Fujian, in the mid-1990s, the local party secretary regarded it his duty to warn me of the suzhi hen di (very low quality) of my village neighbors. The very same neighbors, vice versa, liked to joke that this party secretary was more “afraid of the gods than anyone else” (meaning that he was more superstitious) and complained that new village leaders acted like “local emperors” (that they were more backward than anyone else). In Shandong ten years later, I met peasant rights activists who had sued their village committee for wasting (langfei) tax money on restoring the small village temple, instead of, as they said, using it for local development and peasant welfare. “The corrupt village committee wants us to believe in fengjian mixin (feudal superstition) not kexue (science),” they told me. Such contradictions, if not repressed through “thought–work,” typically lead to a pervasive doubting of surface appearances, and, when no action can be taken to correct them, to cynicism (see chapter 2, this volume). Indeed, the supposedly ignorant peasants, whom I met during the last fifteen years in Fujian and Shandong, were overtly cynical of official politics, and had developed an attitude of general doubt against any official narrative or statement, always searching for the “real thing” behind the surface appearance. The village setting, where people could hardly keep secrets from each other, was in many ways an ideal setting for fostering such doubts. Here it was apparent that many of new “rich” and successful entrepreneurs, who the postMaoist government had turned into new models of development, were simply good in la guanxi, “pulling strings,” and kai houmen, “making deals through the back door,” and that so-called village leaders had often gained power through fubai (corruption); they had no culture (mei you wenhua) or abilities (mei you nengli). Even more so since the new contradictions of the post-Maoist era meant to most

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not an increase in wenming (civilization) and daode (public morality) but a serious deterioration of the moral quality of relations in the village. In Meidao Village in the early 1990s, the members of the village government, and of a new, emerging strata of noveaux riches (often related to the former), did everything in their power to verbally and visually differentiate themselves from those so-called peasants who still lived in the old, simple houses and who had not been able to appear more modern by acquiring items such as TV sets, refrigerators, and washing machines for their families. Interestingly, however, poorer villagers in Meidao did not simply submit to a designation of being luohuo (backward) and di (low), but retaliated by calling richer households money-minded, greedy, and without renqingwei (moral standards and human feelings). Ten years later in Baisha village, situated close to Xiamen City (one of China’s early special economic zones), even successful village entrepreneurs emphasized that their interest as peasants were principally opposed to that of guan (officials). In their opinion, the only reason for village cadres to take over office had been to get their hands on village funds and to make deals with outside investors. As a result, the village government was regarded as so fubai (corrupt) that it was positively destructive of both local development and moral relations. Village meetings on local development often ended in shouting matches, as in a meeting that the village government had convened to ask farm owners to pay for a new water pipeline.

Remaking Valuable Persons through Sincerity: Peasants, Locals, and Situated Ethics in Fujian and Shandong What is striking is the frequent use of Maoist rhetoric, sometimes in traditional guise, against a value corruption that villagers linked with a new alliance between state and market (also see Feuchtwang 2002). The rhetoric reveals the local view that selfish elites no longer cared for the collective good, and local officials no longer wei renmin fuwu (serve the people, now interpreted as a local or peasant “we”) but rather get cozy with outside (urban or even foreign) investors. In rural Shandong, where the influence of Maoism has remained far stronger, peasant critics of corruption and consumerism used not just Maoist language but also placed Mao posters and busts in their houses to remind local elites of their duties (and threaten them with the possibility of another revolution). But even the new leaders of the temples and ancestral halls in Fujian, often themselves retired cadres, alluded

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to the Maoist ideal of jianku pusu (hard work and simple living) when they criticized, in interviews, their successors’ love for material wealth, saying they loved “cars and leather shoes.” Ordinary villagers emphasized frequently the difference between money made through hard work and study, and money made through corruption. The medium at the root of moral anxieties in Fujian and Shandong was thus money itself, a thing that could morph into suzhi, friends, and power, but whose relentless pursuit threatened to undermine local solidarities and even the fundamental ethics of Chinese family life. For local people, money was evidently a currency of citizen value, but its decoupling from producing moral persons and relations made it indeed savage or undomesticated (see Gregory 1997)—a thing that was certainly good to have, but not good in itself. The new obscurity of money’s origins (as against the old work points of the Maoist era) and its importance in testifying suzhi made money an object of excessive attention and gossip in the villages. Scandalous stories of the use of money to shame relatives at family meetings, of gifts turned into weapons, money-minded brides, sold daughters, tightfisted, heartless sons, and greedy cadres made the round (Brandtstädter 2006). Epitomized in Deng Xiaoping’s slogan for the new era that “it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long it catches mice,” money’s grayness turned, for the villagers, into newly luan (chaotic) social relations and the flood of impostors, frauds, and fakes. At the same time, villager who in the early 1990s did not often know how to distinguish quality things from trash (as defined by market) were eager to learn how to recognize mingpai (famous name-brands) and how to gauge the price of every new good they encountered. What was the fundamental moral paradox Fujian and Shandong villagers found themselves in? Official narratives in post-Maoist China have placed much blame for the nation’s “problems” on peasant and their mass arrival in urban spaces in the 1990s, which, similar to the avalanche of counterfeit goods, produced fears about security, hygiene, civilized order, and fazhan (development) in general. As a result, China’s peasants have been repeatedly urged to shed their peasantqualities and to transform themselves into rural entrepreneurs (Kipnis 1995). Peasants are today asked to develop a new commodity consciousness, acquire suzhi, and modernize by consuming quality goods (commodities, education), and not to be either satisfied with simple living or waste money on feudal superstition: both practices reproduce, from the state’s point of view, parochial and backward identities and socialities.

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The paradox for peasants here is twofold. First, the Chinese hukou (household register system) ensures that even those who have turned into successful rural entrepreneurs or have moved to the cities as mobile laborers remain classificatory peasants: that is, a state category whose “essence” is its antagonistic contradiction to the post-Maoist modernization project.16 As a result, peasants who sincerely try to acquire individualized urban lifestyles to become citizens (in the sense of becoming both shimin and gongmin: “city-people” and “public-people”) might be called frauds by their rural kin and friends and also by urbanites, as they cannot shed their peasant classification. Second, as I have argued earlier, individual attempts to shed peasant qualities and to distinguish oneself from backward fellow villagers has, from the perspective of villagers, not increased civility and moral value in society but led to social corruption: to local governments who embezzle collective funds to throw banquets or make holiday trips to Beijing, Shanghai, or even foreign countries (central markers of the new consumer citizen); to children who no longer support their old parents and no longer value their existence; to wealthy people who take everything and give nothing back to their communities; and to neighbors who now ask money for lending a hand or who even steal from each other. Shedding aspects of a peasant identity thus could negate renqingwei or situated ethics on the level of practice, when it came into conflict with the demands for being an upright, responsible leader, a good son or daughter, and a good neighbor who is also known as a fellow bendiren. All these attempts, moreover, marked the peasant person as insincere: as insincere in relation to state categories and in relation to one’s situated identity as a bendiren and particular social person (e.g., as a neighbor, family member, and descendent of local ancestors). This local war of words—or the counter-narratives of corruption and ai qian (money love)—was aimed exactly at spelling out this contradiction and resolving or rectifying it through naming. But in contrast to the Maoist era, the state’s moral code no longer encompassed the peasant, and thus no longer provided the language that allowed peasants to exert such rectification, and to realize new moral standards by narrating bitterness and embracing true value. What has remained in common, in terms of positive ties, between ordinary peasants and their local governments? My interlocutors in Shandong and Fujian found different answers to this question. For the peasant rights activists I became friends with in Shandong it was peasantness itself, a category rural people should re-appropriate through heqilai, tuanqilai (by getting together again) and by launching a new

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struggle against evil elites and corrupt cadres. For some of them, decollectivization had been the true crime of the post-Maoist era because it had undermined cooperation between peasant households, led to harmful competition, egocentrism, corruption, and a lack of public morality. They, as the Maoist and post-Maoist state, placed their hopes on the emergence of xin nongmin (a new peasant) but their ideal new peasant was very different—it was not a product of the state or the market, but of a new peasant consciousness derived from education and local solidarity. Instead of demonstrating suzhi these peasant activists demonstrated pusu (literally, plain and simple; (su, “essential characteristic,” is the same character in both terms). None of the peasant rights activists I met, for example, smoked (something highly unusual in rural China), all drank only moderately if at all, and all preferred simple food. They also were the only rural people I ever met who felt insulted when I brought them some Beijing techan (luxuries and specialties) in response to their hospitality. As one of them explained, to eat and drink only moderately, and to reject cigarettes completely meant dou (to struggle) with corrupt cadres who indulged in excessive food consumption dachi, dahe (by big eating, big drinking). Rejecting consumerism was here a tool to recover an empowered peasant self (which also could, and should, include good cadres), and to testify to a sincere commitment to a common peasant cause. It symbolized personal and collective immunity against the virus of corruption that also separated peasants and local governments. In South Fujian, the idea of the peasant and the simple life held little attraction for villagers who had already acquired many modern consumer goods, lived in huge houses, and dreamt of traveling to Hong Kong, America, and Europe. For them, instead, the focus was the social place they all belonged to and whose collective properties and memories they owned as locals, a property represented, again, by village temples and ancestral halls. Temple and hall reconstruction here helped to reconstitute and refocus local solidarities under the guardianship of territorial gods and ancestors (Feuchtwang and Wang 2001). But it was the reconstitution of collective properties that was the essential test and testimony: as I was told in another Fujian village Nanjiang, it was only when all local people were willing to song gei gongjia (donate [private wealth and property] to the public) that kinship and religious solidarities could be realized; if some refused, in contrast, then this was a testimony for broken relations (Brandtstädter forthcoming). In Meidao where I conducted research in the mid-1990s, and in Baisha and Nanjiang ten years later, local people had been reconstructing

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ancestral halls and local temples since the mid-1980s. Village temples and ancestral halls reclaimed the land and the properties of a landed collective, this time in the name of a territorial god or shizu (a pioneer ancestor). What it more relevant here is the type of collective they represent, namely, that of the bendiren. Anthropologists have argued that rural Chinese moral worlds are constructed in the local gift economy, labor exchanges, and the rituals of politeness that create “good feelings” between villagers, neighbors, and kin (e.g., Yan 1996). I argue that resurrected temple gods and pioneer ancestors here represent the moral code of a situated-worldview in post-Maoist China (rather than of a small or local worldview). How does this relate to post-Maoist value anxieties, the scare of impostors and fakes, and efforts to reveal the truth behind appearances? In all my fieldsites I found people incessantly engaged in efforts to separate what is zhende (real) from what is jiade (false). Many had learned to distinguish fake products from authentic ones by watching consumer shows on TV, and appreciated official demonstrations of ways to discern counterfeit currency. But what if it comes to people? Here, the problem to discern true value appeared from a peasant perspective to be of a twofold nature. First, there is the commonplace contradiction (Gregory 1997: 305) of what makes a valuable person, rooted in the paradoxes of perspective held by members of a local community. What for those who can be said to see like a state, it might appear as suzhi or quality, build into the citizen through the appropriation of knowledge and demonstrated in new forms of conspicuous consumption, can reveal itself to those who see from the perspective of situated ethics as only a surface that obscures selfishness, corruption, and fraud. Second, and vice versa, a good person from a local perspective can be a failed citizen from the perspective of the state. There people experience a commonplace contradiction in what they know is required to become a true citizen and a true human person. For example, as a good citizen, one would not, as the official narrative has it, reject consumption, demonstrate peasantness, or waste money on feudal superstition, but these practices can be the source of solidarity and good feelings within an extended network of family, friends, and local or peasant compatriots. Practices that reject consumerism and a market-based civil society found a new commonplace value standard against savage money—a value token that in post-Maoist China is no longer tied to, to paraphrase Chris Gregory, the gold standard of a shared moral economy. Money has for a long time played a role in the production of social and cultural values in China; in contrast to the West, where the

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economic and kinship spheres are regarded by most folk as clearly opposed value spheres. In rural China, gifts of money are made at major family occasions and life-cycle events (such as weddings and funerals); monetary donations from village households to the temple consolidate moral communities; and village women burn spirit money for gods and ancestors. In all cases, however, in order to produce sociality or a common moral standard, the quantifiable, abstract quality of money is erased in the act of giving: the appropriate value of monetary gifts at life-cycle events is dependent on the kinship category and/or on emotional distance, the use of hongbao (the famous red envelopes) erases the national currency, and in the case of spirit money, “real money” is exchanged for a specific cosmological currency. Such moments of erasing money’s origin demonstrate value’s origin in the political act rather than in economic or cultural facts (see Graeber 2001). In rural China, this political act involves the active setting of a commonplace value standard rooted in situational ethics against a single, axiomatic value or truth of totalitarianism in the state and the market. By subordinating consumption (and thus money) and to a new moral standard, these transformative political acts reaffirm the social as the origin of all value against the fetishism of commodities, and establish the political situatedness of value against narratives of its abstract, scientific nature. As Gregory (1997) writes, “[C]ommonplace logic has historical and geographical generality; unlike axiomatic logic, it makes no eternal and universal truth claims” (309). The rejection of consumerism does not necessarily imply the rejection of consumption, as is evident for anyone who has witnessed the huge houses villagers build in south-eastern China. Nor does it imply a rejection of the modern state and its values, as is obvious in the case of the Shandong peasant rights activists. But it recreates a framework for a common perception based on the logic of the empowered peasant or the bendiren, revokes antagonistic contradictions, and works toward a new reciprocal recognition between elites and peasants (see Gregory 1997: 308). Rejecting consumerism and demonstrating concrete collective commitments has become a new form to test and testify sincerity, and to expose fakes. Moral reasoning is here a material practice rather than a verbal narrative, also because speaking truth remains in China an important prerogative of the postrevolutionary state. Narrating commonplace value would here only realize the tu (parochial or localized) peasant “without education,” that is, the already existing stereotype. But these material

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practices try to convince rogue local economic and political elites to return to a shared value standard, or subject to a Law, that promotes justice for the situated collective. The comparison between Shandong and Fujian is here again instructive. Fujianese peasants recast themselves as members of empowered collective through participating in revived ritual economies that today shift millions of renminbi, while Shandong peasant activists do so by rejecting both consumption and gifts, and by embodying pusu. The opposition is only apparent: in both places new moral collectives are created through the reconstruction and fixing of virtue—the timeless treasure or the head of the coin. This virtue creates new solidarities but it also threatens cadres and new elites with the authority of the law. In Shandong, peasant rights activists do so in a very literal sense, by studying legal texts and challenging lawless local governments through complaints and petitions to higher government levels, and increasingly also directly through the courts. In Fujian, in contrast, villagers use the threat of supernatural revenge and retaliation from magically efficacious (ling) temple gods, who also have traditionally represented the law in place (see Wang 1995). This threat works today, of course, primarily because of the so-called feudal superstition of local cadres or outside investors. I conclude this chapter with an anecdote from Baisha, where the government in 1991 had expropriated half of the village’s land for the construction of a golf course. Here villagers nearly simultaneously reconstructed the local village temple, which had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Soon the two temple gods reaffirmed their (much older!) claims to all original village lands through their annual ritual visits, during which they also demanded to enter the golf course, with the larger part of the village community in their tow. As one temple manager told me, in the first year the golf place owner, an American of Taiwanese descent, refused the local gods entry to what he believed was his golf course. In the following year, the number of his customers and his profits declined dramatically. Since then, as the temple manager went on gleefully, the golf course owner has come to believe in the gods’ magical power, and has made a point in sending his manager over to the village to personally invite the gods to his gold course. The golf course has also begun to make a large donation of incense money before the festival each year. In the eyes of the villagers, the gods’ magical power (as a blessing and a threat) helped to restore some balance in the relations between bendiren and the outside world. Justice has been restored, at least to a small extent.

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Notes 1. Literally the “normal language,” that is, Mandarin. 2. Interestingly, suzhi appears to be the older, classical Chinese term for quality in things whose meaning only with time was transferred to persons. Su means pure, simple, beginning, or root, and zhi innate character or intrinsic quality (Bakken 2000: 60). 3. For an in-depth discussion of this, see Anagnost (1997, 2004) and Bakken (2000: esp. chapters 2 and 3). 4. Xia hai, literally “to jump into the sea,” was the expression in the 1980s that described the (voluntary or forced) decision to give up one’s state job and instead to “go private,” to risk one’s luck in the treacherous seas of market relations. 5. Following Duara (1998), I define “authenticity” not primarily as an attribute of the individual self but as referring to a regime of truth, constructed as eternal and in opposition to the vagaries of history and the corruption of capitalist markets. For clarification it is worth to quote Duara at length: “Authenticity in my formulation refers primarily to an order or regime which invokes various representations of authoritative inviolability. A regime of authenticity derives its authority from ‘being good for all times,’ which is tantamount to being beyond the reaches of time . . . in my view, authenticity refers to a regime of power that repeatedly constitutes itself as the locus of authority—akin to Foucault’s ‘games of truth’ ” (294). 6. Stories of impostor VIPs, impostor monks, and impostor “minority persons” in contemporary China can be found in Anagnost (1997), Notar (2006), and Hooper (2005). 7. Significant here is the change in connotation of this political phrase from the Maoist to the post-Maoist era. For Mao, the “peasant problem” was ultimately the key to the creation of modern (socialist) China; in the Reform era the peasant problem has become the country’s development problem. 8. Roughly, human feelings/human interest, conscientious/serious, real/ true/genuine. 9. See also the discussion of the commodity\treasure binary in Myers (2001: 9). 10. In other words, class became significant as a political category as it ceased to be significant as an economic category, and, vice versa, was “officially” abolished just before it started to become an economic reality again in Chinese society. This decoupling is itself a significant strategy to drain “unruly” political potential from society (i.e., politics that do not represent the “regime of authenticity”). 11. There are obvious historical links here between Maoism and the Confucian politics of rectifying names (zheng1 ming), which assumed that no good government was possible without naming things and people for what they really are (Anagnost 1997: 102–103). But sincerity is

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13. 14. 15.

16.

Sus a n n e Br a n d t s t ä d t e r the other important historical link: zheng3, typically translated as sincerity, was the source of all morally valuable and effective practice. For Confucianists, sincerity implied not so much to be “true” to one’s individual self, as in Western romanticism, but to be consistent in appearance and practice with one’s social position and true (good) human nature (An 2004). This even became the official guideline of central politics under Hua Guofeng, Mao’s successor. Late known as “Two Whatevers” (liang ge fanshi), an official statement declared in 1977 that “we will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, [and] steadfastly abide by whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave” (quoted in Schoenhals 1991: 249). Yuan is yuan renminbi, the Chinese currency. The following is a summary of Wang Hai’s story as reported in Yan (2000) and Hooper (2005). On China as the “exemplary society” and the pervasiveness of models and modeling, also in premodern China, see Bakken 2000. The particularity of Maoist China was, of course, that emulating the new models presupposed the destruction of old models; it was also a means to destroy these old models. Although there is much talk about the “new peasant” of the “socialist market economy,” this new peasant is much more a fiction of the future than were Mao’s revolutionary peasants, which, at least, had already helped to realize “Liberation” in 1949.

Bibliography An, Yanming. 2004. “Western ‘Sincerity’ and Confucian ‘Cheng.’ ” Asian Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 2, 155–69. Anagnost, Ann. 1989. “Prosperity and Counterprosperity: The Moral Discourse of Wealth in Post-Mao China.” In Marxism and the Chinese Experience, edited by A. Dirlik and M. Meisner. 210–34. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. ———. 1997. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. “The Corporeal Politics of Suzhi in China.” Public Culture, Vol. 16, No. 2, 189–208. Bakken, Børge. 2000. The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control and the Dangers of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandtstädter, Susanne. 2006. “Muddled Modernities in ‘Peasant China.’ ” In ESRC Centre for Research on Social and Cultural Change, Working Paper. ———. Forthcoming. “Law, Popular Religion, and the Moral Economies of Political Representation in China.” In Permutations of Order: Religion

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and Law as Contested Sovereignties, edited by T. Kirsch and B. Turner. Aldershot: Ashgate. Davis, Deborah S. 2000. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dorfman, Diane. 1996. “The Spirits of Reform: The Power of Belief in Northern China.” Positions, Vol. 4, 253–89. Duara, Prasenjit. 1998. “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender and National History in Modern China.” History and Theory, Vol. 38, No. 3, 287–308. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2002. “Remnants of Revolution in China.” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in China, edited by C.M. Hann. 196–214. London: Routledge. Feuchtwang, Stephan, and Mingming Wang. 2001. Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China. London: Routledge. Gao, Yuan. 1987. Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Gregory, Christopher A. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Hart, Keith. 1986. “Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin.” Man, Vol. 21, No. 4, 637–56. Hooper, Beverley. 2005. “The Consumer Citizen in Modern China.” In Working Papers Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. 1–24. Keane, Michael A. 2001. “Redefining Chinese Citizenship.” Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1–17. Kipnis, Andrew B. 1995. “Within and Against Peasantness: Backwardness and Filiality in Rural China.” Comparatives Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, No. 1, 110–35. Myers, Fred R. 2001. “Introduction: The Empire of Things.” In The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, edited by F.R. Myers. 3–61. Oxford: James Curry. Notar, Beth. 2006. “Authenticity Anxiety and Counterfeit Confidence: Narrating Value in Reform-era China.” China Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, 64–98. Pun, Ngai. 2003. “Subsumption or Consumption? The Phenomenon of Consumer Revolution in ‘Globalizing’ China.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4, 469–92. Schoenhals, Michael. 1991. “The 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy.” The China Quarterly, Vol. 126, 243–68. Wang, Mingming. 1995. “Place, Administration, and Territorial Cults in Late Imperial China: A Case Study from South Fujian.” Late Imperial China, Vol. 16, No. 1, 33–78.

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Yan, Hairong. 2003. “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4, 493–523. Yan, Yunxiang. 1996. The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. “The Politics of Consumerism in China.” In China Briefing, edited by T. Whyte. 159–93. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

7

S ac r a : Ru mor s a bou t t h e Mor a l Forc e of R i t ua l Obj ec t s a s P u bl ic A rt

Karen Sykes

They possess that “mysterious conjunction of beauty when it is taken as a work of art, horror when it is taken as actually lived life, and power when it is taken as a moral vision.” —“The Moral Imagination,” Clifford Geertz

How Do Public Displays of Ritual Objects Come to be Understood as Wrong? At the beginning of his essay “The Moral Imagination” (1984), Geertz writes of the literary account, written by an English sailor who had heard another sailor tell a disturbing story of the practice of suttee in Bali. It is not clear if the seaman had viewed it or how he heard of it, but a reader finds the detailed account aesthetically beautiful and ethically disquieting. Suttee, the practice whereby a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband, had been long outlawed at the time of the alleged “sighting,” but the tale provided sufficient motive for the writer to consider the complexity of the woman’s intentions. Geertz argues that the moral imagination of the storytellers, stirred even by the singular telling of the tale of the act of suttee (embellished, real, or fictional), gains force in the retelling. He insists that it is not the moral actions of the woman that receive analysis so much as the actions of the tellers of the tale thereafter that

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yield up insights into the study of moral reason. This is why the tale from the sailor comes with a petition that the listener subscribe to the colonial administration’s ban on the practice. It is all too clear that there is a risk in rumoring tales from distant places—locales that are not immediately available to the listener—that the moral imagination will obscure the opportunity for understanding the specific situation better, such that the intentions of the widow can be understood in their specific context. I am not interested in the concept of the Balinese person that informs her personal motives, however privately or publicly inflected they may be. Instead, I am fascinated by the work of rumor, the story, or the fable; and so I chose the quotation starting this chapter because it addresses the power of rumor and stories, complicating the question of how the telling of them makes them “true” or reveals personal motives of their heroines. Retelling the horrific story of three young women’s choice or acceptance of a tragic death, the account takes on force as education, as fable, or as art. Listeners learn how the sacrifices of love and art might be horrors, even in their beauty, but that does not yield more insight about how the moral imagination in this case affects us. Moved by Geertz’s account to think further about the nature of rumor and the moral imagination, I took up an old puzzle about the aesthetics and ethics of the temporary display and the final disposal by incineration of a unique kind of sculpture used in funerary rituals, and developed a specific case of ruminations about that. First I should introduce the specific ritual object that concerns me in this chapter. The Malanggan is a famous ritual sculpture from the island of New Ireland, which lies off the northeast coast of New Guinea. It has been displayed in national museums around the world—but typically only briefly on display at village funerals before its destruction left funeral goers with only a memory of its beauty. As a sacred object, the Malanggan had long possessed the capacity to damage; as has been known by the devastating effects of its beauty upon the makers of the Malanggan at the moment when they animated the sculpture and insisted it possessed its own eye, or that it had the power of vision to see them, its own makers. While ritual objects of other provenance are rumored to possess such power, as Taussig (1994) reminds us with his discussion about the Australian churinga stone in his book Mimesis and Alterity, which addresses the politics of representation in postcolonial anthropology and the power of images to disrupt social life. This was especially so in the case of the Malanggan, the sculpture that concerns me here, because the physical display of the sculpture was part and parcel of

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the creation of the object. It was made to be destroyed; and so, the beautiful memory of its display left a trace or a residue with the viewers of it that was arguably a part of the ritual object itself. What remains interesting about the existing discussions, and especially about the Malanggan, was that much knowledge about these sacra in particular came to anthropologists “second hand,” through conversations, rumor, and interviews with men and women who professed to partial recollections of their knowledge of the sculpture. Whether through circumspection or modest speculation, I show here that rumor constructs specific knowledge claims that privilege associative over causal logic, sometimes mistaking the former for the latter. In this case, rumors privileged the contiguity of ritual objects, public display, and tragic death as if associations established causes, when they do not. But therein is the very problem. Pointing out the contiguity of sacred images, sculptures, and place was rhetorically persuasive, even helpful in the absence of surer accounts, but the adjacency of objects, persons, and aesthetic forms in public display does not constitute an understanding of the Malanggan’s allure and transience, nor does it explain how these events ended in tragedy. This is the story of that tragedy. After the display of ritual carvings in the new airport terminal in Kavieng, New Ireland, the carvers who made many of them fell ill and died. Although the deaths were spread out over the next decade, the rumors circulated that the wrongful use of ritual sculptures caused the tragedies. The new status of a sacred object as “art” raises varied considerations about provisions for its public presentation, and how its transfiguration through relocation comes to be judged to be wrong. First, it should be noted that the danger of viewing the sacred object was not only a new concern; the paradoxes of display are old ones. In its new role as an art object, these powers of its visual aesthetic shadow the new moral force of rumors that devastated peace of mind and well-being in social life; rumors about personal misfortune and tragic events created an explanation simply based on contiguity, from which tellers inferred causality. Here is the effect of the rumors and the different perspectives on them: the rumors created the popular belief that tragedy followed carvers’ and bureaucrats’ misappropriation of Malanggan into a permanent display as public art to be viewed by foreign tourists in this small South Pacific island or in the national collections of former imperial nations. It was thought by some villagers that the permanent visibility of the carvings undermined their important ephemeral qualities. From the perspective of these villagers, seeing the sculpture in ritual was so highly valued that they claim the

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memory of the carving is more powerful as an image in their mind’s eye than the presentation of the sculpture. The perspective of the artists of Malanggan sculptures is not the same as that of the bureaucrats who commissioned them. The artists believed they had failed to acknowledge the complexity of many cross-cutting obligations to other carvers that established their right to use the images for commission and thereby incited outrage for carving images that were not “their own.” The bureaucrats believed that jealousy over commission payments had evinced new belief in old sorcery practices. These are multilayered explanations from at least three interested perspectives. These are the several different perspectives from which people in New Ireland all reason that it is wrong to display sacred objects as art without some due consideration for their transfiguration. The stories are unusual in many respects, but most importantly they were founded in rumors that Malanggan carvers died for their mistaken public presentation of carvings that should have remained available for only selective viewings. Often, anthropologists do not include the accounts of the unusual and strange in their research because it can seem to undermine the credibility of the informants by exposing them in irrational moments; however, it is necessary to consider rumor if the rumor is to be fully elaborated as a form of moral reason. Once rumor is understood to be a form of moral reasoning, then it is clearer how the force of rumor in social life values objects—as either sacred or as beautiful. Before taking forward that point of view, the value of an object was simply a matter of perspective, and that perception is rarely shared throughout a community. Although I was present for the ceremonial unveiling of the art display at the opening of the new terminal building in 1992, the story begins after that. The substance of this chapter is built of people’s moral reasoning about the circulation of rumors and tales about that display, the speculative logic by which many people in the intervening years up to the present made sense of them and the suspicious worried consciousness that dominates that experience. Let me share how this story came to me.

Rumors The story came to me by whispers. At the turn of the twenty-first century a terrible rumor of a mysterious claim against human life was passed from one person to the next, throughout the island of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and to their kin across the world. I heard it in Massachusetts and in Port Moresby, again in Kavieng, and then in Konos. Although hard to substantiate in ethnographic or

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legal fact, the story resonated with everyone who heard or told it. The rumor possessed a kind of moral force; that is, a skilful configuration joining the tellers of the tale, the makers of the Malanggan (who are carvers as well as the viewers of the object, as will be shown), with the images and the creative techniques of those who heard and saw it. People respond to this moral force with the specific recognition of their entitlement to be good humans. The concept of moral force accounts for the effect that rumor has in creating the shared understanding that the display of sculpture is an ethical as well as an aesthetic concern. I understand moral force as the work of rumor in moral vision, as it is possessed and known as fluctuations of visibility and invisibility of forms. Visible and invisible forms are conjoined and realized in objects, such as the sculptures that I discuss in this chapter. I argue that analysis of the public displays of ritual objects, like the analysis of rumor, requires anthropology to account for the concept of moral force in tandem with moral vision, which in the case of Malanggan entails the recognition of human mortality. Much was said about the inappropriate display, which had captured the shared imagination in New Ireland, in public places of what have previously been used as ritual objects. Here it is encapsulated. Over the last decade, the indigenous artists whose expert Malanggan carving encircled the posts in the departure lounge of Kavieng International Airport had all died mysteriously. The beautiful ritual images remained on the tall posts that the men carved for public display in the terminal, but people felt awkward about viewing the carvings after the tragedy of the carvers’ deaths. A series of rumors about the causes of the deaths posed a complex understanding of the matter. The rumors expressed this question—had the carvers died because they had made Malanggans inappropriately, for permanent public display? How can Malanggans be made wrongly, badly, and inappropriately? The Malanggan is an artifact that indexes the era of “high” anthropology in disciplinary history, marking the scholarly pursuit of an understanding of its enigmatic character, over the value of it as collector’s item. Malanggans lie in museums, some wrapped in original covers, unexposed to human eyes, waiting to be revealed, or slipping into gradual oblivion. Malanggans were fated to become significant anthropological objects since the nineteenth century, when they were salvaged from imminent destruction by labor recruiters, whalers, and scientists of the South Seas voyages to be returned for study in ethnological museums. Only a few items are displayed in public, in permanent collections of museums of distant countries. Those Malanggans that are kept in the storage rooms of European

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museums and around the world number up to five thousand. These sculptures remain in ethnographic museums, some in their original wrappings, and do not appear in public displays. The numbers destroyed in New Ireland are harder to count. Those that appear in New Ireland as funerary sculpture are customarily seen only in ritual. Most usually the participants in the ritual destroyed the Malanggans in order to remove it from their sight after the funeral. They argued that the persistent image of the Malanggan would claim the human imagination too powerfully if it remained in view, and is just as disturbing to people as insisting that they place their permanent gaze upon the body of the dead. The appropriate way to look at Malanggan, its display, and its destruction is endemic to its form, which is a concern for the moral character of the display and of human’s lives. I discuss how the Malanggan’s claim on the imagination (the aesthetic) is conjoined with the moral claim (the ethical) on mortality. In order to understand the Malanggan’s claim on the mortality of the makers of it—its viewers as well as its carvers—let’s examine the contrary explanations about the propriety of displaying ritual objects in a public place. How do public displays of ritual images come to be understood as wrong? Did the decision to permanently display the Malanggan as a form of public art—rather than a ritual object—cost them their lives? With the rumor of the deaths the question arose: had the spirit of the Malanggan, the spirit behind the images, claimed their lives as wages for its irreverent public display and permanent exposure of sculptures that were otherwise intended to be seen briefly and then come to a beautiful destruction by burning or decay?

The Moral Force of Vision in the Making and Viewing of the Malanggan I have experienced and seen how rumor works, but it is more than a formal rhetorical device to disturb and even control a community. What was said, the content of the discussion, mattered as much as anything, and in this case people rumored tales about how the sculptures came to be inappropriately displayed and how men had died. Rumor gripped the imagination of New Irelanders because the subject matter—the ephemeral object, a memory of a painted, carved sculpture—was elusive to the tellers and listeners. If the thing itself was transient, then the matter of its appropriate display was all the more difficult to assure. How, where, and when a Malanggan is displayed is as important a part of moral force as the carving and painting of the Malanggan

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itself. How a Malanggan is viewed and the effect it has on its viewers is so important to establishing its value that New Irelanders still express doubt upon the arts. More than that, viewing a Malanggan made a person valuable, and the failure to see a Malanggan casts doubt upon the character and maturity of a person. Despite considerable effort, the work of vision was and is not well understood in Malanggan display; and what follows is a set of notes, gleaned from anthropological musings about a transient object, that address vision and its moral force in making a Malanggan display. It helps readers to know some of the details on the creative relations between viewers and makers, the power of the image in human memory, the work of perspective in relating the mortal human to the immortal divine, and how experience of looking conflates image and form. If the human eye, if vision, is a moral force then it is important to understand better how the search for creativity in artistic production can obscure the important question of how to live well. So while I am concerned with the specifics of the Malanggan case, it was not a unique one because there remain other examples of the reclassification of sacra into art that have considered how visibility1 and the ephemerality or transience of the sacra are part of the definition of the object as such.2 Michael Taussig argues that the visibility of a sacred object locates it in specific social relations, connecting it to what he calls the nervous system that links up the shared experiences of people, objects, and conceptual forms around the world. James Weiner describes how the very transience of “sacred knowledge,” which makes it powerful, is also undermined by the demands to treat occasionally appearances of it as evidence of its veracity. How do images entitle some people with the legitimate use of moral force over others? These questions are best answered with specific information; and so I would like to give an account of what could be known anthropologically about the Malanggan carvings as ritual objects. It should be recalled that Malanggans are prepared for display at funeral ceremonies, which bear the same name and are famously made in New Ireland, by carvers and sculptors who can claim expertise in their making one, if only because once before they have seen such a sculpture. The making of a Malanggan lies in the nature of vision itself. The viewer makes a Malanggan, as much as a carver does. This was because the Malanggan is recognized as such when it is seen, which is a process whereby the participants come to make the Malanggan by capturing the image of it with their own eyes. Seeing the image is an extremely important creative process, simply because the hosts of a funeral feast burn the sculptures after the brief display

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thereby leaving the image (rather than the material object) as the form of the sculpture. In Malanggan ceremony, participants were assured of the presence of the form. Creative skilful work united image and form, just as maker and viewer become one and the same. This process of making of Malanggan sculptures presented a uniquely interesting problem to those who viewed it, and many people over the last century have been fascinated by the story of the concentration of ritual work toward the final display and dispersal of the Malanggan. Malanggan rituals concentrated work toward the production of a sculpture, a ritual object that was displayed once, briefly and powerfully, to the assembled ritual participants. When in the ritual the form was recognized in the object, the object carries no purpose any longer. The Malanggan was destroyed by fire immediately after its display, or put out of sight until it decomposed into unrecognizable wood chips. I have seen two Malanggans destroyed in fires; and I hold five Malanggans in my attic of the sight of their makers. (This unnerves me when I think about it even now, but I was instructed not to put them in public view if I wished things to proceed safely for me.) As a result of the destruction of the sculptures, the remembered images of the Malanggan gained a distinct clear presence in the memory. All that remained was a beautiful memory. Even today, only a few Malanggan sculptures can be viewed as visible forms, whereas the images remain mostly as invisible form of the sculpture, meaning they are visible only in the memory. Many ethnographers have focused their analysis of the object on this distinction between visible and invisible forms of the Malanggan in their attempts to understand it. Even Parkinson and Thrunwald, the earliest collectors of New Ireland, acknowledged the enigmatic quality of the sculpture, and have never taken the visible form of the Malanggan to refer simply to the invisible, referring to the power of the Malanggans “to return in feverish dreams” to the European scientist, the ritual participant, the carver, and the hosts of the funeral alike, even for many years after seeing them as told by Augustin Kraemer, the leader of the early German scientific expedition, in the preface to Malanggan Von Tombara (Malanggans of the Cannibals), which was published in 1925. The early twentieth century witnessed other attempts to explain the meaning of Malanggan and interest in the sculptures escalated in France and the rest of Western continental Europe when the surrealist movement embraced them as objective forms of pure imagination, freed from the plastic art of sculpture. An early landmark anthropological study by Phillip Lewis (1969) of the Chicago Museum in the post–World War II era seems to correct

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the excesses of emotionality in the descriptions. Lewis drew on the general theories of perspective that had been advanced by his contemporary Panofsky, an art historian of the early renaissance. He documented Malanggan in its social context by describing the place of the object within the social dynamics of the ritual in the community, and as a device and means for carvers and viewers to access the spiritual world. His attempt to make Malanggan’s destruction intelligible as a study in perspective (akin to Panofsky’s study of the vanishing point as a key theme in establishing perspective in medieval painting so that human could be linked to the divine) outlined a dynamic relationship among artist, invisible form, viewer, and sculptures. The problem of perspective in regards to Malanggan lay with how people won insight from it, how it came to possess them. According to Lewis, New Irelanders understood the role of Malanggan in opening the profane to the sacred world so well that they saw no need to explain it; in fact they could not explain it without confounding themselves (as in an attempt to explain grammar by the process of speaking about it). Much later, Roy Wagner (1986) insisted that Malanggan is not an unsolved puzzle to be cracked by some later ethnographer, but rather stands for the lacuna of meaning; Malanggan signifies nothing. More akin to the perspectivism of Panofsky than to the rudimentary psychologizing of the early-twentieth-century scientists and artists, Roy Wagner, in his preface to his ethnography of a New Ireland village known as Bakan, argues that the experience of viewing Malanggan created an existential problem for the viewer of it.3 He later shows readers that humans were and are confounded with the desire to connect to the spiritual world beyond the presence of the Malanggan, even when that world may be nothing, nothing at all.4 An earlier ethnographer Hortense Powdermaker (1933) made a distinct call to examine the reproductive or generative capacities of Malanggan sculptures. She recorded the New Irelander complaint that European museums would possess the sculptures, but not know the work that went into making them (247). According to Powdermaker work remained invisible to the collector’s eye. Strathern (1988, 1990) draws this insight from Powdermaker, and use Kuchler’s ethnography to examine how people could become enchanted by technology as a form of creativity, as if it were separate from social life. She acknowledges that New Irelanders, like Europeans, think creativity is a distinctive concept, which can be acknowledged in such formal legal devices as patents. Strathern surmises that the concept is an inventive idea, a creative unit, which is invisible but finds uses (and hence its visibility) in the material world. Strathern is less concerned with

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Malanggans per se, and more interested in how the means for making and viewing Malanggans proved to be a useful analogy for intellectual property laws; as an analogy they are a tool for unpacking some core assumptions underlying European property laws, especially the patent.5 In a different account of the relationships of Malanggan to property, Derlon (1997) shows that an entitlement to access a garden was coterminous with the entitlement to create a Malanggan. The father’s clan concedes the right to access specific gardens to the makers of the Malanggan. She successfully demonstrates that garden access was won through the father, even within matrilineal society where clans claimed larger areas of land. Members of matrilineal societies recognized the creative contribution of paternity to the future of the matrilineal clan. Whereas Derlon, Powdermaker, and even Strathern emphasize work and generative forces in their studies of social life, their ethnography does not record the moral debates about those relations and how people meet obligations to the father, the clan, or the spiritual world when they view and dispose of Malanggans. The ethnographic work to date insists on the continuity of the imaginary form, a success that depended upon occasional conjunction of the ideal and material form in the making and display of Malanggan. Gell (1998) underscores such a theme in illustrating the art nexus with the Malanggan sculpture whereby the viewer or patient suffers the image, and feels its beauty or aesthetic power as a material effect in his body. Kuchler (2002) writes more metaphorically than analytically of this process, as she describes a sacrificial economy that gathers up many invisible places into one point in time and geography, building up the fire of imagination that regenerates the invisible as visible forms, and releases the invisible forms as if smoke into the wind and as if sparks to the mind’s eye, until those forms can be captured visually again. Malanggan is powerful work, and it might be the case simply that Malanggan makers had to be courageous to understand and see the final effect of their work; that is, the successful confluence of visible and invisible forms. It is also true that Malanggan making required the creators to be courageous because they are not certain to succeed. Not all Malanggans succeed, some fail to accomplish the work of reproducing the imaginary forms and these sculptures appear dusty pale parodies of their creators’ ideas. Sometimes these Malanggans are destroyed without revealing it in ritual, as happens when a rumor spread that the wife of the Malanggan maker had viewed it before it was complete, or when the Malanggan makers constructed them on sites that other clans had not conceded to them for gardening or for residing.

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Given the certainty that the invisible form will persist, why should it be thought difficult to create a Malanggan? This is one question that haunted the inappropriate display and the untimely death of the carvers in Kavieng. Somewhat differently than the existing ethnographers of Malanggan,6 I focus upon the arguments about its moral force and question how it must be displayed. How did the death of the carvers in New Ireland make it necessary to reintroduce a concern with human mortality into anthropological considerations of the Malanggan images? As I have discussed, for many decades the carved Malanggans of Northern New Ireland have perplexed art historians and anthropologists alike because they seem to defy interpretation, but act so powerfully upon the imagination that they have become a primary object of fascination for collectors and artists over the last century. In recent years, anthropologists prefer to believe that they answered the question of how to move the Malanggan as a ritual object into a public space if they simply referred to the way it was used in ritual. Because Malanggans are destroyed after brief revelations the image can be kept in memory. The simple solution seems to have been that museums could keep the sculptures as objects, while New Ireland people kept the sculptures and images (Kuchler 2002). This apparently happy division of claims on the objects, that some kept rights of disposal, use, and possession on the images, while others kept rights on the material form, soon becomes a failed treaty between museum partner and indigenous makers. The problem arises when those who can claim authorship can stand, or potentially stand, in close proximity and in public view of the Malanggans that they or their ancestors made. What are the ways forward to overcome the problems raised by this overly close association of the sculptor and his sculpture, and why is it that the old solutions to this problem will not remove the angst felt at such a possibility? First, I will provide a brief description of the conventional display of Malanggan in the event of mortuary ritual.

A Normative Account of Moral Force in Malanggan Few people outside of the funeral goers see a Malanggan, and even then there are restrictions on access to the sculpture. Fewer still see the work that went into its construction, but a privileged perspective on Malanggan construction begins with a moral injunction: in order to see a Malanggan properly, a person must first recognize his or her own mortality.

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The moment of the Malanggan display recalls the first burial or cremation of the dead. While a Malanggan ceremony often happens many years after the event of the actual death, in the moment preceding the actual display, the hosts of the men’s house light a fire akin to the original crematory fire. In the ritual the carvers display the Malanggan after the fire is lit and smoke rises from the men’s house. The Mandak say it looks like a bird taking flight from the house. At the point that smoke from the fire takes flight upward, the Lewiniwu (the younger man in the role of eulogist) jumps from the enclosure to the feasting grounds shouting “Laxalavala, I ra va su” (the red eyed bird [or the fire-bird] has flown up). He leaps atop the displayed pigs, which are waiting redistribution from a platform, and sings a eulogy from that place, asking the crowd to think of their progenitors and disperse from the ritual, going back to those who wait for them. The Malanggans are then revealed to the participants. Each feaster gives a portion of shell wealth to show that they feel humility at the sight of it. The ritual demonstrates the person is a composite; the spirit and the body are conjoined with skill. A person with vision that is an eye educated by participation in ritual exchanges of images, objects, and forms can see this confluence of soul with body. Vision is understood here as an aesthetic skill. Vision, as a skill, entails recognition and reciprocity; it is in the exchange of vision with Malanggan that viewers and carvers alike learn they are mortal, and recognize mortality to be a force in their lives. Everyone present at the display of a Malanggan can view it, and can participate in the exchange of vision. Early in my research, I had thought that this skill distinguished expert carvers from feasters, and so I will begin my explanation there. From what I know of carvers’ skill in animating the Malanggan, the process is considered to be dangerous and proceeds by placing the eyes in the sculpture in order to animate it. For a carver, visual skill is only learned in the process of placing the “eyes” in a Malanggan, and he cannot learn how to do otherwise than in the actual performance of the ritual. The carver stays in the bush for days, and dreams of the spirits of long dead ancestors, before this last operation of making the Malanggan. Placing the eyes in the Malanggan animates it so powerfully that he feels overwhelmed in the moment and he collapses onto the ground, as if dead. In the eye of the Malanggan, he recognizes his own eye. The Malanggan’s agency as a sculpture that allegedly sees humans is the outcome of his agency as a creator who sees Malanggans. The carver and the Malanggan exchange vision, in a mutual recognition of the vision’s agency in making bodies and objects human. With this

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knowledge he collapses; his work is complete in that event. The carver brings the Malanggan to life in the moment of exchanging vision with it, and seemingly shows how that is so by appearing to have lost his own life in the process. The Malanggan educates the viewers of the Malanggan at the time of the feast into the recognition of the ephemeral quality of mortal life. In the ritual display the feasters are prepared to view the Malanggan, having given taro, shell wealth, and pigs in the public view of everyone assembled. The hosts expose the Malanggan by dropping the protective coconut frond walling from around the place where it sits, in the men’s house enclosure near the graves that contain the bones of the dead. The painted objects, with strong distinctions of dark and light fields of color, glow in the midday sun. Those present at this funeral feast gaze at it for a brief time, and turn away to show their humility in the face of such a remarkable creation as the Malanggan. In turning their faces away from the object and toward the ground, they close their eyes and cover them with one hand. What they have seen is now a fleeting image in their immediate memory. At first the gesture appeared to me as style, a movement that signified their humility and suggested their grief at their loss. I thought it stood as the reminder of human mortality. I learned in later years, when I returned, that in the moment of turning away from the Malanggan display they could learn to see it, as if to educate their vision of it. The scintillating paint on the sculptural objects overwhelmed their vision, and they turned away from the sculptures in awe, so that they could think about what they had seen. Thinking about the image is a specifically visual skill, concentrating upon what we commonly call the afterimage. The dark and light fields of color, when viewed in very bright light, will be reversed for the person seeing it again. By turning their vision away, they captured the reversed image on the back of their eyelids and looked at the shimmer and fade of the afterimage as they had felt and seen it. The reversals of light and dark fields lacked precision of detail as an afterimage. The viewer sought to imagine their experience back into the outline that they had recovered as an afterimage. The potency of the Malanggan image remained with them as understanding of the fragility of being human. The force of the Malanggan, its conjunction of aesthetic and ethical powers, comes with the mutual recognition between Malanggan and maker of the fact of human frailty. The exchange of vision is also demonstrated in the exchange of vulnerabilities. What I have described so far is a case for the aesthetic of

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life, but its ethic has distinct force in human affairs. As I will show in the next section, a consideration of human mortality is reasoned in as a factor altering the effects of the display. The recognition of mortality gives the Malanggan moral force in creative processes, and reveals the Malanggan as an image within situated human relationships. In seeing a sculpture, in the unification of image and form, participants at a feast recognize the time of their own mortality, the force that makes them simply human. Being human, they measure their days by accounts of their generosity and their gifts to each other and recount these at the funeral feast in order to celebrate the life of the departed. The deceased is known by the redistribution of his shell wealth, by the recognition of children’s entitlements to gardens, and by the display of the Malanggan that releases spirit from mortal body. The viewers of the Malanggan first give gifts of taro (which is said to be life-giving or loroxan), and of pigs (which instantiate and extend corporal existence in the redistribution of the flesh), and finally of portions of shell wealth (which recognize and sustain the social network of reciprocal obligations). Afterward, the hosts bestow the guests with their entitlement to view the Malanggan, just before the sculpture is burned. The ephemeral Malanggan object is possessed only as an image, which is also the form of its display. In Malanggan display people come to understand the ephemeral as indicative of vulnerable humanity, life in which human mortality is both tangible and ever present.

Moral Force I cannot quell doubts about the causes of the death of the men, but I will address the interesting question of how their deaths came to be moral acts rather than simply social ones. This entails that I consider the background to the tragedy as a way of understanding how people came to understand the Malanggans as ritual objects, out of place. The display of the Malanggan in a public space is thought to be an act that is contrary to the social norms of ritual, simply because it is in the public rather than a separate sphere of ritual action. The assumption is that the boundary between the sacred and the profane protects humans from damage by divinities that wish humans to calibrate their actions toward worship, rather than practicalities of living. The prime minister and the men had hoped to display the best of New Ireland’s art to the world by presenting it in the hallways of the new airport terminal, thereby making that international space used by New Irelanders and their guests as resonant with power as the

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landscape of “New York.” The men aimed to display Malanggan in its home province with the same regard for it as had been shown for its display in the most prestigious museums around the world. They sought to bring a public art display, of the sort more commonly seen in the national capitals around the world, right back to New Ireland. Kavieng Airport terminal and all of New Ireland would be truly international, rather than the possessor of a few carvings in the gift shops of the hotels. The carvers and the bureaucrats played with the boundaries of ritual during the creation and the installation of Malanggans. The best, most renowned carvers worked on the project and soon each carver had covered a post with Malanggan images so that it reached from floor to ceiling of the airport’s public space. They did so at the bidding of the prime minister of PNG, who counted the province his home and wanted the airport terminal to communicate the ethnic identity of the province. They aimed to make the Public Art display the realization of a vision of the collective identity of the people of New Ireland. At best, the airport carvings were the most spectacular public revelation of Malanggan arts in New Ireland. At worst the display was a disaster that caused the deaths of elderly men. There are several explanations for the deaths, which I describe in the rest of the chapter. First, some men sickened with embarrassment. Some New Irelanders did not like the carvings in the terminal, and felt that the work failed to be of good standard. The charge embarrassed those men who had worked diligently at producing them, and those men who were most distressed, retired from public life in both town and village. Each Malanggan carver chose to stay near his men’s house, feed a few pigs, and to spend his last years alone with a few immediate relatives. Many of the men who were embarrassed most deeply by the judgment could be found from month to month in the various hospitals around the province of New Ireland. Second, some men suffered the ill will and sorcery of jealous relatives, who wished to possess for themselves, some of the financial reward given to the carvers. In reality this sum was small (one thousand Kina or about two hundred pounds in 1999), and redistributed around the group who helped the carvers. Finally, some relatives argued that the carvers had revealed for selfish reasons all the invisible forms of the Malanggan. They felt that they had used their skill inappropriately because they tried to distinguish themselves as expert tradesmen or artists (rather than ritual carvers) and thereby win financial or political status in town.

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The Malanggan’s Claim on Carvers, the Bureaucratic Hosts, and the Visitors What reasons did bureaucrats and local New Irelanders offer for the loss of the kinsmen and the destruction of the images, after placing those sculptures by putting the carvings in public view? The Malanggan made its claims on New Irelanders through a period of seven years between 1992 and 1999, beginning with a public celebration of the opening of Kavieng International Airport in 1992 and ending with the death of the last of the Malanggan carvers in 1993. All of the master carvers died subsequent to displaying the images. New Irelanders share an overwhelming sense that each carver experienced the real claim of the Malanggan on human life simply because they died after they carved it for the public. Did the Malanggan spirits simply take their due? How do we know that the Malanggan claimed its due by taking the lives of the carvers who displayed the images in the airport? The problem of stating the Malanggan’s claim is similar to that of clarifying Antigone’s claim against the state and against her kin. Judith Butler in her short book Antigone’s Claim (1999) discusses the relative powers of kinship relations and state and shows us that Antigone did not say directly that she violated state law when she buried the corpse of her brother who had raised an army against his Sovereign. Like Antigone’s claim, which must be indirectly spoken, even as her suicide is as decisive and intentional an act as it could ever be, the Malanggan’s claim is known through indirect speech and through the ways in which people negate the possibility that it could have been any other way. It is not possible to say that the carvers surrendered their lives to the Malanggan spirits to demonstrate their claim to use their artistic techniques to connect to the spiritual world, but neither is it possible to say that the Malanggan did not claim them in return. It is not clear exactly what can be said of the Malanggan’s possession of the lives of the carvers, or if indeed it was that. Consider that Kavieng bureaucrats benchmark the airport carvings as a first major display of Malanggan as public art. They assume that having made a public display once in the past, the old questions and prohibitions against the public display of Malanggan no longer hold for the present or future. They feel that they have entered a new era when it is better to consider the protective measures needed to protect cultural heritage, which is a different matter than the consideration of the proper display of Malanggan.

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Among village leaders—the elderly men who were companions, peers, and age mates of the dead carvers, there is some discussion about the ethics of the display. These men believe that the images should not be on display, it is too late to go back. Once seen, men cannot recover the Malanggan as a concealed image. The elder men wonder out loud if the Malanggan has taken all that it wants with the lives of the eight elderly carvers. A smaller group of men wonder if some members of a secretive men’s society have worked sorcery against the carvers, leading to the premature and unpleasant deaths. This accusation is made furtively. People with many reasons to be the culprit for murder by sorcery often make charges of malicious conspiracy against others, naming them as sorcerers, and even charge the deceased with doing evil. If they accused someone openly, they could betray their own guilt. Such stories can overwhelm scholars, especially if the strange story is ignored and overwhelms them by numbing their sensibilities to stimuli that would open up the account. I repeat these stories here because this is not an exotic topic but an ethical one. My aim is to write about the Malanggan’s claim as a way to incorporate an ethical perspective into the debate on property relations, which otherwise risks becoming means to affirm the legitimacy of the state. Just as New Irelanders make Malanggans in order to help them recognize the wages of death and to contemplate what they have lost, I would aim to bring into view what we risk losing from our analysis if we research issues that can be described only in the legal, normative terms of social life. If all of this seems unusual, there remain some further questions about Malanggan displays remain unanswered. What does it mean to consider the perspective of the art form, the Malanggan, which stands for the body of the deceased as a temporary vessel of both its will and its spirit? I consider what it means to analyze the conjunction of aesthetics and ethics in the point of view of Malanggan rituals, which famously defies interpretive gloss, and lies beyond the intelligence of speech and conversation while it demands seemingly to be understood from its own perspective on social relations. Certainly, I cannot speak or write assuredly from the perspective of the Malanggan (that would be similar to writing from the perspective of the unconscious), but I did analyze the rumors that claimed the imagination of curators and artists. So let’s reverse the background and foreground of the discussion so far. Let’s put the rumors and claims in the background with the matter of moral reasoning, and put the power of the visual aesthetic and sorcery in the foreground. Then we can ask a more

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unusual question, but it is the question that bothered everyone in Kavieng, New Ireland, for years. What kind of claim does the Malanggan sculpture make upon people? It is clearly not a moral claim at all.

Volt Sorcery at the K avieng Airport Terminal Anthropologists must combine both ethics and aesthetics in order to understand Malanggan as public art in New Ireland. Both forms of the aesthetic, the recognition of the beauty in the separation of imaginary and material form as it is learned from viewing the carved Malanggan, and the recognition of the ephemeral beauty of the images as taught by the display of the knotted Malanggan, which reverse the visual schema. To clarify how this matters, I discuss the Malanggans carved on the posts of the departure hall of the Kavieng Airport terminal in order to show how an appreciation of ephemeral beauty motivated people to discuss ethics of Malanggan display more generally. The provincial politician chose boldly to decorate the departure and arrival halls with carved house posts that resonated with the images used to carve the house posts of men’s houses up and down New Ireland. He chose eight Quila trees, an exotic hardwood from central–south New Ireland, which turns to iron strength with weathering, and is much prized for the work of carving house posts. For each post, he commissioned a master carver from across the island of New Ireland for a sum of one thousand Kina. The money was to be split among the men who worked with each of the carvers, many of whom formed workshops of about a dozen or more helpers. At the outset, it seemed a modest proposal. These posts used the work and images found in carved Malanggans, but did not pretend to be Malanggan carvings. They are not painted as a carving would be, and they do not produce the effect of igumes, the “glittering” that makes it possible for light to be reflected into the eyes of the viewers—an aspect so deeply essential to the work of Malanggan making as to make it potent to historical memory and the regeneration of social life. The government erected the posts in 1992 in the departure hall at Kavieng Airport, after the carvers spent a full year of work completing them. The carvers rushed to finish in time for the celebrations at the terminal, and in the last months excluded many individuals and sub-clans from participating in decisions about which images should

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be seen, at the displeasure of the clanspersons who were possessed of the rights to view them. The house posts stood in October 1992 when the whole province celebrated with a feast of roast pork and vegetable, a series of dances, and a line up of political speeches. Amidst the celebrations, those clanspersons excluded from the final decisions about carving particular images began to complain openly and loudly about the quality of the work. They argued that the posts were toys and models of house posts, and not authentic. They disputed the quality of the carvings, insisting the rough job robbed the power from the customary art. They quarreled with their clanspersons and insisted that the carvers insulted the clan and its dead ancestors with the abdominal creations. They lamented the fact that all the images had been exposed, the world of the ancestors destroyed, and the days of the Malanggan rituals had ended. In the midst of the government’s celebrations, they deplored their future and exclaimed, “We will be nothing but ‘happy-clappy’ Christians, sly businessmen, poor peasants, and corrupt politicians now.” The crowds had injured the Malanggan carvers with their complaints. The men, who once felt proud of their skill, now felt ashamed that they had betrayed their ancestors with these poor carvings. The vilified carvers returned to home villages and said no more, now that the posts were exposed. News of the deaths of the Malanggan carvers came in bits and pieces over the next decade. By 2003, all of the original carvers had died mysteriously and unpleasantly. The deaths distressed bureaucrats employed in the tourism and culture ministry, as well as the clanspersons of the carvers. As the case shows, there can be no happy division of indigenous kinship claims made on the imaginary separate from the state legitimate claims made on the material forms of the Malanggan. Such a separation of imaginary from material forms of art requires that people forget that in one case they make claims on the ephemeral aesthetic, not the constant forms of property. Taking into account the underside or the negative side of the sculptural aesthetics, just what kind of claim did the Malanggan make upon the carvers, the bureaucratic hosts, and the international visitors? I have been told that the politician attempted to honor the deep understandings of the working of Malanggan, rather than act out of ignorance. The nature of his understanding creates a complex claim for him. That for a short time he successfully exercised more powerful sorcery to entice the Malanggan carvers to expose all the images, to gather those images in to one place and to compose them for a few years as common property. The Malanggan images became public

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possessions of the Province of New Ireland. Whereas other times the state has taken the artworks of an artist at the time of his death in exchange for the uses of civic property, for example, a private home, the prime minister of PNG acted somewhat differently. Chan took the images from the carvers in exchange for money (a thousand Kina each). A few New Irelanders wondered if Chan was accountable by reason of his indirect involvement, causing distressed people to commit acts of sorcery, especially as sorcery always works by indirect action.

Rumor, Associative Logic, and the Consciousness of Human Mortality Asking about the perspective of the Malanggan, unusual as it may seem, introduces the third dimension of moral reasoning, the dimension of consciousness of human mortality it added to the mutually supportive patterns of associative logic and the rumor. The sculpture’s power to call up consciousness of mortality relies upon invocations of the extra-social in its ritual display, and hence its display in the secular public provoked New Irelanders into discussion of its extra-social or antisocial power. Before concluding, I want to outline two contrary explanations for Malanggan, the aesthetic of associative logic and the moral reason of the rumor that supports it. Each elaborates a different way of understanding moral force. First, Malanggan can be understood as an associative logic that wields a pastiche of images and concepts into a thing of beauty, even when facing mortality. Malanggan can be considered as a drawing up of social relations as a pastiche in a re-presentation of the ritual insight into the fragility of human life. Perhaps this approach, which is commonly known as a postmodern aesthetic that places meaning from the past into direct relationship with those of the present, neither unifies nor predetermines deeper meaning. Second, spreading rumors about the failure of the carvers and bureaucrats to appropriately present the Malanggan entitles people to visualize the sculpture as they gossip, and then regenerate its form while shouldering the burden to deliberate how it might have been presented best. At least two significant analyses exist of one object’s repositioning aesthetically and ethically in a new situation. One approach (much like the postmodern analysis) is most concerned with aesthetic form, and emphasizes how the specific composition of images and ideas evinces the forcefully felt awareness of mortality while it values a human life against its ultimate loss, rather than values it in terms of

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how a life is presented to others in the world and thereby lived. The postmodern emphasizes the display of images, often in composite forms, as if they were extensions from the past into the present that erased all consciousness of social change. It is an approach that recognizes no political or moral works for the success of its orchestration through an associative logic. Taken as such, the Malanggan might first seem to be understood as a composite image, without importance of form beyond the presentation of the figures themselves. Indeed Malanggan carvings are composites of birds, snakes, and flowers as if they accomplished the task of reproduction by being seen in composite. The other approach, which interests me here, engages the storyteller’s moral imagination about the limits of associative logic (the composite of ideas and forms) that uses rumor to resituate the object in the light of consciousness of human mortality. Associative logic without consciousness of mortality is only an aesthetic concern with composites, configuration, and patterns. Consciousness of mortality would be hard to understand, but in this case consciousness has a physical referent, in the personal experience of the afterimage. As I described, the Malanggans are luminescent in the sunlight because the paint is mixed with coconut oils and with ground seashell to create a reflective paste that covers the surface of the carving so that it is smooth and better able to reflect light. The paint puts blocks of black and white juxtaposed with each other. In viewing the extraordinary Malanggans, the viewer will turn away and cover his or her eyes after looking at it for a few minutes. They aim to catch the afterimage, as a reversed glow on their eyelid. As the participant views the afterimage in the shadow of his eyelid, he imaginatively fills in the rough shapes with a memory of what he has seen in the preceding minutes. The remembered image is already colored by the memory of the event, the imagination works to fill in the gaps so that beauty has presence or force about it. People are aware of personal consciousness at the moment that they confront an image of human mortality. In the Kavieng Airport terminal, the statues stand without paint. They cannot educate the imagination without the paint that facilitates the work of light, and the possibility of the exchange of vision. What people do retain in visual memory is different than that. The co-presence of the Malanggan carver with the Malanggan itself is toxic to social norms, and people must reason about the morality of the display. The permanent presence of the “creators” beside the creative product mystifies the viewers, who are the public that come to the airport as residents and their guests in the province. Having

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the carver co-present and alive with the Malanggan on display (when their “deaths” would be necessary to the successful animation of the sculpture in ritual) gives rise to the rumors. In turn the co-presence of the rumors with local knowledge of the working of Malanggan, gives rise to the moral force of the claims for the carvers’ deaths. In the public display in the Kavieng Airport terminal, the moral force of the Malanggan lies with associative logic, supported by the mutual capacities of speech and vision to make “connections” where contiguity is more highly valued than causality. Visibility gains force in an explanation, not from certainty of vision, but out of angst while holding a perspective on particular entities placed side by side; the force of rumor as explanation grows from the series of claims made by bureaucrats, carvers, sculptures, and even the stories about them. How do they all add up? Rumor works in a manner similar to sorcery, although sorcery escapes ultimately from the rhetoric of speech. Rumor makes the coincidence of events—or of people—in one place into evidence of the one entity’s causal effect on the other. Those who spread rumor tend to speculate. They suggest possibilities, rather than argue from evidence. The power of rumor lies in rhetoric; it persuades others to entertain suggestions, rather than dispute what might or might not be true. Sorcery, as the examples of volt sorcery show, operates by putting two things side-by-side that have no causal relationship. The assumption of volt sorcery is that one entity experiences contagion by the other, which is not a causal relationship. For example, an actor directs their intentions toward a particular end of effecting change in an entity, as when an agent demonstrates their power by injuring a victim, or curing a patient. Causality is inferred, it is not active, nor can it be demonstrated. Causality is assumed to be an active force, when the event is no more than an observable effect of two entities standing together in one place allows. The power of rumor, or of sorcery, can lie in the fact that suggestions are made retrospectively, when people are trying to understand how a calamity occurred, or how things came to be, tragically, as they are. In this case, the knowledge of the death of the carvers gives the rumors about the negative effects of the public display of Malanggan a moral force that they would not otherwise possess. This should not surprise a listener who is grieving relatives, or is fearful of losing kin to death. The question is a social one, not simply a personal matter. As has been shown in earlier studies of ritual, which contemplate, what kind of life is a good to live is raised as a part of the work of funerary arts. The recognition of human mortality gives potency to

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both the logical and the rhetorical dimensions of the arguments. The question of how the acts of the Malanggan carvers caused their deaths also raises its corollary, of how Malanggan carvers ought to have lived with their expertise? Mortality presents the ever-present problem of understanding the rationale for doing and being good. Given that I can make Malanggan, how should I best do that? Given that I have life, what should I do with it? If I were to generalize, then I could say this has been an account of subaltern peoples—each subaltern to yet another group, as carvers serve bureaucrats and bureaucrats serve foreign tourists— caught between the ritual displays of Malanggan in the villages and the public display at the international airport. Any record of the commoditization of the Malanggan into an art object must include the villagers’ point of view, along with the bureaucrats and politicians and foreign tourists, and also include a perspective that anticipates the readers’ awareness of their own mute observance as they wonder at these events and wonder what they have subjected themselves to by reading of them. Although entitled “sacra,” in these pages I did not analyze the process of their commoditization, nor did I present a general theory of value that accounts for desecration. However, moral reasoning, these rumors that trace conscious understanding of human mortality through various associative logics, is preliminary and necessary to advancing a better understanding of all of that.

Notes I would like to thank my colleagues Tony Crook, Melissa Demian, Eric Hirsch, Lawrence Kalinoe, Stuart Kirsch, James Leach, and Marilyn Strathern who offered invaluable support for the duration of the ESRC-UKfunded research project Property, Transactions, Creations: New Economic Forms in the Pacific, in which this story emerged. I thank them and the ESRC for the support of the work. In addition, I acknowledge colleagues at the University of Manchester who commented on oral presentations of different versions of this material, and for additional research funding. Some of this material has been discussed at EHESS, Paris at the invitation of Stephane Breton in the seminar series led by Andre Iteanu. Finally, I thank the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea, and the National Cultural Commission for giving permission for this research. 1. Taussigs’ examples include the appearance of churinga stones. 2. For example, in cases where sacred objects and transient knowledge are measures of the truth of claims to native title to land, culture became accessible to the court through a sealed envelope.

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3. Wagner’s ethnography Aswinarong: Image, Ethos and Power amongst the Usen Barok (1986a) begins with a tribute to the Malanggan as emblematic of the enigma of culture. It is a most provocative preface because the Barok, with whom he lived for nine months to complete his research, do not make Malanggans. They do, however, understand the practical joke or the double bind that the intransigence of cultural meaning generates for cross-cultural communications. His book Symbols that Stand for Themselves, which was released in the same year, addresses what that might mean for cultural anthropology more generally. 4. The enigma of the Malanggan continued to move Wagner, who as late as 2001 wrote that subjectivity was constituted against the history of conscious corrections made to approximate an understanding of the real person, who remained inaccessible. 5. The patent is a legal device that protects the private ownership of creative works, while releasing them to wider use. The Malanggan is a sculpture that entitled the viewers to reproduce it in new material forms. 6. I include Kramer (1925), Lewis (1969), Brouwer (1977), Gunn (1987), Wagner (1986a), Clay (1986), Derlon (1997), Kuchler (2002), as well as Parkinson (1907) among the ethnographies under consideration.

Bibliography Brouwer, Elizabeth. 1977. A Malanggan to Cover the Grave. PhD dissertation, ANU. Buschmann, Rolf. 1999. The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea 1870–1914. PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii. Butler, Judith. 1999. Antigone’s Claim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clay, Brenda. 1986. Mandak Realities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coote, James, and Anthony Shelton, eds. 1992. Art, Anthropology and Aesthetics. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. Derlon, Brigitte. 1997. Memoire et Oublie. Paris: CNRS. Geertz, Clifford. 1984. “Found in Translation: The Social History of the Moral Imagination.” In Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Hildred. 2004. The Life of a Balinese Temple. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. Gunn, Michael. 1987. “The Transfer of Malanggan Ownership on Tabar” in An Assemblage of Images: Idea and Image in New Ireland, edited by Louise Lincoln, New York: George Braziller Hirsch, Eric, ed. 1998. Art and Anthropology: The Anthropology of Alfred Gell. London: UCL Press.

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Jeudy-Ballini, Monique. 1999. “The Price of Emotion.” Pacific Arts, Vol. 13, No. 1, 23–37. Kramer, Augustin. 1925. Malanggan Von Tombara Munich: George Mueller. Kuchler, Susanne. 2002. Malanggan. Oxford: Berg. Layton, Robert. 2003. “Art and Agency: A Reassessment.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 9, No. 3, 447–64. Lewis, Phillip. 1969. The Social Contexts of Art in New Ireland, vol. 58. Field Museum of Chicago, Chicago: Fieldiana. McLuhan, Marshall. 1951 (rpt 2003). The Mechanical Bride. Toronto: Viking Press. Parkinson, Richard. 1907. Dreibig Jahre in der Sudsee. Stuttgart: Strecker and Schroder (Translated into English as Thirty Years in the South Seas by J. Dennison. Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing, 1999). Pinney, Chris, and Nicholas Thomas, ed. 2001 Beyond Aesthetics. Oxford: Berg. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1933. Life in Lesu. New York: W.W.Norton. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ———. 1990. “Artifacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Images.” In Culture and History in the Pacific, edited by Jukka Siikala. Helsinki: University of Finland. Taussig, Michael. 1994 Mimesis and Alterity. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Tuzin, Donald. 2002. “Anthony Forge: A Memorial.” Canberra Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 1, 44– 67. Viveros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And. Address to the ASA Decennial. Manchester: Manchester Papers in Anthropology. Wagner, Roy. 1986a. Asiwinarong: Image, Ethos and Power amongst the Usen Barok. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1986b. Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. The Anthropology of the Subject. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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A f t e r Wor ds: From Et hos t o Pat hos

C.A. Gregory

Introduction This collection of essays is the product of a series of workshops over a long period where the organizing themes were debated and modified and drafts of articles discussed and revised. I entered the discussion toward the end of this period in a weekend workshop held in Manchester on April 29–30, 2006, where the penultimate drafts were presented. As the essays dealt mainly with Melanesia and South Asia, and as I am one of the few anthropologists around who has worked in both areas, it was no doubt thought that I could contribute something by way of comparative overview. I confess that my initial reaction was one of skepticism because I have always thought that regional comparative exercises of the India-versus-Melanesia kind were an abuse of the comparative method because it works best, I believe, when the cases to be compared are broadly similar cases, differing only in small but significant ways. However, as I read the articles I realized that the project was not concerned with regional comparison, that the issue was not Homo Hierarchicus meets the Melanesian Person, nor even a critique of these much celebrated and discussed concepts; abstractions like this were simply not on the agenda. So, just what is the agenda? Where do these essays lead us? What strikes the reader of these essays is the refreshing concreteness of the ethnographic descriptions given and the recognizably human dimensions of the moral paradoxes and dilemmas discussed; no

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“cultural translation” is needed to comprehend the ethnographic specificities. The idea of “moral reasoning” has served as a device for enabling the authors to think about some of the data they collected in the field, some of the characters they encountered, and about some of the moral dilemmas they, and their informants, have faced. The exercise has been more in the nature of an experiment in inductive, “bottom–up” rumination of the way in which people cope with the moral dilemmas and paradoxes in their day-to-day lives. The respective authors have modest aims but the chapters, considered collectively, raise some interesting theoretical questions for discussion that I will now try to raise.

Moral Reasoning, Paradox, and Rationality The Oxford English Dictionary defines a paradox as a “proposition or statement that is (taken to be) actually self-contradictory, absurd, or intrinsically unreasonable” (OED 2004). This definition captures a theme found in every essay in this volume. They describe the moral dilemmas that arise from various paradoxical situations: the problems created by the public display of sacra that should not be seen; the concerns different people have about the existence of cheap, fake commodities that have high intrinsic values; the jokes of angry citizens in a state that is privatizing their private assets; the strategies of “big shots” who strive to maintain custom by selling it on the market; the moral dilemmas of poor, needy people who are able to make big profits from begging; and the corruption of officials whose job it is to wipe it out. The use of the expression moral reasoning to describe the thought processes of people caught up in these unreasonable moments is apt because the expression itself is a contradiction in terms in the sense that the word “moral” originally meant “founded on opinion, sentiment or belief and not on meticulous facts or reasoning” (ibid.). The first question these chapters confront us with, then, is of how do we as academics—as merchants of reason—handle the problems posed by paradox? How do we reason about unreason? Freedom from contradiction is the essence of rationality; its presence is the very definition of irrationality. For the rationalist a paradox is “bad,” and must be exorcised by the laws of logic: the laws of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle. Thus the discovery of a paradox excites great emotion and much intellectual energy is invested in ways of exorcising the contradiction. Such was the reaction

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in 1901 and again in 1931 when first Russell then Godel discovered that antimony can produce a self-contradiction in accepted ways of reasoning even in mathematical logic. When this happens, as Quine (1966) notes, “some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit and henceforth be avoided or revised” (7). This is how the rationalist tries to reason morally. Russell’s paradox, for example, gave rise to the theory of types. The basic idea of this theory is that the division of linguistic expressions into true and false is not sufficient; that a third category must be introduced which includes meaningless expressions. It seems to me that this is one of the deepest and soundest discoveries of modern logic. It represents the insight that a set of syntactical rules . . . must be explicitly stated in order to make language a workable system, and that a leading directive for the establishment of such rules that the resulting language be free from contradictions . . . This theory is an instrument to make language consistent. This is its justification; and there can be no better one. (Reichenbach 1946)

There are good reasons why mathematical logicians want to eliminate contradiction from their analyses. Their theories must be rational and meaningful if they are to make sense and be useful. Rationality is a value we all subscribe to in a pragmatic way: who wants to cross a bridge constructed on the basis of some faulty mathematical logic? The anthropologist, too, is concerned with rationality as a value. Our discipline has a long history of revealing the meaning behind apparently “meaningless” expressions. Our theories try to dissolve the problem of irrationality by making the unfamiliar familiar through an appeal to some form of cultural relativism. We find this in the “modes of thought” debate that raged in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Horton and Finnegan’s edited collection Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies (1973) addressed “one central question: Is there a basic difference in modes of thought (both in content and, more especially, in logic and formulation) as between Western and non-Western societies?” This (poorly posed) question, which remains unresolved, has been taken over by cognitive scientists as Olson and Torrance’s edited collection, Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition (1996) illustrates. They reformulate “central question” as that of the contrast between the assumption of the “psychological unity of mankind” and the facts of cognitive pluralism. The essays on moral reason in the present volume take us beyond the central question of the modes of thought debate by posing new

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questions. These new questions are neither better nor worse, just different. They do not make any assumption of the “psychological unity of mankind” and are not concerned with the cultural differences in modes of thought. Their analyses have nothing in common with the abstract theories of “cognitive pluralists” either. As suggested earlier, the essays in this volume are more concerned with the concrete ethnographic issues that transcend cultural difference but, paradoxically, do this by analyzing the moral dilemmas faced by people located in geographically specific places at historically specific times at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But if the hoary old question of rationality versus irrationality is not the “big” question posed then what is it?

Meaning, Morality, and Values The essence of the six chapters of this volume can be captured by six keywords: fakes, corruption, custom (kastam), sacra (malanggan), charity (dasagam), and privatization. All the chapters can be seen as rumination on the meaning of these words, but the “meaning” at stake here is an interesting variation on the way in which Geertz uses the word. For Geertz culture equals shared meaning (Schweder 1984: 1). This formula captures the essence of his theory. “Culture,” Geertz (1973) stresses, “consists of socially established structures of meaning’ and is ‘public because meaning is” (12). These meanings, he notes, are “ ‘stored’ in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or a feathered serpent” (127). These sacred symbols “function to synthesize a people’s ethos—the tone, character, and actuality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (89). Ethos and worldview, he adds, must be the basis of an understanding of the values involved “in the normative regulation of behavior” (141). Given that moral reasoning raises the question of ethics and values, it would seem that our authors in this volume are engaged in exercises of “thick description” under a new label and that their explicit intention to get beyond “culture and meaning” is an illusion. However, this judgment would be too hurried because only in one chapter in this volume—Venkatesan’s—does the idea of culture as “shared meaning” have any role to play. She is concerned with connections between people “based on shared religion, shared language, and the kind of relationship specified within Islam between the rich

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and the poor.” But what concerns Venkatesan is not so much the ethos of the community as it is the personal morality of its members and how the tension between the two excites gossip and causes shame; she not concerned with how values publicly regulate behavior but how these values are privately subverted by members who, through need and/or greed, go on profitable begging trips to Singapore. What is at stake here is the classical distinction between the ethical and the pathetic, where the ideal is posed to the real, the permanent lineament to the transient emotion, the citizen to the individual. Thus ethos is to pathos as the essential or typical is to mere accident (Anon 1881: 541–42). If Geertz’s approach to meaning focuses on ethos, then the essays in this volume are more concerned with pathos, with the thoughts that shame, fear, anxiety, jealousy, envy, and anger excite. The emotions canvassed in this volume are all of the negative kind. Even the joking that Alexander discusses is born of anger aimed at the absurd situation her Kazakh informants found themselves in. (Many of the cases represented, and especially this one, also arouse the pity and sorrow of the reader.) The distinction between ethics and morality, then, can be seen as one between the ideal and the real. The ethos of a community or state supplies the values, enshrined in a written or unwritten code of ethics that are supposed to regulate the behavior of citizens; it provides a means of valuing the actual behavior of its citizens. But what happens when those values are not shared by all members of the community? What happens when the ethic of the community or government are in a liminal state? It is precisely these questions that the authors address. In all cases they describe a warring over keywords, but the sociocultural and historical context of the warring is everywhere different. Take Martin’s chapter on the Tolai of PNG for example. At issue here is the moral evaluation of the word kastam, the Tok Pisin term for “custom.” Economic development in this region has created a division between “winners” and “losers,” an opposition that crosscuts kastam, the traditional culture that otherwise binds people together. The word kastam is now defined from two points of view. The losers label the winners “big shots” and accuse them of narrowing the definition of kastam and selling it to tourists for their own commercial gain. The winners for their part call the losers “big heads” and accuse them being “lazy buggers” who extend the notion of family to absurd limits so that they can make unfair demands on them. The terms of this debate are clearly incommensurable. The labels they have for each other are heavily value-laden pejorative terms and the

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negative emotions motivating their respective arguments, jealousy and resentment, are barely concealed if at all An interesting variation is provided by Shah in her chapter, which considers the meaning of the word “corruption” in Jharkhand, Eastern India. Political developments since independence have transformed the class relations in the countryside but the ancient resentments and differing perceptions of current practices have ensured a continuation of the complete lack of dialogue between the rich ex-landlords and poor ex-tenants in this area. There is no debate as such, just two radically opposed views about the meaning of ‘corrupt.’ The elite, many of whom have acquired jobs in the development institutions of the state, are committed to an official view of corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain. The rural poor, by contrast, see the state as inherently and irredeemably corrupt and want nothing to do with it. In other words, there are no shared assumptions, no scope for any communication. However, divisions within the rural poor have emerged with education and a new class of educated ex-tenants, who have a more positive view than their parents about the potential of the state to act in the public good, are beginning to challenge the elite of the ex-landlord class. In the cases discussed by Alexander (Kazakhstan) and Brandtstädter (China), the moral dilemmas of people arise because the ethical standards of the state were in transition from a socialist ideology to a market-oriented one. The Kazakhstan case described by Alexander illustrates the impossibility of reasoning from changing premises. Syllogistic reasoning is a transcultural process that involves drawing conclusions from premises; but if a premise undergoes a change as the conclusion is being reached then reasoners in this situation are confronted with an absurdity. Alexander shows how people cope with this absurd situation by joking, which itself is an absurd syllogistic reasoning when a pun in the premises allows a surprise conclusion to be drawn. The keyword whose meaning was being disputed here was “privatization,” and the key emotion motivating the joking was anger. If Alexander’s chapter deals with that particular historical moment in time when the liminal state of post-socialism is at its peak, then Brandtstädter deals with that latter moment when the political state is struggling to impose the new ethical standard. The moral dilemma confronted by the servants of the state in China in this period was the issue of what to do about the production and sale of high quality fake whose low prices told the truth about the false claims of their Guccilike brands? The emotions driving this dilemma were the anxieties of

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the emerging elite whose prestige was being compromised by the contagious magic of the fake goods they adorned themselves with; their status as elites, or would-be elites, required sympathetic magic of the kind that gives a Gucci-wearer Gucci-like superior status. The elite blamed the rural poor for creating this dilemma for they were the producers of the fake commodities. The rural poor, on the other hand, value themselves not in terms of modern commodities but in terms of traditional ritual economy. Rural communities are investing huge sums, some of which comes from remittances, in the rebuilding of ancestral halls and of local temples. Meanwhile the aspirational elite, the not-yet rich urban wannabees, are forced to construct their elite status on fakes as the flourishing demand for the goods attests. Sykes presents us with yet another variation where the weapon of the verbal war is rumor, an anonymous force of extraordinary power. At issue in this case from the island of New Ireland in PNG is the meaning of malanggan, beautiful secret-sacred ritual objects that were traditionally made to be used as a funerary objects but never to be seen. For foreigners, on the other hand, these objects became highly desired “tribal art” and thousands found their way into the museums and living rooms of people all around the world. This foreign display of the malanggan excited no emotion in New Ireland because the communities for whom they had sacred meaning were largely ignorant of their display. However, when a local politician commissioned some indigenous artists to make some for display in the Kavieng Airport in New Ireland the value of malanggan as an art object for display fell into contradiction as its value as a secret–sacred ritual object. The subsequent and mysterious death of the carvers was, for some, the logical consequence of this contradiction. Rumor, a weapon of the weak, articulated this logic. For the elite, on the other hand, the objects have acquired a new value in contemporary PNG. They represent the cultural heritage of a precolonial tradition of which all the citizens of PNG today should be proud.

Words and Speakers, Values and Valuers, Reason and Reasoners These essays are about the disputed meaning of words and the values different people assign to them. As such, they are also about speakers and valuers. But most importantly they are about the concrete relations between words and speakers on the one hand, and value and valuers on the same hand. This, to me, is where the significance of

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this collection of essays lies. It is a truism that values have valuers but a remarkable fact of the anthropological literature on values is that it is precisely this truism that is often abstracted from. Abstraction is, of course, a perfectly legitimate analytical procedure. Linguists routinely examine language in the abstract. Consider Carnap (1942), for example. If we are analyzing a language, then we are concerned of course, with expressions. But we need not necessarily also deal with speakers and designate. Although these factors are present whenever language is used, we may abstract from one or both of them in what we intend to say about the language in question. (9)

In the study of semantics, for example, linguists abstract from the user in order to focus on the analysis of the relationship between a word and its referent; in the study of syntax the referent and the speaker are abstracted from in order to focus on the formal relations between expression; in the study of pragmatics, on the other hand, the concrete relationship between expression and user is paramount. In terms of this trichotomy, then, moral reasoning is a form of “pragmatics.” But it is also more than this. As a study of the word it is concerned with the concrete relationship between all three forms of analysis and is based on the dogma that the speaker is the “efficient cause” to use the language of the ancients. In other words, primacy is given to the speaker located historically, geographically, and anthropologically. As Carnap (1942) has noted, “pragmatics is the basis for all of linguistics” such that “descriptive semantics and syntax are, strictly speaking, parts of pragmatics” (13). It follows, then, that the essays in this book are first and foremost about the concrete relationship between the moral reasoner and his or her moral reasoning. A speaker becomes a moral reasoner when the argument contained in an utterance is informed by the speaker’s values, that is, when the speaker becomes a valuer. Anthropological approaches to the value question often abstract from the valuer. As in linguistics, this may be a perfectly justifiable procedure given the question at hand. Dumont’s analysis of the role of purity and pollution in the Indian caste system is a classic example of this. He is not so much concerned with the origin of this value as with the logical implication of its prescriptive rules concerning marriage, the division of labor, and so on. His critics claim that he has merely presented a Brahmanical point of view, an argument that obviously raises the question of the status of the valuer. The

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counterargument is that these values are shared by many non-Brahmans, and so the debate goes on. To move beyond analyses of the type provided by Dumont it is necessary to make a distinction between values in the sense of ethos— the shared values of a community—and those values of people who, for whatever reason, do not share them and who, because of historical relations of consanguinity, affinity, or contiguity, are unable to consider them dispassionately. Consider, for example, the words on an anonymous Indian woman. I feel that once a woman starts to menstruate she acquires a strange kind of power, the power of giving birth of creating new life. Men do not possess this kind of power. Only women have it. So men are afraid we may rise above them because of this power. To control it, they invented menstrual taboos: “Don’t touch the food. Don’t go near the shrine. Don’t enter the kitchen.” Men impose these restrictions on us. They impose these restrictions to control our power and to use it for their own benefit. (SBS 1993)

This, I submit, is a classic example of moral reasoning and it highlights the distinction that must be made between ethics and morality. Dumont’s concern was with value in the sense of the ethics of a society and not in the sense of the personal morals of someone who is a victim of those ethics. This distinction is similar to the distinction Morris makes between “moral discourse” and “religious discourse.” Moral discourse, he argues, is appraisive–incitive whereas religious (or ethical) discourse is prescriptive–incitive. Prescriptive modes of discourse privilege “oughtness” as the supreme value. Menstrual taboos of the kind “Don’t touch the food. Don’t go near the shrine. Don’t enter the kitchen” are classical examples of the prescriptive mode. Appraisive modes of discourse privilege appraisal, or critical judgment, as the supreme type of value. Morris (1964) gives “Music A is better than music B” as an example of this type of utterance (125). The anonymous Indian woman is obviously another example of moral reasoning informed by values of the appraisive kind. What the two modes of discourse share is that they are both used to incite behavior. Ethical discourse, which expresses the value standard of the dominant, is concerned to get people to behave in a certain rule-governed way; moral discourse, which expresses the critical values of the subaltern, can be used, among other things, to justify behavior that varies from the norm. In the light of this discussion, it is clear that every essay in this book is concerned with concretion rather than abstraction: in all cases

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speech is related to speaker, value to valuer, moral reasoning to moral reasoner in clearly specified sociocultural settings firmly located in time and place. The dilemmas, paradoxes, and ambiguities they describe and analyze emerge only when analysis is concrete; it is precisely these complicating factors that abstract analysis is concerned to get away from in order to investigate other more general issues at the “semantic” level or the formal questions that can be addressed at the highly abstract “syntactic” level. The pragmatic level at which these authors work quite literally grounds their analyses relations between people in given places at given times. A striking feature of every case presented is that the social relations between the people concerned are as vague and indefinite as the meanings of the terms they dispute, a fact that creates problems for the anthropologist trying to describe the relations. Consider the problems Shah has with the distinction she draws between the “village elite” and “rural poor.” What is the basis of this opposition? Sometimes she characterizes it as one between the “descendents of ex-landlords” and the “descendants of ex-tenants.” This suggests that in the past it was a clear-cut class relationship based on the differential ownership of land. It also suggests that the memory of that relationship has passed down distinct patrilines and is expressed today in endogamous communities related by contiguity. In other place Shah describes the relationship as one between “high castes” and “poor tribal peasants,” the latter being Scheduled Tribe primarily from the Munda and Oraon groups. The capitalized expression “Scheduled Tribe” introduces an official government classification into the discussion. Yet another basis to the opposition is given in a note where she refers to the anthropological debate about the definition of a “tribe.” I use the word “tribe” here to refer to a range of lower castes and Scheduled Tribes who are descendents of the tenants of the ex-landlords of the villages they live in. Today they generally live off a subsistence economy based on farming from their fields and forest produce supplemented by contract work as hard manual labor. I do not wish to engage in the familiar debates about what is a tribe (Bailey 1961, Ghurye 2000 [1943], Majumdar 1937, Mandelbaum 1970, Sharma 2001, Weiner 1978) here nor do I condone the colonial exoticization and romanticization of “tribals” (Elwin 1955) by using the term. While I do not want to reinforce such colonial perspectives, I believe that other terms that are often used, such as adivasi, or indigenous populations, are just as politically constructed and have their own sets of problems.

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Yet another criterion, education, is introduced when she notes the “village elite is beginning to get challenged by a new class of educated tribal youth.” I draw attention to Shah’s equivocations not as a criticism but as an illustration of existential dilemma that ethnographers in India (myself included) face. Of course the problem is a general one and illustrations can be found in every essay. Consider the social relations among moral reasoners Martin is concerned with in his Tolai case, the relationship between big shots and big heads as the Tolai say (or, to be more precise, as different subgroups call each other but not themselves.) If the social relations between people in the Indian case described by Shah have gone from relations based primarily on economic class to groups based on sociocultural groupings of various types, then the Tolai case describes a historical movement in the opposite direction. In precolonial days social organization was based on exogamous matri-moities, clans, and kindred groupings; today these relations persist but the situation has been complicated by the emergence of class-type relations between big heads and big shots. The lack of definition and clarity in the respective social relations described by the different authors is both a cause and a consequence of the paradoxes and dilemmas that their moral reasoning makes and reshapes. Concrete day-to-day, face-to-face relations between people are all about negotiating that ambiguous middle zone defined by the opposition between autonomy and relatedness. The Tolai big shot is morally reprehensible from the subaltern point of view because they are too near the autonomy pole, while from the elite’s point of view the big head asserts a degree of relatedness that does not exist.

Conclusion: Toward a Transcultural Anthropology? These essays not only analyze paradox they collectively present us with a paradox in that they seem to say something fundamental about the human condition though an examination of sociocultural specificities. The essays are not exercises in cultural translation because, as I mentioned earlier, abstraction like Homo Hierarchicus and the Melanesian person are simply not on the agenda for discussion. Words, values, and reason are not analyzed in the abstract in these essays; rather they are anchored in the daily lives of speakers, valuers, and reasoners as they struggle to come to terms with the dilemmas created by the societies and cultures they are part of. This is a world where need shades into greed, gift into bribe, and the public into the private as people struggle

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for both autonomy and relatedness in historical circumstances where the existence (or nonexistence) of prevailing ethical standards provide rules to be avoided rather than obeyed. Furthermore, it is a world where the morality of the actions of the dominant and subordinate varies according to one’s point of view. In this sense these essays are in the classic tradition in that they adhere to the Malinowskian injunction to see things from the “native point of view.” But this injunction, as Geertz (1976) has noted, raises the difficult methodological issue of just what the expression native point of view means. This question has no simple answer and the history of anthropological thought can be read as series of different answers to the question. For Geertz the problem was one of attempting to determine the definition of “self” the “other” create for themselves. For him this involved coming to terms with the culturally specific conceptions that reflected the ethos of Balinese, Javanese, and Moroccan, respectively. when a meanings-and-symbols ethnographer like myself attempts to find out what a pack of natives conceive a person to be, he moves back and forth between asking himself, “What is the general form of their life?,” and “What exactly are the vehicles in which that form is embodied?,” emerging in the end of a similar sort of spiral with the notion that they see the self as a composite, a persona, or a point in a pattern. (Geertz 1976: 236)

The contributors to this volume take a different tack. They are not concerned with the “pack” but with the contradictory division within the pack; they are not concerned with the “general form” or “points in a pattern” or abstract “persons” but with the dilemmas and paradoxes actual people find themselves in when they find their own morality at odds with the dominant ethos of the community of which they are part. The paradoxes in which these people are caught do not produce dispassionate rational thought of the classic abstract syllogistic kind, but passionate equivocations of a recognizably human kind that transcends cultural difference. It follows that moral reason of this appraisive-valued kind is not “irrationality” of the culturally specific type that requires the anthropologist to function as cultural translator to render the unfamiliar familiar. The essays in this collection do not amount to a paradigm shift for they make no attempt to provide a new theoretical agenda. However, as concrete analytical ruminations on the meaning of native point of

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view they provide us with some new ways of thinking about the problem and, for those who care to look, an implicit critique of accepted ways of doing anthropology and some new ways of thinking about the way ahead.

Bibliography Anon. 1881. “Jebb’s Attic Orators.” The Quarterly Review, Vol. 152, July and October, 526–52. Carnap, R. 1942. Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1976. “From the Native’s Point of View” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by K. Basso and H.A. Selby. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Horton, R., and R. Finnegan. 1973. “Introduction.” In Modes of Thought. 13–62. Horton, R., and R. Finnegan, eds. 1973. Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies. London: Faber & Faber. Morris, C. 1964. Signification and Significance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. OED. 2004. The Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com/. Olson, D.R., and N. Torrance, eds. 1996. Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W.V. 1966. The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays. New York: Random House. Reichenbach, H. 1946. “Bertrand Russell’s Logic.” In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, edited by P.A. Schilpp. Evanston, Illinois: The Library of Living Philosophers. SBS 1993. Something Like a War (Video). Schweder, R.A. 1984. “Preview: A Colloquy of Culture Theorists.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, edited by R.A. Schweder and R.A. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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I n de x

absurdity, 43, 48, 56, 59–61 Africa, 17 anekdot, 49 anthropology, 60 transcultural, 199–202 Bakhtin, M., 60 blat, 52 Boas, F., 17 bribe, 126 charity, 30, 36 begging, 36 dasagam, 72, 77 donations, 30 Chennai (Madras), 71 China, 31, 139–158 landless peasants, 139–168 Maoism, 139–158 peasants, 31 clan, 5, 15, 51, 97, 120 scheduled tribe, 120 coevality, 7 colonial politics, 6 contract, 121, 126 contradiction, 12–18, 43 axiomatic, 12, 13, 28 commonplace contradictions, 8–12, 24, 28, 35, 45 associative logic, 163 globalization, 24 kin versus family, 95 minor politics, 24 passions versus reason, 10–12, 15

reason versus sentiment, 8–9 subaltern reason, 24 corruption, 34, 35, 36, 37, 52, 100, 110, 117, 118, 123, 124–126 definition, 118 development and, 117–135 government, 52, 65 morality and, 124–126 ritual practice, 101, 110 system of “favors”, 54 culture, 7, 12, 14 custom, 3, 37 custom as trick, 111 cultural relativism, 12–18 decolonization, 7, 18 Deleuze, G., 23–25 development, 117–135, 139–158 Dumont, 12 Durkheim, 20 ethos, 12, 37, 192, 200 liminal state, 193 native point of view, 200 normative, 192 shared meanings, 192 economy, 28, 36, 43–61, 51, 117–135, 146–148 consumerism, 146–148 development, 117–135 informal, 28, 126 labor, 51 neo-liberal, 43–61 planning, 36

204 ends, 74–77 and means, 74–77 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 17 fakes, 31, 140 frauds, 140 pirates, 140 family, 95, 103 freedom, 47, 85 Freud, S., 43, 59–61 Geertz, C., 13–14, 38, 161, 184, 192–193, 200 Gluckman, M., 18 gossip, 23, 36, 68, 70, 77–80 censorious, 80–81 as moral force, 70 and freedom, 85 as incomplete knowledge, 84 grassroots, 99 Gregory, C.A., 12, 13, 25, 28, 37, 106, 116, 151, 154, 155 greed, 23, 35, 72–74 heimlich, 53 historical particularism, 17 household, 3–14, 53–59, 75 intuition, 50 Jharkhand, 117 jokes, 43–55 Kant, I., 17, 22 deontological philosophy, 20 duty, 20 moral philosophy, 17–20 obligation, 20 kastam, 27, 32, 33, 112 pastiche, 112 kin, 95 labor, 51, 120–121, 124 first order work (money-do number paisa), 124

I n de x second order work (-do number kam), 124 Laidlaw, J., 68 love, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 Malinowski, 13, 114 Mao, 31, 141, 142 Maoist contradictions, 31 Maoist politics, 31 Maoist revolutionary philosophy, 31 market, 119, 139 marriage, 3–11, 14–15, 69, 71, 74, 100 affines, 14 arranged, 74 bride-wealth, 3–11, 14–15 customary versus “Western”, 4 dowry, 67–89 love, 14 monogamy, 4, 5 polygamy, 4 Matupit, 95 Mauss, M., 13, 21, 114 meaninglessness, 48 money, 26–29, 67, 69, 77, 78, 79, 93, 98, 101, 121, 124, 142 blat, 26 customary, 93 “easy”, 121 fair trade, good value, just price, 26 moneylender, 71 power (money-power), 104, 105, 107, 112 property and, 29 reciprocity, 26, 93 second order work (do number kam), 124 tabu (shell), 98, 101 moral reason, 3–8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 37, 48, 59, 107, 190 ambiguity, 7, 8, 13, 16, 25, 34, 35, 37

I n de x economy, 27, 51, 117–135, 119, 141 imagination, 84, 85, 161 judgment, 107 Kantian, 17 pragmatics of, 7, 196, 108, 143 beyond the pragmatics of, 196 relativism, 12–18 sentiment, 14–15, 29, 30, 46 morality, 3, 13 consciousness, 13, 21 distinct from ethics, 113, 193 Durkheimian theory of, 21 education, 21, 141 money, 26–29 personal, 193 practical ethics, 150 real, 193 narrative, 23 need, 23, 35, 72–74 norms, 20, 117 obligation, 11, 33, 94, 100 Paiyur, 68 Papua New Guinea, 3–18, 31, 93–114, 161–189 paradox, 3, 15–16, 24–26, 34, 190–192, 200 of value, 34 pathos, 12, 37, 189–202 transience of, 193–195 words and, 193–195 peasants, 31, 32, 34, 35, 148–150 against landlords, 127 as scheduled tribe, 127 pragmaticism, 7, 111, 143 privatization, 37, 46, 53, 54, 59, 61 property, 46, 47 ownership, 58 private, 47

205

quality, 140 human quality (suzhi), 34, 140 moral values and, 141 Rabaul, 94 rationality, 7, 14, 30, 47, 48, 190–191 economic planning, 36 rationalism, 7 scientific, 144, 149 Soviet, 50 state, 48, 52 reason practical, 143 “reasonable man”, 17 reciprocity, 52, 112, 113 limits of, 113 non-, 114 ritual, 74, 97, 100 charity, 123 commercialization, 97, 102 commodification, 97 economy, 74–78, 97, 162, 171–174 life-cycle, 74, 100 money in, 97, 123 rumor, 56, 161–183 Russians, 43–45 Bolshevism, 43 Ryle, 13–14 sacra, 37 scandal, 43 shame, 73, 80–81 Shanghai, 139 Smith, A., 46 sorcery, 178–180 causal logic versus associative logic, 180–183 Soviet Union, 43 subaltern, 6, 24, 27, 34, 36, 37 subjectivity, 70, 78 Big Man, 100 Big Shot, 96, 99, 100 constitution of, 70 Labbai, 67, 78

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subjectivity—continued possessive individuals, 107 valuable persons, 150–156 Tamilnadu, 98 Thompson, E.P., 27, 129 just price, 27 transience, 166–171 tribal, 36

judgments, 29 money, 26–29 moral, 48 pathos, 197 shattered, 45 uncertain, 45 value-anxiety, 29 valuers, 29 words, 19, 29 Volosinov, V., 115

uncanny, 53, 55 values, 17, 23, 29, 35, 45, 142, 145, 195, 150–156 abstract, 195 changing, 24–36 concrete relations of, 195, 197 ethical, 197 financial, 48 identity, 48

words, 31, 115, 196 gossip, 31 index of social change, 115 jokes, 43 rumors, 35 and speakers, 196 speakers as efficient cause, 196 World Bank, 46, 57