Matthew Carey
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Matthew Carey MistrustAn Ethnographic Theory MISTRUST Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Katharine Herman Editorial Board Carlos Fausto Ilana Gershon Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié Jonathan Parry Joel Robbins Danilyn Rutherford Anne-Christine Taylor Jason Troop www.haubooks.com The Malinowski Monographs In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term “ethnographic theory” himself. Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the “ethnographic” is conceived today. Hau Books MISTRUST AN ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY Matthew Carey Hau Books Chicago © 2017 Hau Books and Matthew Carey Cover, ink wash painting by BadaShanren (Zhu Da) Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9973675-2-2 LCCN: 2017934092 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by Te University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. ⵉ ⵙⵉ ⵍⴰⵃⵙⴻⵏ, ⴱⵓ ⵜⴰⵃⵔⴰⵎⵉⵜ. ⴰⵎⴷⴰⴽⴽⵍ ⴷ ⵍⵓⵙⵜⴰⴷ “For Si Lahsen, the slipperiest of fshes. Friend and teacher.” Table of contents Acknowledgments xi Note on transliteration xiii Introduction: Te apotheosis of trust 1 chapter 1 Lying and obfuscation: Te uncertain ground of speech 15 chapter 2 Trust or tolerance? On the treachery of friends 39 chapter 3 Te triumph of contingency: Anarchism as Realpolitik 63 chapter 4 Conspiracy, witchcraft and theft: Manifestations of the mistrusting imagination 85 Conclusion 107 References 111 Index 125 Acknowledgments Tis text, like all ethnography (but more so), is an exercise in betrayal of the peo- ple who inspired it: my friends and acquaintances in the Moroccan High Atlas. I trust they will forgive me in time. Particular gratitude and apologies are owed Si Lahsen, Sabira, Si Bou Jmā‘ and Si Morad, in conversation with whom I developed most of the ideas of mistrust presented here. Without them, nothing. Professional thanks are due to Olivier Allard, Vera Skvirskaja, Susan Whyte, Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre, Inger Sjørslev, and Andrew Carey, who all read all or part of the text, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers, who greatly strengthened my argument, and to my editor, Giovanni da Col. Vera and Olivier must be thanked again: she for providing much of the online Ukrain- ian ethnography that features in chapter 4, and he for his part in developing some of the ideas concerning trust and mistrust that feature in the introduction (Rachel Renault also deserves thanks on this score). Much of the gestational work behind this thematic orientation had previously been accomplished while I was a visiting scholar in Paris in 2012–13. My stay was funded by the Collège de France and facilitated by Philippe Descola—to them and to the rest of my colleagues, I am grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Charlotte Rosenmejer, whose redoubtable ef- fciency meant I had the time and mental space to write this book. It goes without saying that where I err, the fault is mine: I should have checked; and where the argument is fawed, the fault is also mine: I should have thought a little harder. Note on transliteration All transliterations from the Russian or Arabic are standard. Tere is no one standardized system for transliterating Tashelhiyt into Latin script. As this is not a linguistically-minded publication, I have opted to make it as readable as possible for a non-specialist by following the more familiar Arabic transcription system. Te following sounds have no standard English equivalent: gh—a voiced ulular fricative, like a rolled French r kh—a voiceless ulular fricative, like the ch in ‘loch’ q—a deep glottal stop r—a Spanish rolled r ‘—a voiced epiglottal, like retching Other conventions include: ay—a diphthong, as in ‘eye’ i—a long vowel, as in ‘sheep’ j—a soft French j All proper nouns and common nouns are spelled without diacritics. xiv MISTRUST Without the general trust that people You must trust and believe in people, or have in each other, society itself would life becomes impossible disintegrate Anton Chekhov Georg Simmel If you once forfeit the confdence of your Whatever matters to human beings, fellow citizens, you can never regain trust is the atmosphere in which it their respect and esteem thrives Abraham Lincoln Sissela Bok (philosopher) Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot essential ingredient in efective commu- even trust your mistrust of yourself—so nication. It’s the foundational principle that without this underlying trust in the that holds all relationships whole system of nature you are simply Stephen. R. Covey (management paralyzed guru) Alan. W. Watts (Californian philosopher-guru) Trust is what makes contracts, plans Trusting ought to be a human right and everyday transactions possible; it Jacques Attali (French politician) facilitates the democratic process… It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go When you learn to trust in trust, then round you become confdent Joseph Stiglitz (economist) Jean-Claude van Damme (actor) Introduction Te apotheosis of trust Tere is perhaps no concept that so federates the disparate caucuses of mo- dernity as trust. From the broad plains of popular psychology to the narrow marches of academia, from the semantic metastasis of management-speak to the quiet, curatorial passion of established religion, trust is everywhere. And everywhere it is lauded as both necessary and good. Necessary, in that trust is, simply put, a precondition for virtually all aspects of collective human existence. So each of the human and social sciences separately insists that their very object of study depends on the presence of trust. For sociologists like Simmel, trust is the glue of society: we could not live alongside others without the minimal trust that allows us periodically to turn our backs to them. For economists, trust is the foundation upon which almost all economic transactions are built; for political scientists, it is the cornerstone of legitimacy and the fons et origo of government. And, in the wake of Grice’s pragmatic philosophy, trust is even frequently described as a condition of speech and communication. Tis fairly incontrovertible claim of necessity is customarily seconded by a moral claim of virtue. As the Swedish-American philosopher Sissela Bok (1978) puts it, whatever it is we value, trust enables it to fourish. Trust, particu- larly extensive social trust, is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, promoting development, generating prosperity, improving one’s sex life, and fostering mutually benefcial relation- ships. Beginning with Weber’s foundational work on the legal structures, social forms, and cultural confgurations that progressively allow for the extension of 2 MISTRUST credit beyond the immediate family circle and so give rise to modernity, vast scholarly resources have thus been deployed to identify the processes and insti- tutions that enable trust. Underpinning much of this literature is the assump- tion that trust is, broadly speaking, a good thing for both the individual and the community that enjoy it, be they paupers, peasants, princes, or thieves. And the more we have of it, the better. Of course, this correlation is not infnitely extensible: everybody recognizes that at some point trust tips over into credulity and this can have unfortunate consequences, but the general rule holds. Trust must be maximized. Tere is, unsurprisingly, little room within this absolutist framework for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions (e.g. Rosanvallon 2006), it is treated as little more than an absence of trust—just as in classical Augustinian theodicy, evil does not have an identity in its own right but is a mere privation of goodness. As such, mistrust is frequently not seen as doing anything but undo the positive work of trust. Where trust builds relationships, mistrust sunders them; where trust breeds wealth, mistrust generates poverty; where trust gives rise to efective communication and extensive social ties, mistrust is the mother of confusion and isolation. Mistrust is, in short, uniquely corrosive of human bonds—it is social acid. It is precisely this idea that was developed in the litera- ture on “lower-trust” societies that briefy blossomed in the heyday of peasant studies, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Te classic work is Banfeld’s Te moral basis of a backwards society (1958), in which the inhabitants of the pseudonymous village of Montegrano, in the Italian Mezzogiorno, are depicted as chronically and cripplingly suspicious of everybody outside their immediate nuclear fami- ly.1 Tey lie, gossip, backstab, and betray without compunction, because they have no ethical ties beyond those of kinship. Tis is the dog-eat-dog world of so-called amoral familism, in which mistrust locks people and societies into a vicious cycle of backwardness and underdevelopment as squalid and unrelenting as a world without sunlight. I have spent several years living in and then visiting a peasant society in the Moroccan High Atlas, which shares many of the key characteristics identifed 1. Recognizably related lines of thought are developed by George Foster, who argued that peasant societies typically share a cognitive orientation towards an Image of Limited Good and the idea that success can only come at the expense of others, thus leading to mistrust (1965: 297), and Aguilar, who looks at how Mexican peasants seek to overcome an “ingrained disposition” toward mistrust (1984: 3). See Govier (1997) for an overview. INTRODUCTION 3 by Banfeld: chronic and very vocal mistrust; communicative strategies based on obfuscation and dissembling; relentless gossiping; and frequent accusations of deceit and betrayal.