This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the prete... more This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of its own narrative and role-play structure, the frame of duplicity sometimes exceeds the control of its authors. My own participation involved a spectrum of roles progressing from 1) innocent passerby, 2) an unwitting set piece meant to convey legitimacy, 3) an ethically compromised ethnographer, and 4) the target of the scam, all the way through to 5) an active participant in deception—with several of the roles converging at times. Ethnography inside a scam allows for reflection into the role of deception in everyday social interaction, as w...
In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Ab... more In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of the deuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize “Western” science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorporated into the meaning of science. The second case considers fieldwork among the brouteurs of Côte d’Ivoire, internet scammers who build intimate relationships on false premises using social media. They acquire shocking amounts of wealth in this way which they display on their own social media accounts. However, they are said to use occult means to seduce and persuade their virtual lovers, trapping their prey in the sticky allure of the world wide web. Newell uses both examples to highlight the overlaps between the transformational efficacie...
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban pat... more This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d’Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan-ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d’Ivoire]
Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, t... more Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of justice in cases of social crisis, a process built upon the tracing of social networks and the determination of who really 'belongs'. Using my own experience of being robbed and its social aftershocks as an example, I trace the processes through which social networks constrain the interpretation of an event, while at the same time redefining their identities (as group and individual) through this interaction. The juncture of stranger and community is the axis through which such negotiations are carried out. Key Words Abidjan • Côte d'Ivoire • exchange • moral economy • social networks • stranger • theft • urban Meyer Fortes began his essay on the concept of the stranger with the following sentence: 'A few months after my first arrival among the Tallensi in 1934, I had the distressing experience of being robbed' (Fortes, 1975). I too had this distressing experience not long after my arrival in Treichville, a quartier of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Around 2:00 a.m. on a Friday night, I found myself walking home alone. Normally I walked at night with the protection of my trusted friend Noël, but he was asleep that night. Noël, whose street name was 'chef du village', had once been heavily involved in Abidjan's 'gang scene', 1 and he prided himself on knowing everybody. In our many conversations (which played a large role in my decision to move to this quartier in the first place), I had absorbed his stories about how Treichville was a community, that once people knew you were from Treichville you were safe, and no one would dare attack you. Since I walked this street every day and greeted people along the way regularly, I felt I was no longer a total
While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to co... more While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostal-ism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal understandings of individual agency and economy in contrast to the moral economy of social obligations. At the same time I draw parallels between the ritual techniques of Pentecostalism and witchcraft cosmology, demonstrating that, despite Pentecostal churches' efforts to transcend the power of witchcraft, they in many cases become encompassed by witchcraft discourse, often taking on the appearance of witchcraft itself.
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands func... more Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give signs of knowing and men seem to believe in the spirits they pretend to be only pretending to be. In Côte d'Ivoire, where masks are a symbol of national identity, consumption focuses around displaying supposedly authentic name brand labels. Urban Ivoirians call this display of wealth and consumption 'bluffing', exposing the artifice of their supposed affluence. Still, the success of their performance depends on the authenticity of expensive European and American brands, in a market where most of what is available is counterfeit. Underneath the public secret of their performative display lies the deeper secret that they remain uncertain of the legitimacy of their purchases. Masks and brands both metaphorically delineate a metonymic though invisible connection to authentic power, but the secrecy of what lies beneath the masked performance provides an unstable ambiguity in which it is always possible that the surface is that which it represents. Brands always contain this instability between appearance and the genuine, for all are ultimately copies whose uncertain authenticity we cover up with public secrecy. We now declare that the trademark of [Côte d'Ivoire] will be the mask, for it is representative, rather pleasing to observe, and enshrouded in an air of mystery. Duon Sadia, the Minister of Tourism of Côte d'Ivoire, as cited in Steiner 1992a: 53 The modern trademark does not function to identify the true origin of goods. It functions to obscure that origin, to cover it with a myth of origin. Beebe 2008: 52 Brand logos are expected to be transparent indicators of authentic quality, and a great deal of effort is expended worldwide on policing counterfeits and piracy to protect that assumption. But a more counterintuitive approach might help explain why brands matter even when most of us distrust the relationship between the logo and the purported authenticity of the object it adorns. Perhaps the analytic focus of social science upon branded goods as objects of display and identity blinds us to an important element of how they are endowed with value in practice: the performative context of how we enact brand value may be as much about concealment and secrecy as it is about display. Indeed, I have come to think that masking rituals and the public secrecy that
... Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 1984. Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia. ... And it is this ... more ... Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 1984. Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia. ... And it is this performance of masculine success that is important, not the actual 'breadwinning' potential of the actor. If as Butler (1988)5. Butler, Judith. 1988. ...
Introduction by Jeremy F. Walton, Sasha Newell and Patrick Eisenlohr. In this introduction to our... more Introduction by Jeremy F. Walton, Sasha Newell and Patrick Eisenlohr. In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of “material temporalities” with an eye to the collection’s impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate “material temporalities” in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalities in offering affordances to and constituting forms of recalcitrance for human actors. Following this, we discuss the two orders of time, human and nonhuman, that intersect in the assemblages of material temporalities, as well as a number of key inspirations for our theorization of material temporalities—Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterochrony, specifically. This discussion of human and nonhuman times supports our critique of “clock time” and its errant aspiration to an objective material basis for temporality. Following this, we offer an overview of both recent and longstanding anthropologi- cal engagements with temporality and historicity, as well as a summary of recent media studies perspectives on time and materiality, which mount a more radical intervention and critique than most anthropological arguments. We then review anthropological debates over affect and materiality in order to argue for the centrality of temporality and historicity to affective matters. Finally, we summarize the collections’s three major thematic clusters—virtuality and latency, material extensions of phenomenological time, and material futures—with reference to the specific contributions.
The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about chan... more The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the prete... more This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of its own narrative and role-play structure, the frame of duplicity sometimes exceeds the control of its authors. My own participation involved a spectrum of roles progressing from 1) innocent passerby, 2) an unwitting set piece meant to convey legitimacy, 3) an ethically compromised ethnographer, and 4) the target of the scam, all the way through to 5) an active participant in deception—with several of the roles converging at times. Ethnography inside a scam allows for reflection into the role of deception in everyday social interaction, as w...
In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Ab... more In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of the deuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize “Western” science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorporated into the meaning of science. The second case considers fieldwork among the brouteurs of Côte d’Ivoire, internet scammers who build intimate relationships on false premises using social media. They acquire shocking amounts of wealth in this way which they display on their own social media accounts. However, they are said to use occult means to seduce and persuade their virtual lovers, trapping their prey in the sticky allure of the world wide web. Newell uses both examples to highlight the overlaps between the transformational efficacie...
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban pat... more This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d’Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan-ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d’Ivoire]
Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, t... more Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of justice in cases of social crisis, a process built upon the tracing of social networks and the determination of who really 'belongs'. Using my own experience of being robbed and its social aftershocks as an example, I trace the processes through which social networks constrain the interpretation of an event, while at the same time redefining their identities (as group and individual) through this interaction. The juncture of stranger and community is the axis through which such negotiations are carried out. Key Words Abidjan • Côte d'Ivoire • exchange • moral economy • social networks • stranger • theft • urban Meyer Fortes began his essay on the concept of the stranger with the following sentence: 'A few months after my first arrival among the Tallensi in 1934, I had the distressing experience of being robbed' (Fortes, 1975). I too had this distressing experience not long after my arrival in Treichville, a quartier of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Around 2:00 a.m. on a Friday night, I found myself walking home alone. Normally I walked at night with the protection of my trusted friend Noël, but he was asleep that night. Noël, whose street name was 'chef du village', had once been heavily involved in Abidjan's 'gang scene', 1 and he prided himself on knowing everybody. In our many conversations (which played a large role in my decision to move to this quartier in the first place), I had absorbed his stories about how Treichville was a community, that once people knew you were from Treichville you were safe, and no one would dare attack you. Since I walked this street every day and greeted people along the way regularly, I felt I was no longer a total
While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to co... more While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostal-ism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal understandings of individual agency and economy in contrast to the moral economy of social obligations. At the same time I draw parallels between the ritual techniques of Pentecostalism and witchcraft cosmology, demonstrating that, despite Pentecostal churches' efforts to transcend the power of witchcraft, they in many cases become encompassed by witchcraft discourse, often taking on the appearance of witchcraft itself.
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands func... more Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give signs of knowing and men seem to believe in the spirits they pretend to be only pretending to be. In Côte d'Ivoire, where masks are a symbol of national identity, consumption focuses around displaying supposedly authentic name brand labels. Urban Ivoirians call this display of wealth and consumption 'bluffing', exposing the artifice of their supposed affluence. Still, the success of their performance depends on the authenticity of expensive European and American brands, in a market where most of what is available is counterfeit. Underneath the public secret of their performative display lies the deeper secret that they remain uncertain of the legitimacy of their purchases. Masks and brands both metaphorically delineate a metonymic though invisible connection to authentic power, but the secrecy of what lies beneath the masked performance provides an unstable ambiguity in which it is always possible that the surface is that which it represents. Brands always contain this instability between appearance and the genuine, for all are ultimately copies whose uncertain authenticity we cover up with public secrecy. We now declare that the trademark of [Côte d'Ivoire] will be the mask, for it is representative, rather pleasing to observe, and enshrouded in an air of mystery. Duon Sadia, the Minister of Tourism of Côte d'Ivoire, as cited in Steiner 1992a: 53 The modern trademark does not function to identify the true origin of goods. It functions to obscure that origin, to cover it with a myth of origin. Beebe 2008: 52 Brand logos are expected to be transparent indicators of authentic quality, and a great deal of effort is expended worldwide on policing counterfeits and piracy to protect that assumption. But a more counterintuitive approach might help explain why brands matter even when most of us distrust the relationship between the logo and the purported authenticity of the object it adorns. Perhaps the analytic focus of social science upon branded goods as objects of display and identity blinds us to an important element of how they are endowed with value in practice: the performative context of how we enact brand value may be as much about concealment and secrecy as it is about display. Indeed, I have come to think that masking rituals and the public secrecy that
... Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 1984. Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia. ... And it is this ... more ... Hansen, Karen Tranberg. 1984. Negotiating Sex and Gender in Urban Zambia. ... And it is this performance of masculine success that is important, not the actual 'breadwinning' potential of the actor. If as Butler (1988)5. Butler, Judith. 1988. ...
Introduction by Jeremy F. Walton, Sasha Newell and Patrick Eisenlohr. In this introduction to our... more Introduction by Jeremy F. Walton, Sasha Newell and Patrick Eisenlohr. In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of “material temporalities” with an eye to the collection’s impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate “material temporalities” in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalities in offering affordances to and constituting forms of recalcitrance for human actors. Following this, we discuss the two orders of time, human and nonhuman, that intersect in the assemblages of material temporalities, as well as a number of key inspirations for our theorization of material temporalities—Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterochrony, specifically. This discussion of human and nonhuman times supports our critique of “clock time” and its errant aspiration to an objective material basis for temporality. Following this, we offer an overview of both recent and longstanding anthropologi- cal engagements with temporality and historicity, as well as a summary of recent media studies perspectives on time and materiality, which mount a more radical intervention and critique than most anthropological arguments. We then review anthropological debates over affect and materiality in order to argue for the centrality of temporality and historicity to affective matters. Finally, we summarize the collections’s three major thematic clusters—virtuality and latency, material extensions of phenomenological time, and material futures—with reference to the specific contributions.
The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about chan... more The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Sep 1, 2007
Andrew Apter is professor of history and anthropology and chair of the interdepartmental program ... more Andrew Apter is professor of history and anthropology and chair of the interdepartmental program in African studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society and, most recently, The Pan-...
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Papers by Sasha Newell
The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.