Oil flares, theft and trust: A long, rambling trip to Bangui

According to a National Geographic article I happened upon a couple of years ago, northeastern CAR has the least light pollution in the world. It has no doubt struck many people who have flown over the region that there might be something to those problematic stereotypes that label Africa “the dark continent”: in addition to vast un-peopled spaces, there is simply very little electricity to go around. Scarlett Lion recently linked to a gorgeous photo essay by Peter DiCampo about “life without lights” in rural Ghana. A photo of a teenage girl cooking expertly over a small open fire and of a teacher holding a paper-grading pen in one hand and a flashlight in the other evoked intense memories for me. The only thing missing from the shots are the inevitable swarms around a spot light – insects, moths, mosquitoes, gnats, and thousands of other creepy-crawlies you never before knew existed.

I thought of all this as I flew to Bangui the other day. Looking out the window, for hours I saw nothing but blackness. But on the Casablanca – Douala leg, we jogged out over the Gulf of Guinea, and there, suddenly, burned a haphazard series of red-orange lights. Oil flares, I realized. The fires that erupt from leaks in the underwater drilling stations. Immediately recognizable as non-electric light, how large must those bonfires be to blaze so vibrantly from 40,000 feet above?

I arrived in Douala near midnight, chastened at the reminder of how exploitative resource extraction can be. Immediately after the Douala-bound passengers filed out, leaving only the few continuing on to Bangui, I had another reason to be chastened: someone had made off with the duty free bag of gifts I had left in the overhead bin. No amount of tearing around Douala customs and baggage claim yielded the lost items; they were no doubt safely stashed away. All the gazes that met mine wore a composed look that came across as smug innocence. The bag contained Scotch for the friends with whom I'm staying in Bangui, one of whom explained that the same thing had happened to her when she passed through Douala. Luckily she woke up just enough to see as the man made to place her sack within his and intervened.

In future research, I would love to study trust. I have no idea yet how I would go about doing it (I find Nathan Nunn's work fascinating but lack the training to perform such quantitative gymnastics), but it strikes me as a crucial, and under-theorized, aspect of social life. Trust resides in shared expectations about likely outcomes. In other words, one could in theory trust in a likelihood of theft. But is that really the way it works – trust becoming a vector for heightened suspicion? Maybe partly, but not entirely. In his new book (Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow), Pierre Englebert cites a statistic from the Afrobarometer survey of Nigeria showing that most people simultaneously do not trust the police– indeed, even see them as the root of many problems – and yet also have confidence that the police is the institution that should handle all theft and crime. This made me wonder whether it is possible not to have trust in, and yet to have confidence in, at least of a sort. Perhaps all this is rather a question of faith – faith in the face of what an empirical analysis alone might label damning evidence.

A final, disconnected thought to conclude this rambling post (one of the luxuries of blogging is an ability to override the inner editor that argues against random asides): the Arabic maps on Royal Air Maroc's overhead monitors labeled Kisangani with its colonial name, Stanleyville (actually staanleefeel in transliteration). Odd how these little time-travel glitches arise; the English version, and all the other Arabic terms, were up-to-date.

Welcome to Bangui.

Experimental Ethnography

My apologies for the silence. I've been fine, mostly in Bangui due to the recent rebel attack in Ndele and a spate of highway bandit activity on the roads around there.

Partly, my no-post laziness has stemmed from plunging into reading in the wake of encouragement, thanks to a friend in Bangui , to explore the new world of economics – Nathan Nunn (who, incidentally, cites my adviser, Charles Piot, on multiple occasions), Edward Miguel, Stathis Kalyvas...(I welcome further recommendations!) I even caught myself thinking like an economist the other day, trying to draw little diagrams of potential causal relations and wondering how one could isolate the factors and determine the links.

As I approach the end of this chunk of fieldwork I'm filled with mixed feelings including, yes, some regret.

Though the idea of fieldwork as a rite of passage is oft-critiqued in anthropology, it nevertheless persists. My department, for instance, offers no methods course. Throw 'em in the deep end and see how they do. Most people swim, even if just dog-paddling. So on one level this rite of passage practice is fine. But I have started to notice myself developing a certain anxiety over the lack of structure in ethnographic research. This lack of structure was less apparent when anthropologists worked in small villages and immersed themselves in every detail of their social structure. The (artificial) geographic boundary of the village provided the contours for the study. But now as multi-sited ethnography has become common (my own research has been more multi-sited than I had envisioned, simply because the places I had hoped to do research have been intermittently unsafe, forcing me to find other options), there is a risk that the great strength of anthropology – its receptiveness and openness – will make for watered-down research unless one has years in which to do fieldwork, which for most of us is impractical. (The most common question I get from ex-pats these days is, “So, are you done with that dissertation?” Sigh. That's not quite the pace of these things.)

All of this is a rambling prelude to my main point: the methodology-envy that hit me upon reading about Elizabeth Levy Paluck's experimental ethnography.

Paluck sought to assess the impacts of encouraging listening to a conflict resolution-themed soap opera in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She randomly assigned villages to either receive the broadcasts or not and then designed an evaluation survey that used both quantitative and qualitative measures. At the end of each respondent's interview, the interviewer offered a bag of salt as a thank you. The interviewer then explained that a local humanitarian group had drawn attention to a needy group in the community and asked whether the respondent would share any salt. “Which group?” was the most usual reply. The interviewers asked whether there was a group the person would not feel comfortable giving to. Most people in this area plagued by recent years of violent conflict responded affirmatively. The interviewer then measured the quantity the person said s/he would give, depending on the group. As expected, people gave less salt to members of their rival group. Surprisingly, the results showed, tentatively, that those who had listened to the soap operas were less willing to donate than those who had not.

How fascinating to make social norms and relationships materially visible. I have tried, in my limited capacity as a solo researcher, to do similar things myself, but have bumped into frustration each time because, I think, of my failure to materialize the hypothetical examples I set out.

In my next project, whatever it might be, I would love to systematically integrate some experimental methods. But I have much to learn.