Contradiction and social life

Social science researchers speak of the need to triangulate – compare multiple sources of data about the same topic – in order to parse the meaning of contradictory information. But what should one do when a single individual contradicts herself – espousing diametrically opposed opinions with equal force – in the course of a conversation?

I've struggled with this question during my research in CAR, particularly in relation to Central Africans' views and management of international aid. What to make of a conversation in which a government environment ministry employee, with the patience of a practiced teacher, explains (in French) the workings and importance of wildlife conservation (including a moratorium on all hunting), and then, just a few minutes later, yells (in Sangho) in favor of his right to hunt, a right he is prepared to fight to maintain?

One diplomat to whom I posed this question responded, “It's simple. They're lying.” But that response offers little analytical meat.

Linguists would likely describe it in terms of code-switching, a literature in which I am woefully little-versed (suggestions for readings welcome). As I understand it, code-switching refers to the ways that multilingual people switch between the languages they know in order to better suit the demands of the social situation in which they find themselves. A person might code-switch within a single sentence, or else might speak employ different languages to suit different settings. Relatedly, Foucaultians might describe this as a situation of overlapping “epistemic communities.” The term epistemic community refers to the people who accept a set of truths/assumptions about the way things are, a shared understanding that forms the basis for their cohesiveness (and control).

These perspectives interest me, but, given that epistemic systems do not exist as discrete, bounded units within a person's head, I'm curious about how contradiction is itself a part of the human condition. A witchcraft-believer might accept biomedical explanations for disease causation at the same time as she pursues a witch for “poisoning”; a racist might count a person of color as a close friend. The exception may prove the rule, but that doesn't harmonize the contradictory beliefs. It seems to me that humans have a great capacity for holding contradictory statements as simultaneously true.

For a number of years now, anthropologists have tried to expose contradictions – the Plato talking to the cave-dwellers model. These analyses might take a form like, “Development workers think they're working for liberation, but really they're enacting a more-invasive form of neo-colonial discipline!” (Ditto human rights activists.) There are some useful works in this literature (I found Harri Englund's Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor useful, for instance), but it has limits. For one thing, you can only pull the wool off of people's eyes so many times before they do it themselves and then get on with the work of living, trying to chart the best course amid imperfect information and inevitable unintended consequences. It strikes me as more fruitful to attempt to make sense of the sincerity that may characterize apparent contradictions. (Bill Maurer is at the forefront of the shift away from what I term curtain-lifting anthropology. Though his writing might be too experimental for some, his analysis usually fascinates.)

To return to my aforementioned Ministry of Environment friend, I'm starting to analyze the statements of people like him as similar to the statements of, say, oil company executives engaged in environmental initiatives or Pepsi employees spearheading anti-obesity projects. They seem sincerely to understand and strive to combat the ills of their industries, and yet they still drill ill-advised wells in the Gulf of Mexico and advertise their soft drinks to kids using cartoon characters. In other words, their actions are at cross-purposes. I'm not sure where this line of thought might lead, but at least it gets me beyond simply seeing Central Africans as gifted liars, which strikes me as an intellectual cul-de-sac demanding a bit of bushwhacking.

A rant: Cell phones and Africa

On the plane this morning (I'm making my way to the Law and Society Association annual meetings), I flipped through the Wall Street Journal and saw an article about Africa illustrated by a photo of a dark hand holding a Nokia. Could this be yet another incarnation of the hackneyed “cells phones revolutionizing Africa oh wow farmers can get commodity prices on their mobiles and no longer get rooked at the market” stock piece?

Indeed it was, in a way.

I swear, these articles come out so often college students could make a drinking game of it – take a shot every time you see the stock-prices-on-phones example! Or is it some editorial world where's Waldo, planted here and there to see who's actually reading (is there a prize?) I, for one, have lost count of how many times I've seen it since the first coverage around 2005. And yet I've never seen a single farmer consulting commodity prices on his phone.

The WSJ article at least took a novel tack: turns out those commodity prices on a phone aren't so revolutionary after all. Service providers in Uganda are finding that once people have to pay for the quotes, few deem the service worthwhile.

So can we move on to another story now?

On Revolution

If anthropologists still described their reflectively loquacious interlocutors as 'chief informants,' a man I met a few days ago in Kaga Bandoro (a local employee of an international NGO) would rank among mine. Though he's only from the next prefecture over, he counts as a stranger in Kaga Bandoro, and, like so many other liminal people, he has a privileged position from which to wonder over how and why things are the way they are in the town.

“The people here say, 'We are like the whites' – they only look out for their nuclear family – and that's not accepted in African culture. They want only to receive, but they never give,” he mused.

Marcel Mauss' idea that “The Gift” serves as the basis for social cohesion popped into my mind, and I eagerly described it to him. What to make of a place where, in my interlocutor's assessment, gifts were limited to within immediate families? He shook his head at the challenge of it. and then returned to Mauss to ask for clarification so he could carefully note the basics of French sociologist's theories. Did I perhaps have a French pamphlet on social cohesion that I could share with him, he wondered?

We sat quietly for a moment and then he asked, with some urgency, “Based on the research you have done all over AR, do you think it would be possible for us to totally change, to reverse all these problems of corruption and lack of trust?”

“Like a revolution?”

“Yes.”

And now an old line of Max Gluckman's clamored in my head: “Africans are rebels, never revolutionaries.” To be fair, I'd argue that no one is really a revolutionary, in the sense that new orders never fully wipe out the influences of their predecessors. The blank slate does not exist and history always remains with us in surprising ways. But Gluckman's point, that in African societies conflict, in the form of rituals of rebellion, serves to reproduce the social order, is painfully borne out in Kaga Bandoro, the eastern outpost of APRD territory.

The APRD is one of the first rebel groups to emerge following President Bozize's successful coup in 2003. Its members await integration into the state through the recently-begun DDR program. They fight with the government over the right to man lucrative roadblocks. (I came across a letter written by an APRD officer to the local authorities in which the author even went so far as to eschew the niceties of usually formal written French to blast the government for hassling travelers and subjecting them to searches on a contested barrier.) Like so many in the government, the rebels see politics as a money-generating scheme. They have no interest in changing the system – they want only privileged access to it. Gluckman's rebels, in the flesh.

But this analysis, I sensed, would leave my friend bereft (though he may have agreed). I wended my way through a meandering answer, saying that I thought revolution unlikely, but that change – and even major upheaval of mores, could happen. And I hoped he was not as unsatisfied with this response as I was.

Excuses

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. Travel together with computer problems have conspired to constrain my posting.

A few posts, written over the past weeks, follow, and from now on I'll try to keep more up to date.

The Public Treasury, a Tale in Two Acts

Readers of this blog may have noticed that my posts have tended toward the negative as far as the Central African state is concerned. Today, I have positive news: in February, it became illegal for people to pay taxes to officials in their offices. Instead, good citizens must go to the bank, where there is now a special window marked “public treasury.” People deposit directly into various departments' coffers. In the first month with the new system, revenues more than tripled. The introduction of a basic technology thus eliminated a massive amount of pay-yourself-government (corruption, in common parlance). Of course, money deposited in bank accounts may still wind up building ministerial villas in the provinces, but at least this way there's a potential for more transparency.

This morning as I pulled into the market in Sibut, two hours' drive north of Bangui, I heard a familiar voice call out, “Louisa!” I know no one in Sibut, except maybe for the guys at Restaurant Destroy (the name shares sign space with those of the various humanitarian groups who have patronized the establishment), where I usually get an avocado salad and omelet. I opened the door and saw, to my surprise, a friend from Ndele. He works for some Sudanese merchants by accompanying their truck to DRC to buy coffee and then make the long trek north again to Am Dogon, Sudan to sell the beans. Along the way, they stop in Central African villages and peddle Chinese-made pots and tea sets, toothpaste, and dates. My friend's truck stopped in Sibut to await a money transfer of 200,000 CFA (more than $400) to pay for the rest of the voyage to Bangui. He estimated that in all he would pay 550,000 CFA in road barrier fees for the the Ndele – Bangui journey. Gendarmes, soldiers, police, water and forests ministry guards, and other entrepreneurial sorts set up barriers to extort fees on the roads. Because of the armed group insecurity in Ndele, they can now demand more from voyagers – especially “foreign” Muslims – as a kind of proof of loyalty. Pretty much the polar opposite of the efforts to de-personalize taxes described above.

I can't help but wonder, upon seeing the bedraggled, beaten-down trucks that ply this trade, how on earth they can make a profit from selling an occasional tupperware set and some mid-grade coffee beans if they must pay thousands of dollars in bribes for every round trip. And yet they keep doing it.

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.

Who wants to save the elephants?

The other night I plowed through Jeffrey Goldberg's recent New Yorker article, "The Hunted: Did American Conservationists in Africa Go Too Far?" (full text blissfully available online). Goldberg reports the story of Mark and Delia Owens, animal researchers turned conservationists in southern Africa. They wrote several books about their life in Botswana and Zambia, and American TV producers filmed a documentary about them in the mid-90s. The film crew captured the shooting death of a "trespasser" (or poacher?) by someone off-camera, believed to be Mark's adult son Christopher. The Owens left Zambia shortly thereafter and, in the aftermath of the controversy, have been advised not to return.

As I read, I kept waiting for the climax. OK, I thought, so the Owenses were perhaps involved in the murder of one person. What else? This thought was immediately followed by another: has my time in Central Africa made me so cynical that I no longer react with outrage to the killing of an unarmed "trespasser"? Perhaps.

But I think my reaction stemmed less from cynicism than from Goldberg's relentless focus on this one charismatic American couple at the expense of placing them within a larger perspective -- a larger perspective that would in fact have been more chilling. For many people are killed every year in the name of combating poaching across the continent.

In CAR, militarized anti-poaching is done by a parastatal "project" funded by the European Union. (The project will end in July, at which point it will be replaced; its successor aims to critically examine the management of space in CAR, which hopefully will diminish the death toll of poachers, anti-poaching guards, cattle, elephants, and other animals.) In the past twenty years, this work has been done by French soldiers ("securing the borders"); an American conservationist (his efforts never really got off the ground, though, because the South African mercenary in his employ got into diamonds and attempted murder and other scandals); Russian former French Foreign Legionnaires funded by safari hunters...I could continue.

The well-armed poachers come in increasingly large groups (up to one hundred strong, with camels and donkeys), and, according to the anti-poaching guards, they shoot first. These are not people you can ask nicely to please not kill the elephants and go home. The poachers, who generally come from Sudan, used to target CAR's north and east, closer to home. But they've killed all the elephants there, and the poachers have now penetrated as far as the southwest, and even Cameroon. Because of this dire situation, appearance alone suffice as justification for the guards to kill an interloper. It is war between the anti-poaching guards and the poachers and cattleherders who seek to profit from CAR's vast, sparsely-populated terrain. Only it's a war that is largely hidden from the outside world.

(I once spoke with a man who does militarized anti-poaching work about the fall from grace of one of his predecessors. The predecessor had apparently mutilated, or allowed his men to mutilate, the corpses of poachers they killed. I suggested that this was why he had been kicked out. My interlocutor, though, disagreed. The problem was not that he mutilated bodies. The problem was that he took photos, and, when he had a falling out with a few people, those photos made their way into the European press.)

There is a case to be made for militarized anti-poaching work. Richard Leakey makes it eloquently in Wildlife Wars, his book about his tenure as head of the Kenya Wildlife Services. It is a difficult issue that demands a sustained examination. But focusing on Owenses, and the fall-out from one particular incident, risks masking that what they appear to have done/abetted slots uncomfortably into a widespread division of labor in the conservation world. I once spoke with a director at a reputable international conservation organization, who explained his personal opinion: militarized anti-poaching work is necessary, and our programs would be useless without it, but we can't do it, or say we support it, because of the outcry. Donors wooed with fundraising entreaties full of photos of furry friends would be scandalized. Again, the message is that it's OK as long as it is hidden.

By focusing on the Owenses' misguided efforts (yes, criminal would probably be a better descriptor, but there is a lot of technically criminal activity that goes unpunished in Central Africa) the article makes them into scapegoats rather than implicating the rest of us who see saving the elephants as an imperative. Goldberg unintentionally obscures the thorny challenges of human/livestock/wildlife coexistance that the world (the ivory market is not in Africa, it should be noted) currently struggles with. (Based on the article, it seems like poaching in southern Africa is somewhat under control; in Central Africa it is anything but.)

It is important not to oversell the successes of militarized anti-poaching. National Geographic published a graphic photo-studded story three years ago about Zakouma National Park in Chad (just across the border from CAR), which has been hard-hit by poachers. The author, Mike Fay, struck a cautiously congratulatory tone in his description of the anti-poaching guards' (also EU-funded) work. Nevertheless, in the past four years Zakouma's elephant population has dwindled from 4,000 to 400. Unless something is done about demand, no conservation efforts will succeed.

The article's best line by far came from an Idahoan reacting negatively to the Owenses' attempts to impose their will on their Idaho neighbors: "We're not Africans." The comment carried a clear meaning: you can't just push us around the way you can those peasants. The comment is such a sad commentary on the state of Western ways of operating -- whether motivated by good intentions or not -- in the continent's "hidden" spaces.