On another occasion Prabha asked me to take some presents to people in Chhalli, her husband’s village, including her husband’s widowed sister Sushila, and a sister of her own, Simran, who was married there. These two were not on good terms. I visited Chhalli in the company of a classificatory ‘brother- in-law’, Gopal. Gopal was married to a kinswoman of Prabha’s and his own daughter was married to a man in Chhalli. He was effectively an extension of the ‘island of trust’ which Prabha, myself and our families constituted. We had lunch at Sushila’s house and she seemed pleased with Prabha’s gifts. It was difficult to get away as she seemed unwilling that we should visit other houses in the village. Yet I had to get the rest of the presents to Simran without Sushila being aware of what had been given. In such a tiny hamlet, with all the houses facing onto the same street, secret visits were impossible. Sushila insisted on accompanying us to Simran’s house, as did a number of neigh- bours and a raggle-taggle of small children who had gathered as they saw us leave her courtyard. I was frantic to see Simran for at least a moment on my own so that I could hand over the gifts without the scrutiny of Sushila and the rest of the village. Gopal had grasped the situation without being told and attempted diversionary tactics. Why didn’t I take a photo of everyone standing in front of Simran’s house, he suggested. It would be a nice memento of the visit and everyone could be in it. He would take it himself if I gave him the camera. Everyone rushed out on to Simran’s verandah, with Sushila at the front, determined not to let Simran have pride of place. Gopal lined everyone up and took a good deal of time fussing and positioning people. This gave me time to stuff the bag of presents under a quilt lying in Simran’s front room;
she acknowledged the manoeuvre with a knowing grin and we joined the crowd on the verandah. Gopal’s diversionary tactics had worked a treat, and again my duty as intermediary was complete.
Why were such devious tactics needful? Why make such a drama out of a simple errand?
I understood why Prabha might not wish Sushila to know that Simran was getting gifts from abroad as well as herself. Sushila could be jealous that she was not the only one to get presents, and this might exacerbate their already tense relationship. Or she might become dissatisfied if she thought Simran’s present was better than her own. Of course, Simran might do the same if there was any chance for open comparison of the gifts; I knew from my own
experience that in such circumstances gifts were very likely to be compared by the recipients or by other witnesses, and any perceived differences in value attributed to definite motives on the part of the giver. I liked Prabha and did not want to be responsible for sowing discord between her sister and sister-in- law. Prabha did not like Sushila, but I presumed that she wished to retain her goodwill or she would not have sent her expensive presents. And given that an affine of my own (Gopal) had a daughter married in the village, I had a further reason for not wishing to stir up trouble there, even if with the best of intentions. Gopal was also someone whom I liked and who was moreover very useful to me in a number of ways.
On the bus back to Ghanyari, I reflected that I did now understand why my parents-in-law had told me not to tell others of my business, even to be devious about my intentions if necessary. Sometimes reflexivity is a better research tool than any amount of field notes or observation of others. In rela- tion to the discussion that follows, I am not claiming that what I felt and understood was exactly what other people in Ghanyari would have felt and understood in the same situation, only that my thoughts and feelings helped me to interpret something that I had found hard to comprehend on earlier visits to Ghanyari.
Trust, deception and social relationships in
‘peasant’ societies
I recognised in myself and in others around me a pattern of behaviour which has been very well documented in a literature on the nature of social relation- ships in ‘peasant’ societies, mainly written between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Given the interest in the nature of sociation and intimacy in modernity which is manifest in much contemporary sociology, and the interest on the part of both sociologists and anthropologists in what might be called the management of the self, it is perhaps curious that this literature is not referred to more often than it is. I will briefly review some of its main themes.
In 1965 George Foster published a famous paper entitled ‘Peasant society and the image of the limited good’, based largely on his observations in rural Mexico. He described a ‘cognitive orientation’, with concomitant norms of conduct, according to which peasants tend to view their social economic and natural universe – their total environment – as one in which all the desired things of life such as land, wealth, health, friendships and love, manliness and honour, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned (Foster 1965: 296).
There is no way open to the peasant to increase the supply of these good things, therefore a gain on the part of one person in the community must mean a loss to others. Where love and friendship are concerned this means that a favour given to one person is seen as potential diminution of what the
giver is prepared to do for others. The conduct of friendship, and even of affective relations within the family, is stalked by the potential for grief and resentment. If Prabha gave a desirable gift to her sister, then this was liable to be perceived as a slight to her sister-in-law; it was better that each should not know what the other was given than that comparisons should be made.
Concealment, even deception where necessary, is the better strategy for main- taining control over social relations.
Indeed, in the literature I have in mind, jealousy and envy appear as major components of interpersonal relationships in peasant societies. In a relatively self-contained social environment people compare themselves with their neighbours, and are loath to see those who should regard themselves as peers flaunt superior resources or good fortune. In the case of India, Pocock’s perceptive account of beliefs about the Evil Eye tells us that ‘it is most to be feared when those who ought to be equals are not so in fact’ (Pocock 1973:
39). Foster notes that one common means of containing envy among those who regard themselves as status equals is the concealment of one’s riches:
explicit displays of wealth and success are limited to ritualised occasions.
There is a kind of surface egalitarianism among peasants who resent the intrusion of differentials of wealth or pretension, even though each is privately concerned to maximise their own advantage (Banfield 1958). Colclough notes that in an Italian village ‘The socially mobile are a constant source of danger to those around them, for their success is achieved at the expense of others, and thus they are subject to sanctions, the mildest of which is gossipy denigration of their good fortune’ (Colclough 1971: 225). ‘Cutting upstarts down to size’ (Bailey 1971: 282) is a common preoccupation. Migrants in particular need to tread a careful path between not displaying the wealth they have earned abroad at all (and thereby risking being deemed as failures) and flaunting it too ostentatiously, exciting envy. Thus for Prabha it was better discreetly to send suitably pleasing gifts to her kin whilst secretly investing her savings as she thought fit.
The need to conserve and (if possible) maximise personal or family resources in an environment which has traditionally been experienced as inse- cure – either because of the inherent insecurity of subsistence agriculture or because of the inscrutable and unpredictable demands of the state or its local representatives – engenders a situation where the emotional and the strategic aspects of social relationships are seldom distinct. Individuals in the neigh- bourhood are constantly engaged in building and maintaining useful alliances with others. But living at close quarters also means that disputes and tensions are common; trust is hard to maintain, relationships with neighbours and kins may veer between close alliance and enmity, and sometimes this manifests itself in a kind of village factionalism. In his description of honour and conflict in a Sicilian town, Schneider describes the anxiety which people experience in balancing the need to maintain useful alliances with the need to maintain one’s reputation:
The issue is not only one of personal power – the control over people and things – but also the dignity and integrity of the self, and this is not to be taken lightly. Indeed it is difficult to describe the predicament in which people find themselves, the anxiety which accompanies working out the problem of honor in the context of competition and conflict. … Few people are completely confident that they can in fact protect them- selves when the chips are down, that their allies will remain allies and their strategies will succeed.
(Schneider 1969: 153) In this environment the politics of reputation become all-important. In some of the societies under consideration this takes the form of a well elabo- rated ideology of honour. But even where this is not the case, in order to secure the best advantage for oneself and one’s family one needs to maintain the reputation of being difficult to con, liable to retaliate if crossed, and well connected with influential allies. In Ghanyari ‘simplicity’, i.e. straightforward- ness and directness, is only valued when allied to a genuine otherworldly piousness, a reputation for utter moral rectitude. If you are not sure that you can reach such moral heights, then a reputation for simplicity could be a serious disadvantage. It would carry the same weight as the term ‘fesso’, trans- lated by Colclough as ‘soft-witted’, and applied to Italian villagers who had allowed themselves to be duped or manipulated by scheming others (Colclough 1971: 224). Impression management therefore becomes crucial. It is considered wise to be guarded, even to mislead others about what one is doing and what one might do in future. Du Boulay describes how deception and lying in a Greek village is used to protect the individual from mockery and to maintain the proper kind of reputation. The lie plays a vital part in mediating relations between the individual and the community so that deceit, therefore, and the avoidance of mockery, appear as phenomena intimately connected with the structure of the value system and as part of the legitimate means by which the honour of the family is preserved and the prosperity of the household maintained (Du Boulay 1976: 405–6).
This applies to Ghanyari too, though I would point out that deception can just as readily be practised against members of one’s own household (my mother-in-law never came to know about my visit to Kishori). This may be because the individual feels better able to control the flow of information if members of their own family are not privy to everything they do or know, or because even the family or household itself is the site of conflict and strategic alliances. Family honour is not irrelevant in Ghanyari, but personal reputation can be distinguished from it to a large extent.
Academics have applied the term ‘lying’ to deceit practised in the interests of guarding personal or family reputation. But Greek and Indian peasants would call it minding one’s own business and resisting the curiosity of those who might (who knows?) wish you harm. ‘Lying’ does indeed seem an inap-
propriate term – not because people do not sometimes deliberately state what they know to be untrue, but because the word marks outright deceit off from the various other forms of indirection and prevarication which serve the same purpose – to conceal the speaker’s intent and to maintain personal reputation.
In Scenarios 2 and 3 I experienced my secretive behaviour as an attempt to maintain privacy. In villages like Ghanyari, and indeed many rural locations, it is hard for the individual to maintain any kind of bodily privacy. Individuals are not expected to claim personal space within the home for sleeping, keeping their possessions or entertaining their friends, though senior men may be better placed in this respect than the rest of the family. The house itself is permeable to the gaze of others – neighbours making casual calls, chil- dren running in and out. In many Indian villages those who can afford it live behind high walls and relax in sequestered courtyards which are not over- looked but, even then, unglazed windows permit the sounds of quarrels to flow out onto the street. In Ghanyari there are no private places for bathing or excreting; bodily discretion can only be maintained with effort and, to a degree, through the cooperation of others. The requirements for modesty and bodily self-control weigh most heavily on women, for whom the opportuni- ties to control space and the timing of household and community activities are the weakest. However, for both men and women, a sense of personal integrity and privacy is maintained less through the use of space than through the use of information – in particular, control over information about one’s intentions and those of persons with whom one is allied. Such information is not vouchsafed lightly, even to close friends and kin. Lying, indirection and mistrust of others are the means by which one retains some sense of control over what one can do, keeps options open and protects oneself from the control of others. Some control over time may be bought through the control of information about intentions. Vague promises or proposals which the indi- vidual may or may not intend to carry out (Barnes 1994: 66) can be given in the expectation that they will retain goodwill, even serve as a token of respect (Bailey 1991: 6), for the time being. Some time will elapse before the person to whom the promise is made gradually realises that the service offered will not be delivered or the plan proposed not acted upon (assuming that they ever took it at face value in the first place). The strategies which Gopal and I practised in Chhalli were designed to give Prabha time – eventually her kinswomen would in all probability each discover what gift the other had received, make comparisons and come to conclusions about what the gifts represented. If her gifts fuelled misunderstanding between the women, the consequences of this would not be evident for some while, by which time other considerations might, with any luck, be more important than this little drama.
All this involves a degree of self-reflexivity inasmuch as individuals must monitor their own behaviour with a view to judging how far it does or does not close off options for the future. There are no simple formulae by which
successful living is ensured. Certainly the straightforward observance of tradi- tional norms is not enough. But this reflection is not the confessional reflexivity which writers on modernity have noted. On the contrary it must be practised in the privacy of the individual’s own mind. Judgements about others’ performance will be fed into the local flow of gossip, contribute to
‘what people say’. But to wonder aloud about the quality of one’s own
‘performance’ would be to appear other than discreet and in command of one’s reputation. It may even be that the kind of privacy achieved through secrecy and lying enables one to construct a ‘real’ interior self which is inde- pedent of the ‘social biography’ constructed for you by others’ judgments (as Gilsenan [1976: 204] suggests in his study of playful lying behaviour in a Lebanese village). In any case, ‘take care’ in Ghanyari does not mean ‘be kind to yourself ’ but ‘monitor your behaviour with a view to managing relation- ships and events to your best advantage’. Indeed, the release of information of any kind (not just about one’s inner thoughts about oneself or one’s future intentions) could be risky. If the notion of the limited good applies to infor- mation, then useful information imparted represents advantage lost to oneself.
Discussion
The ‘peasant’ literature I have referred to presents a cumulative account of what is clearly a widespread mode of inhabiting society, a way of conducting and monitoring oneself and one’s performance in relation to others and constructing a sense of self in the process. Indeed, we have something which might be described as a ‘condition’ to set alongside sociological descriptions of the ‘conditions’ of modernity and postmodernity. In pursuing this line of exploration I found it interesting to relate my material and reflections to Giddens’ account of modernity, this being a detailed and well substantiated (as well as very influential) account of a ‘condition’ of modernity. What happens if we situate Foster’s observations within Giddens’ problematic? And if what we have is some kind of ‘peasant’ condition, then what are the aspects of
‘peasant’ society that generate and sustain it?
Foster sees peasant society as constituting
communities that are the rural expression of large, class-structured, economically complex, pre-industrial civilisations, in which trade and commerce, and craft specialisation are well developed, and in which the market disposition is the goal for a part of the producer’s efforts. The city is the principal source of innovation, and the prestige motivation brings novelty to the countryside.
(Foster 1960: 175) There has of course been much debate about the nature of the category
‘peasant’ since then, and there was at the time much disagreement about how
the ‘quality of interpersonal relations’ in peasant communities might properly be evaluated. But anthropologists who wrote in this mode in the 1950s and 1960s showed considerable agreement in treating it as a matter of moral outlook. Banfield saw ‘amoral familism’ as a set of values. Foster regarded the notion of the ‘limited good’ as a concept which was implicit in peasant behaviour and modes of association.
Foster identified the limited supply of land in peasant communities as an important factor making for a view of life and a way of conducting relation- ships which valorised strategic calculation of the way in which the gains and losses of others impinged upon one’s own chances. But he stressed that the behaviour he associated with the idea of the ‘limited good’ could be found among other kinds of community, and even sometimes in modern cities.
Certainly it seems to flourish in the kind of agrarian community which has not yet experienced a high degree of what Giddens calls ‘disembedding’.
Social relations, organised in terms of place, are crucial and relatively stable, and have not yet been ‘lifted out’ of their local contexts through the distancia- tion of time-space relations (Giddens 1990: 21ff.). A high degree of an individual’s interaction will be with known persons, face-to-face, with minimal reliance on ‘abstract systems’ of knowledge and organisation.
Migrants like Prabha, of course, have experienced the process of disembed- ding or ‘deterritorialisation’ (Appadurai 1990) of their social relationships and cultural values. Yet they continue to return to and relate to a community where relations are still largely embedded in the concrete realities of local land tenure, physical communications, demographies and use of space, as do people from Ghanyari and Chhalli who have ventured only as far as the nearest market town to find work. Gossip can only constitute a means of social control when it is the stuff of conversation in concrete localities – coffee-shops, the village well or parish pump, the bus stop or the school gates.
Perhaps in these accounts of peasant social relations we have a rich descrip- tion of what both modern and classical sociologists have called ‘traditional’ or
‘pre-modern’ society, that state that precedes modernity, ever more shadowily described as we move further from Weber’s classical accounts of traditional authority and legitimation. The mode of conducting relationships which I have described does not entirely fit Giddens’ idea of the ‘pre-modern’. He characterises pre-modernity as a condition in which ontological security is achieved through the reliability and trustworthiness of certain institutions. In particular, kinship provides a framework for relations which, though also generating tension and conflict, have a certain stability across time and space.
Likewise, the local community represents a grouping of known persons which is relatively immobile and isolated. On the whole I can recognise Ghanyari in this characterisation, at least the Ghanyari of my first visit. Yet while the rela- tive stability of social relations may breed trust, in the general sense of trust in institutions, it does not breed trust in individual people. Indeed, as we have seen, mistrust and concomitant dissembling and deviousness are the order of