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Lying, honor, and contradiction

2016; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau6.2.031

2575-1433

Michaël Gilsenan,

Law in Society and Culture

Previous article FreeLying, honor, and contradictionMichael GilsenanMichael GilsenanNew York University Search for more articles by this author New York UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSociological structures differ profoundly according to the measure of lying which operates in them.– Georg SimmelThis essay focuses on the ways in which meaning emerges in the practical reality of the everyday world rather than on the formal construction of systems of classification and symbolism.1 With a particular concentration on the manifold practices of what will be called "lying," I shall try to show the way in which individuals in a Lebanese village negotiate and transact about the most important area of value in any culture, social personality and the significance with which behavior is invested. I shall go on to argue that kizb, the Arabic word translated here as "lying," is a fundamental element not only of specific situations and individual actions, but of the cultural universe as a whole; and that further it is the product of, and produces in turn, basic elements and contradictions in the social structure. Instead of proceeding by the study of taxonomic systems, I shall assume that tacit and explicit sets of meaning can be examined through everyday activity.For Simmel the lie is chiefly significant because it "engenders by its very nature an error concerning the lying subject" (Simmel 1964: 312), and because it fundamentally affects the reciprocal knowledge which is at the root of all interaction. The lie is a technique for the restriction of the social distribution of knowledge over time, and is thus ultimately woven into the system of power and control in a society. How it informs certain kinds of social relations, and in what spheres, becomes for Simmel the major problem, and this leads into his famous discussion of secrecy.His emphasis on the process of manipulation of meaning by the lying subject highlights the part lying plays in the constitution of the self. A lie by X about X is a classic instance of "creating the self," of purposely fashioning a social personality "out there" for one's own contemplation, of making an object of and to the subject for his own aesthetic self-regard. Knowing what he lies about in reference to himself and how he does so gives the key to the innermost realms of the individual. But lying in the everyday world is also a conscious act directed at another; it is always part of social meanings and social relations. Indeed, the lie is usually accessible to the observer, not in its original form in the actor's intention, but as a judgment made by others (or an other) of certain verbal or behavioral signs.2 Lying often manifests itself to us socially as an attribution made by others to the actor of a specific intention, whether or not such an intention "in fact" existed. The modes and conditions of such attributions are sociologically as significant as the strategic, purposive use of lying by a subject. It is here, in the examination of the lie in action, that we learn the full meaning of the classification "that is a lie."3Such judgments may be public and discrediting, or they may be privately made by the other who for some reason has no interest in revealing his judgment and is prepared to go along "as if" things are as they seem. There may be tacit cooperation and collaboration, or challenge and social compromise. Moreover, all the while others may be unsure, unable to answer the question whether such and such an act or statement is a lie or not, and they may turn to procedures for testing it when it is relevant that they do so. Such "monitoring" will depend on whether there is information, uniformly or selectively available, for verifying the individual's representation, or whether it is simply unverifiable and a matter of trust. Similarly, the lying subject may have difficulty in discovering if he is believed, and the nonlying subject in realizing that his conduct is labelled by some as a lie. Uncertainty as to the precise degree of lying or truth on both sides will always be present and subject to active assessment in problematic situations. For insofar as falseness undermines our notions of legitimate and right behavior, indeed the certainty of our grasp on the reality of the common-sense world, it constitutes a threat of a serious order to our social reality.4 The conjunction or disjunction between appearance and reality, shifting and ever critical, is hedged with ambiguity concerning judgment and value, act and intention, what is concealed and what is revealed.The concept of KizbThe meanings and range of the word kizb5 will emerge in the course of this essay. Precisely because it is a thematic and constantly used concept in the everyday world, it has a wide span of meaning and reference, and as manifested in behavior it may take a complex range and form. Children rush up to other children in the street and falsely announce the death of a famous singer;6 a friend says he is going to a particular place and asks if he can do something for you, when in fact he will be somewhere else altogether; another has found 1,000 lire in a field, you can ask X and Y (carefully rehearsed) who were with him; and so on to infinity. Here the lie is simply a matter of tricking another, often by coordinated group effort, and demonstrating in a simple way an ability to fool him. The essence of it consists precisely in the liar's ultimately revealing the lie and claiming his victory: I'm lying to you, you ate it! In the laughter there is the sense of superiority, the fleeting dominance of A over B. There is the risk too that it will fall flat, or even backfire on the perpetrator with direct denunciation of the kizb. These little scenes are played out constantly by children and young men among themselves, though rarely in this form by socially fully mature males.In this aspect kizb is associated with a rich inventiveness and imagination, a verbal quick-footedness and extemporaneous wit that have strong elements of public entertainment and play about them. Players are not necessarily called to account for the factual basis of their talk, providing that an appropriate setting of banter, camaraderie, and play has been established in interaction. Even so, though the young men may indulge in the (often competitive) verbal fantastic for its own sake, it does not accord with the weight and seriousness of anyone who claims a full social "place," a "station." In such a case it would indicate a certain lightness and lack of self-respect, and a married man of, say, his middle thirties would risk becoming a joke himself if he told too many (a role, incidentally, which some, lacking prestige and social standing, settle for, thus capitalizing on verbal skills where more solid resources are lacking).7This "artificial" quality of word play based on kizb brings us to two more general, complementary senses of the term that relate it specifically to judgments on the nature of the world. The first may be illustrated in the words of a taxi-driver friend, twenty-seven years old, married and known for his bravado, cockiness, and putting on the style, who had come back from a job driving people into Beirut for New Year's Eve. He returned from the capital to the quiet impoverishment of the village, and ecstatically rehearsed the extraordinary nature of the scene with vast enthusiasm.The streets were all hung in lights, decorations everywhere, people all over the road and pavements and filling the open-air cafés. The girls' dresses, heaven, the girls' dresses were up to here [graphic gestures]! There were Buicks. Alfas. Mercedes. Porsches, and Jaguars bumper to bumper.8 People were kissing in the street, it was unbelievable, it would drive you mad, you can't imagine, it was . . . like kizb . . . absolutely . . . like kizb!Here is a scene of glitter and artifice, style and fantasy; an ornate, baroque extravagance of wealth, display, and ornament, of gleaming chrome and glittering clothes, that goes beyond reality and is totally divorced from the everyday world of common experience—in short, like kizb. My notes are full of accounts of unusually vivid occurrences where people were all over the place, cars, bullets whizzing everywhere (seen in person, or on film or television), that in the end were characterized and summed up by the phrase "absolutely like kizb" (shi mithl al kizb abadan). Lying therefore is not to be understood only in terms of strategies and judgments in social relations, or as a technique for gaining or showing superiority. It possesses its own aesthetic of baroque invention and is part of a style, of a wide range of variations on the cultural theme of appearance and reality, and it is recognized at once for what it is.Now the social world in its aspect as part of God's creation, and the Muslim community bound by His revealed imperatives, are part of Truth. Truth indeed is something "pre-eminently real, a living force which is operating in the very process of life and death in the world of existence."9 But insofar as the world is the place of men's activity and a product of their own constructing without attention to its real underlying principles, it becomes the realm of the apparent, of what is vain and fraudulent. Though the Truth is present in the revelation of the Quran and the religious law, few men know the true, either of themselves, others, or the world. Or perhaps more accurately it should be said that the fact that Truth is accessible in Quran and Islamic teaching, could be known, and yet men spend their daily lives ignoring it, shows that they are not passively ignorant but actively liars. Moreover, lying is linked in the Revelation, as they well know, with ingratitude and hypocrisy, two other major and salient aspects of unbelief. Lying is thus a blasphemous act, the direct contradiction of the Truth, and the active opposite of the sacred. The sacred creates, its opposite destroys. These are not theological statements only, for they are used to characterize a world view by the villagers themselves, whose sense of the disjunction between apparent and real, born of a system of dominance in which status honor is critical, is very acute. Kizb is linked to endless reiteration of a world skepticism, and a pessimistic and detached sense of deception: "the world is a lie my friend, all of it's a lie" (ad-dunya kizb ya' ammi, kullu kizb). Why these elements of the Islamic cultural universe are selected rather than others, and why there exists the particular elective affinity of ideology and social group, can be understood by examining the operations of the lie in the widest and the most limited range of social relations.Lords and staff in North LebanonThe village in which I worked in North Lebanon was until the late 1960s one of the main centers of an old Bekawat family of Kurdish origin. It is still one of the most important rural foci of the family's interests in terms of olive groves and agriculture, even though most of the lords now live in the cities of Beirut and Tripoli, from where they have easy access to the village. Estimates of the number in the family reach as high as 5,000, and it is a family in name only. Different segments of it are the most significant local-based land-owning groups in the area, the only real material resource of which is land. Though they now live for the most part outside the villages, the family members dominate the political economy of the region almost as effectively as in the days when their horsemen exercised in the fields below their imposing, thick-walled palaces. Up to contemporary times, the "houses" of Muhammad Pasha and Mustafa Pasha ruled this land and much of the mountain and plain across what is now the border with Syria, and their influence and power are by no means dissipated, though the modalities are in the process of transformation.Members of this stratum are bound by a constellation of interests founded on the direct monopoly of resources. In this situation we do not find a sanctifying tradition and legitimizing myth in the sense familiar to anthropologists. Rather, the historical charter is one of conquest and warrior leadership, backed originally by Ottoman appointment.10 The ideology is one of status honor, hierarchy, and coercion expressed in an elaborate idiom of respect. ("We kiss their hands in spite of ourselves," said one peasant to me, chasbin 'anna, "whether we like it or not.") This type of domination is personal, domestic, and quasi-manorial, and is also a persistent system of political and judicial authority.Under the Ottomans the lords were relatively independent of the central government. Powers of taxation and conscription were in their hands, as was control over the various exactions of produce, labor, and personal services which might with greater or lesser arbitrariness be claimed. They built up political connections with the notables of Syria and Mount Lebanon, and they have dominated all regional elections for the national assembly from the time elections were introduced under the French in the 1920s. Their estates were and are still sometimes of considerable size. The most important bey in the village, for example, possessed around 3,000 hectares of land on the plain, most of it in Syria, and passed back and forth with considerably more authority than the police or army of either government could command in the area. The common statement. "He had such and such a number of villages" is a reflection of a single and simple reality: land, houses, and, in many but not all cases, livestock and all the means of production were in the hands of the beys. Moreover, as I shall note later, the colonial period of the French mandate after the First World War strengthened their political and economic position considerably.The linchpin of the system as far as the village setting is concerned, and the group on which I shall particularly focus, is what might be called in Weberian terms the staff—those persons who put themselves at the disposal of the ruling order as instruments for ensuring the obedience of, and the production of a surplus by, the peasants and laborers. In the village these persons claim to be of one family, let us call it Beit Ahmad, claim to be Circassian in origin (i.e., from outside, non-Arab peoples), and claim to have established themselves independently as small landowners and horsemen (in the full honorific sense of the term). Their services could not be demanded through contractual or customary right; these services could be obtained only by incorporating Beit Ahmad into the system of domainal rule in a position of privilege and status.Beit Ahmad were important to the lords perhaps for two major reasons: first, the scale of the land holdings, at least in the case of the real men of power among the beys; and second, the size and nature of the ruled orders. To administer the one and control the other the population of the lords themselves, scattered among their villages of the plains and hills, was insufficient. The staff administered villages (indeed they still act as estate managers and bailiffs) and guarded the lands and honor of their lords against infringement by other lords or by truculent laborers.Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their common stake in the system of domination, the relationship of lords and staff is marked by constant ambivalence. The former, often divided by the very fact that their monopoly of political and economic power concentrated the struggle and competition for that power among themselves, needed their henchmen against members of other lordly groupings. Therefore the lords might encourage the corporate, family nature of Beit Ahmad as a mobilizable force. But this was hazardous, since this corporate force founded on kinship and a shared sense of status and interest might on occasion be turned against a bey's house (and even drive it from the village when a direct infringement of Beit Ahmad's privilege occurred).11 And family links might prevent a henchman from protecting a lord against the "request" of the henchman's cousin for money. Ambiguities in the relationship are recognized privately on both sides, particularly among the young men of the staff. "We made them, not the other way round" is an often-heard statement which, if not totally accurate historically, nonetheless reflects the real sense in which the lords depend on the staff (or aghawat, the honorific term by which they are known). Most significantly, the lords have been able for various reasons to buy out much of the staff's own lands around the village, thereby separating the staff from the means of economic independence and administration.Beit Ahmad are therefore a much more heterogeneous grouping than the local lords. Divided into four major segments with a genealogical charter going back only four generations, they are united less in deeds than in words.12 Most of the older men were or are attached personally in some way to a bey's service, though some held on to enough land to be free of such ties. Their generation shares a keen sense of the interest of the ranking groups as opposed to the "peasants," though their lifestyles are in fact increasingly similar to those of the persons they regard as the lower strata.13 They themselves were men of the horse and gun in the interwar period especially and before significant patterns of social change had really impinged on the region. These elders still feel part of a traditional political economy in which beys and aghas are in a symbiotic relationship and committed to the perpetuation of the structure of domination.In the family as a whole some own a little land, or rent it on favorable terms from a bey; some rely entirely on the lords for employment as bodyguards or chauffeurs; some are mechanics, construction workers, and lorry drivers; others serve coffee and make water pipes for the lord's guests; some are not much more than casual agricultural laborers. Beit Ahmad's position as Beit Ahmad is riddled with contradictions, and I would argue that it is in this gray zone of contradiction that the lie comes into its own. For the family's internal politics are highly fragmented, a series of day-to-day alliances in the context of minute fluctuations of influence and standing. Where low income, limited resources, and irregular work restrict wealth and the opportunities for real autonomy yet men are firmly attached to status honor and hierarchy, personality becomes most critical and the social significance of the individual and his prestige the greatest resource.This is all the more the case because Beit Ahmad are part of a political and economic system based on monopolistic control of major resources and status honor by ruling groups, a system which produces among the privileged strata a primary stress on what a man is, his own individuality, his unique "place" and reputation. You cannot be trained for it in any formal sense; it must be your own creation (providing, that is, that you have been born into the "right" family and station in the first place). Though being of Beit Ahmad and of a certain descent has external reference, what counts within the family is the purely personal standing which a brother's or father's reputation will not make for you. The older men, in whose days the horse and gun were the dominant symbols of chevalier culture and prestige, scorned the idea of work as alien to their ethic and their being. An qabadi (a real man) did not work—the concept was meaningless. He simply was. To be a lord's companion, to be a hunter, to praise the bey in elaborate courtesies, to be a horseman, to be the administrator of seven villages, was not work. That was left for peasants and had no place in the aristocratic code. You are so-and-so and what you can make that statement stand for by your own actions. You observe respect, hierarchy, and etiquette; you sit upright, or lean slightly forward, one hand on knee, legs uncrossed;14 you walk deliberately and slowly; you speak in a voice that demands attention and that silences others, assertively, emphatically.Such men, and some of their sons as well, were murafiqin (companions, bodyguards, followers) to the lords, a position in which their courage and their capacity to dominate others and deter opponents would in the nature of circumstances be tested. Their position as the aghawat could never be legitimated merely by sitting in a certain way and observing the niceties of style, though a lord might happily relax in Tripoli or Beirut with more concern for his inheritance than for his honor. Members of Beit Ahmad depend(ed) far more on day-to-day situations, encounters and performances of honor in which claims and challenges are always possible. The lords were at least in origin Ottoman appointees, men of government, noble rank, beys and pashas, part of the provincial politics of notables. Beit Ahmad has only what it can make of itself and is not able to command the range of alliances of the Bekawat or their economic base. The aghas are locally bound to a particular village and often individually bound to a particular bey. Their greatest deeds are usually on behalf of someone else and in response to someone else's wishes in the idiom of the heroic aesthetic.Contrast this with Clifford Geertz's analysis of the descriptive taxonomies of a society in which the whole weight is on ritualized anonymity and what Geertz calls a "settled haze of ceremony."The anonymization of persons and the immobilization of time are thus but two sides of the same cultural process: the symbolic de-emphasis. in the everyday life of the Balinese, of the perception of fellow men as consociates. successors. or predecessors. in favor of the perception of them as contemporaries . . . [the] various symbolic orders of person-definition conceal . . . [what] we call personality behind a dense screen of ready-made identities, iconic selves (Geertz 1966: 531).In our case, in complete contrast, where "weight" and personal prestige are crucial, anonymity is equivalent to relegation to a kind of neutral zone in which personal liking may be present but one would say "he's a good man, poor fellow" with a shrug.15 He who "has value" and is "not easy" must make claims to that value. Those who do not, or cannot do so, but go about their lives within a restricted sphere of their immediate family lose out at election time or when influence is sought and traded with some lord, as well as in the day-to-day rehearsals of self and place.Anonymity is a judgment, even an attribution of social nonvaluation. Members of Beit Ahmad often demanded of me why I had been talking with such and such a one. The reply that I was asking him about his life history or descent would always produce roars of sardonic laughter. "That has a sira [a socially significant biography]? That has a tarikh [history]?"16 Such comments are made of a "peasant" by definition, as it were. To say any man is a fellah is to locate him in a nonhonorific stratum, to stamp him with anonymity, to label him one for whom questions of prestige and status cannot arise. Why talk to a peasant? Derisory comments of the same order are also made about members of Beit Ahmad by other members, though never in my experience in front of nonmembers. "He has a sira? He has a descent? I told the bey yesterday that you were asking about his descent and he said: 'It's well known what his descent is. He's a dog and the son of a dog!' So much for his genealogy! His father had nothing and he has less. He's a liar [kazzab], just a liar."Social status and patterns of KizbOne does not hide, then, behind various classificatory masking devices as in Bali. Rather one steps forward, differentiates oneself, invites judgment, and strives to establish a significant social biography. It is something to be insisted on, to be claimed as unique, always potentially at issue in the everyday world because circumstances may at any time throw up a crisis in which the self will be challenged and defined. I once upbraided a friend from Beit Ahmad for what I regarded as ridiculous swagger and putting on the style. "Look," he replied, "here, if you don't fannas [show off] you are dead. You have to put it on to live here. You think my brother isn't a fannas because he never sits outside the shop and doesn't talk much and people in the family think he's weak and sickly? You should see him at the top of the village [where the "peasant" families live], he's the biggest fannas in the whole village, talking about how he'll organize these and those votes and who's going to pass exams, etc., etc. Up there he makes himself the lord of the village. Watch him." I did, and it was true.17Most important, these social-status performances take place for the most part before those with whom one is consociate.18 It is their judgment, rather than that of outsiders or the "peasants," which is significant; it is with those who know one best that transactions over one's social self occur. They are of all people best equipped to monitor one's behavior, and they have the most knowledge of one's biographical situation and life history. In my experience there is a high degree of consensus on readings of individual character in our sense of the term, and on mechanical abilities or skills (e.g., motor repair). I never heard men "lie" on these topics—perhaps there were too many practical and objective tests available. The variation and flexibility and transactions occur with respect to one's social standing and the degree to which one "counts" in the everyday world. Your consociates share with you a childhood environment that emphasizes the importance of the fluctuations of individual prestige and a competitive idiom of social relations. Among the children patterns of joking and lying emerge over time between two or more in which one is mistillim (taken over) by the other(s); in which verbal ability to outmaneuver another is cultivated and an appreciative eye for the minutiae of personal and general style and strategy is developed. Onlookers would say istillmu, he "captured him," "got him in his hand," "got a hold over him." Idioms of superiority abound to describe the sparring between individuals that is conducted through boasting of oneself or one's father, through display and bravado, through deceiving another in kizb: akalha (he ate it, he was beaten), mawwithu (I killed him), māt abadan (he died).19All the time the question of what lies behind this behavior is present. People ask "what does he mean by this, what does he intend?" (shu biyiqsud), "what's he after?" (shu biddu), "what's the goal?" (shu al hadaf), "what is his interest?" (shu maslahtu). Narratives about events are full of "I asked myself what he was really after." When the actor particularly wishes to communicate something to another without an ulterior motive and without deception there are very simple cue phrases: 'an jadd (seriously), bitsaddiq? (will you believe me?), ma mazah (without joking), wahyatak, wahyat abuk (by your life, by your father's life).20 Many accounts of confrontations or encounters include the question "how should I make myself out to be?" (literally, "how should I make/do my condition; how should I react and appear to him?"). So one often hears "I pretended that I had never heard of it" ('amilt hali ma' indi khabr, "had not information on the subject"). How one "makes oneself" and "having information" go together in lying and judging other's appearances. Even with consociates the field of interpretation is relatively open, incidents can be glossed in many different ways, and the shifting everyday character of practical experience gives plenty of scope for individual style and display.There are other modes of display and performance: mazah (joking), haki (idle talk, empty words), and tafnis (showing off).21 All are terms which characterize that world of invention, fantasy, humorous elaboration, artifice, and pretense indicated by the word kizb; all focus on display. Khallina nfannas 'aleihum, a man might say—"let's show off in front of them." And so he drives past at high speed, or cuts into a discussion with: "Politics? No one knows what I know about politics. I'm the lord of politics. I invented it." Another wants to borrow a particularly fine set of prayer beads from a friend so that he can walk through the village with it for a few days, ostentatiously flicking it through his fingers in front of everyone. It is all show.Such are the idioms and styles which men manipulate and in which they work the variations in constituting a social self. The lie occurs throughout as a leitmotif in a constant interaction of judgment on the apparent and the real, what is and what seems. But what happens when the self becomes problematic in a radical way, quite beyond the everyday momentary interchange, so that it is critically threatened or threatens others? What constitutes such a crisis and how is it handled? In the next section I will discuss a series of events or sustained processes of action which demonstrate how crisis and the actors involved are defined, and the different collective and individual strategies that are adopted.Honor and the definition of Makhlu'It is characteristic of the principles of this social world to be what I would call highly visible. The basis of politics, the armature of domination, is exposed rather than masked.22 At least at the general level the code of honorable male social conduct and values is equally articulated and "on the surface." Similarly, status is negotiated in behavior that emphasizes visibility and making claims in the public domain about one's acts and biography. The status honor ethic sets the terms of relevance and provi