Elizabeth A. Throop, Psychotherapy, American Culture, and Social Policy: Immoral Individualism Victoria Katherine Burbank, An Ethnography of Stress: The Social Determinants of Health in Aboriginal Australia Karl G. Heider, The Cultural Context of Emotion: Folk Psychology in The Anthropology of Ignorance West Sumatra Jeannette Marie Mageo, Dreaming Culture: Meanings, Models, and Power in U.S. American Dreams AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ApPROACH Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and Jonathan Mair, The Anthropology Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach Edited by Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and}onathan Mair palgrave macmillan * THE ANTHROPOLOGY Of IGNORANCE copyright © Casey High, Ann H. Kelly, and jonathan Mair, 2012. All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PAlGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States-a division of St. Martin's Press LlC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. P<'Ilor<'lv",® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, Kingdom, Europe Figure 8.1 is reproduced with permission of Extend Fertility and Ina lim. Cover image see,hear, speak no evil reproduced with permission of Chris Walkington. ISBN: 978-{)-230-34082-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The anthropology of ignorance: an ethnographic approach I edited by Casey High, Ann Kelly, and jonathan Mair. p. cm,-(Culture, Mind, and Society series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-{)-230-34082-4 (hardback) 1. Ethnology-Philosophy. 2. Ethnopsychology. 3. Ignorance (Theory of knowledge)-Social aspects. I. High, Casey, Ph. 0.11. Kelly, Ann, 1980 Mair, jonathan, 1977 GN345.A642012 306.4'2-<1c23 2011036786 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Contents List of Tables and Figures vii Acknowledgments lX Chapter 1 Introduction: Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object 1 Jonathan Mair, Ann H. Kelly, and Casey High Chapter 2 Sarax and the City: Almsgiving and Anonymous Objects in Dakar, Senegal 33 Gretchen Pfeil Chapter 3 Discourses of the Coming: Ignorance, Forgetting, and Prolepsis in Japanese Life-Historiographv 55 Shunsuke Nozawa 4 Evoking Ignorance: Abstraction and Anonymity in Social Networking'S Ideals of Reciprocity 87 David S. Leitner Chapter 5 Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism 119 Casey High Chapter 6 "I Don't Know Why He Did It. It Happened by Itself": Causality and Suicide in Northwest Greenland 137 Janne 7 Inhabiting the Temporary: Patience and among Urban Squatters in Buenos Aires 163 Valeria Procupez 32 Jonathan Mair, Ann H. Kelly, and High Watson, Rubie S 1999. Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe, NM: James Currey Publishers. Alexei 2006. Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In-Formation Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chapter 2 Sarax and the City: Almsgiving and Anonymous Objects in Dakar, Senegal Gretchen Pfeil -Ce matin encore Ie journal en a parle: ces mendiants, ces tallbes, ces physiques, ces loques, comitutent des encombrants humains. II [aut debarrasser la Ville de ces hommes-ombres d' hommes plutat-dechets humans, qui vois assai/ent et vous agressent bartour et n'importe quando Aux carre[ours, c'est a souhaiter que les jamais The newspaper mentioned it again today: the beggars, the disciples, the lepers, the handicapped people, these collapsed men, forming human roadblocks. The City must be rid of people rather, shadows of people-human castoffs, who assault you and mug you anytime, anywhere. At intersections you just hope that the light is never red! -Aminata Sow Fall La Greve des ou les humains l Introduction: Not Having and Not Knowing In Dakar, Senegal-and in the African metropolis more generally-a number of potential markers of the state have become conspicuous in their absence: missing persons, missing services, missing supplies. 2 The stuff of urban life is gone: where once there were state services, now there are questions. This absence of needed things demands an explanation (see e.g., Ferguson 2006; Mbembe and Roitman 1995). Indeed, the quotidian challenges of material existence have created equally distressing epistemological challenges, and Dakar residents must manage a complex situation in which not having and not knowing are tightly intertwined. All told, tbe situation literalizes 34 35 Gretchen Pfeil Raj's apt definition of ignorance as "the presence of an absence" of knowledge (2000). Between 2006 and 2008, as economic conditions went from bad to worse on a global scale and also in Dakar's markets and house holds, Dakarois worried more than ever about the conspicuous absence of things that the state was supposed to assure: imported rice and cooking gas in the marketplace, electricity. In doing so, they tried to figure out what larger forces, general patterns, or spe agents were behind the movements of goods. These attempts to diagnose the status of the national economy turned not (or not only) to questions about the global system, but routinely focused on the idea that resources were improperly allocated or consumed at levels of influence somewhere just out of the sight of whoever was talking. Things were rumored to have gone missing because of the secret actions of individual members of the government: misdeeds of douaniers (customs officials), covert agreements between syndicates of grain merchants, and well-organized networks of retailers to create false scarcity in cooking fuel. For most people that I talked to-bureaucrats based in the city and migrant workers, students, householders, academics, taxi driv ers, even religious commentators on television-the national dis ease was largely a foregone conclusion. People imagined that others hoarded money and goods for their own consumption or as a form price speculation. Absences have a shape, though; they are marked by signs. Answers about the locations of the pathology were thus sought in the diagnosis of otherwise uninterpretable objects. People watched the circulation of goods in public as a means of determining where missing things had gone and how to mange their own affairs. Discussions focused on things seen in the street as shadows of agents behind the scenes, the tinted windows of cars, and closed windows of shops functioned as veils marking the presence of things that the viewer could not know. Begging and almsgiving have a specific resonance in urban Senegal: instead of icons of their own material need, as they might be viewed elsewhere, beggars are read as signs of the problems of others and of the city as a whole. In Aminata Sow Fall's landmark 1979 novel La Greve des Battu,3 for instance, sacrificial alms and the beggars become, over the course of the novel, the indelible mark of the collective impact of individual hopes and fears that the city cannot escape. The difference hinges on the local ritual economy of almsgiving. Giving sacrificial alms, gene sarax in Wolof 4 , is a poly valent practice in Dakar. It is a habitual practice of the virtuous, Sarax and the City as well as a popular ritual means of overcoming potential blocks on personal agency and restoring harmony in one's social affairs. The Wolof phrase is literally "to put out alms," the same verb used for any kind of taking out (e.g., taking out the trash). Here I focus on the specific kind of sarax that follows consultation with a ritual specialist to resolve a problem. The problems range from the envy of others to one's own misdeeds, especially sins of improper gain or accruaL Once diagnosed, these problems are repaired through the purchase of elaborately anonymized mass-commodity objects, are then secretly "cast off" to beggars. The magic of this process is both real and illusory. Individual private problems are cast off, but they do not truly go away. Rather, anonymized sacrificial objects come to be an emblem of social lems and the state of the city as a whole. As a result of accepting the sacrificial objects cast out by society-and the problems they are meant to cure-the city's beggars (as an aggregate) become a medium in which the moral and practical status of the city (as a col lectivity) are diagnosed by people who live there. Thus, the elaborate creation of ignorance in the management of sarax transactions actu ally makes possible certain forms of local knowledge about the city, imagined as a unified moral agent. Understanding the mechanism through which beggars seem to have grown rich as the rest of the country has grown ever poorer requires a rethinking of alms in the city as part of a larger economy of both material objects and information, an economy in which beg gars actually perform a necessary kind of work. This work consists of the mediation of knowing and ignorance in transaction. Again, specific forms of sarax create anonymous sacrificial objects interpre only in the aggregate. No longer signs of individual givers, they become signs of society. In so doing, sarax practices and the forms of inferential knowledge that they engender link individual actions to collectivity through a kind of epistemological sleight of hand-a suspension of knowledge-made possible by sacrifice as a specific form of transaction. This places an accent on a larger question at the intersection of semiotic anq economic anthropology: the role of knowledge and ignorance, respective/y, in exchange and material transaction more generally. More the negative space left in communication's wake, nonknowledge-about objects, about states of affairs--'-is actively produced in interactions and transactions. These forms of igno rance then become the condition of possibility of further interac- Objects can thus be said to require epistemological crafting. 36 37 Gretchen Pfeil From the completely disavowed objects cast off as garbage to closely guarded heirloom objects, the construction of ignorance is a means by which people create "the opacity necessary for the production of reproduction of societies" (Godelier 2002:33). In what follows, I examine sacrificial almsgiving in Dakar as two distinct practices: the production of objects made anonymous in the practice of giving, and speculative practices of inference that read states of affairs back from aggregates of such objects. The first set of practices, the creation of specific kinds of ignorance, are the condi tion of the latter, the creation of an otherwise impossible form of knowledge. I further argue that these practices highlight the tance of the management of ignorance to sociality in Dakar, more generally. Not Knowing about Sarax -C'est ~'rai, c'est vrai Serigne .. Ce n'est meme pas a discuter. It's true, it's true Serino It's not even to be mentioned. Si tu feras l'aumone comme indique, avec trois fois sept metres de tissue blanc non soyeux, ainsi que sept cents noix de cola dont trois cents rouges et quarter cents blanches ... If you perform the alms indicated (prescribed), with three sets of seven-meter lengths of white, non-silky fabric, as well as seven hundred cola nuts, of which sum three hundred are red and four hundred are white ... -Fall 1979:79 Sarax (n. offered object) and gene sarax (to put out such an offering) are Wolof terms derived from the Arabic sadaqa, a subset of the category of alms (sadaqa is spontaneous, distinguished from zakat is a calculable annual duty). In Dakar, sarax covers a broad range of sacrificial offerings united by the requirement that they be forgotten. For the purposes of this chapter it is useful to divide sarax into two provisional types. The type first type of sarax is habitual to the point of being over looked: plates of food set out on front steps at night, coins fished out of pockets and handed over to beggars automatically without a break in stride or conversation. Some practices of this kind are more like a tic: a drop of yogurt or milk flicked out before drinking a glass, a cup or handful of water poured out at the doorway on Sarax and the City way out of the They are gestures that fade from the memory of people who make them-perhaps they never register in the place. If perfectly accomplished this kind of gift approaches Seneca's stoic ideal: "The rule for the giver and receiver of a benefit is that the one should straightaway forget that he has given, and the other should never forget that he has received" (Seneca:10). The given object becomes a true "benefit"-better translated as a "kind deed" (see Goux 2002)-when the giver can achieve the action without knowing he has done it. As in the habitual and immediately forgot ten gifts of writing among Fudangi "friends" discussed in Nozawa's work (2007, this volume) it is unclear who, if anyone, will receive and do the remembering. I learned most about these practices from the look of annoyance that followed my questions about them. People responded blandly, "That's what I do," or "It's good to do that." Habitual sarax is com posed of gestures presented to me as unremarkable, and indeed, as better left unremarked. The practices do not lead to talk; they leave almost no trace except as they serve to continue the daily order things. Inasmuch as this kind of sarax leaves a mark, it is a residue of habit. Like the dark patch on the forehead and callus above the big toe that make visible on the body the repetition of sa/at prayer, the habit of giving without ever thinking about it leaves an unmen tionable residue of virtue, a quality that accrues to the practitio ner. Such gestures of forgotten alms let life go on without comment, forgotten. My focus here, however, is on a second type of sarax J which involves the circulation of larger and more valuable objects, a form of giving both more elaborately created and more elaborately effaced. The offering of these objects is always the result of consultation, diagnosis, prescription, and preparation. Much as a prescription pill can (in the correct social context) be read as an objectified sign of disease, diagnosis, and a trip to the pharmacy, sacrificial objects in this context become imbued with a meaning that is a history of shadow transactions (d. Irvine 1996). As is the case with some forms of prescription medication, the transactions that have led to the procurement of the treatment are hidden from public view, and largely withheld from discussion outside these contexts. A person, suffering from some very private affliction or, alter nately, hoping for a particular outcome in a complex situation of chance, goes to see a specialist: a serifi (the title of a Muslim cleric) or a seetkat (a seer who uses techniques not considered specifically Islamic). News of this visit is not shared with others, and the person 38 39 Gretchen Pfeil going tells any number of cover stories to explain the trip without revealing its purpose. If the person seeking a consultation does refer to the specific person to be consulted, he refers to him or her as "an old man" or "the lady" and only rarely identifies him or her by name or location.s This person is a cleric or diviner who has earned a repu tation for determining-through one or more means of divination 6 what needs to be "put out" as a sacrifice to remedy the problem? It is not always necessary for the client to name the particular problem in question, in in some forms of divination this is not allowed. One can even consult someone to find out if one has a problem and then to cure that problem (without ever knowing exactly what the problem was). If sacrifices are indicated, the spe cific problem has been located and given a name (somewhat tauto logically, "the need to make these sacrifices"). The afflicted person listens and makes a list of the objects demanded: one might be as was the protagonist of Sow Fall's novel, to give three seven-meter lengths of white 8 , matte-finish cloth and seven hundred kola nuts, three hundred red and four hundred white. Once purchased these objects become indexical signs of both this moment of consultation and of the "problem" that led to the consultation. The value and quantity of the objects requested are understood to reflect the scale of the problem, or the stakes of the situation. The seriii specifies, too, how these items will be "put out." Perhaps one of the pieces of fabric will go to an old woman with a child; another to a mother of twins; the kola nuts, in three packages to three different blind men. The person making the sacrifice might it is more likely that he or she will send a gathered objects are hidden in the house overnight. They are divided into their prescribed portions and closed up in opaque bags, or wrapped in brown paper. The next ideally just before dawn, someone-not necessarily the afflicted person-will take the bags and parcels along on the way to work. Whether they travel by foot, bus, taxi, or private car, people are always carrying neatly wrapped parcels with them when they go out in the morning. The packages might contain work clothes, lunch, a gift for a friend, clothing that needs to go to the cleaner, something to take to the tailor. Parcels of sacrificial goods-and the problems of which they are signs-disappear into the melee commuting and rushing. Then, as the taxis and buses pass a major crossroads-near a major post office, for example-the problems become visible for a moment, because of the traffic disruptions they cause. Bags are Sarax and the City thrown from the windows of stopped buses into the hands of beg gars who press close around every vehicle. A taxi suddenly crosses lanes of traffic to stop momentarily in front of a cluster of shabby children with begging bowls. The tinted window is lowered and a veiled woman in sunglasses is momentarily visible as she hands small black bag after small black bag out the window. The moment is finished, but beggars continue to demand, and she dismisses them with the phrase "the sacrifice is out" as the taxi speeds away. Objects given as sarax lose all meaning but this: they point to someone's personal problem or secret, and they suggest, by their size, something about the scale of the problem. And then they disap pear. The objects-including rice and sugar-are quickly fenced in the market and become ordinary commodities once again. The resul tant money mixes with other cash received and is sent to families in areas, or banked in secret banks, only to become visible much as something else. At each stage in the process, a new kind of is introduced: each portion is a sign of the whole, of which it is a part, but division masks the total size of the whole. The kind of each item hints at the kind of the problem, yet it cannot the whole story. Further, the person who hands it out-glanced fleetingly-might be the person in whose name the sacrifice is made, but it is just as likely to be a messenger. It appears troubling to argue that almsgiving produces palpa bly unknowable-and radically alienated-objects, as if objects of sarax are more commodities than gifts. The bag of sugar and envelope of cash given as sarax appear, if only momentarily, auton omous and separate from the history of individual human inter actions that have produced them. This is, however, precisely the result of the practice of alms in Dakar. Sarax transforms the givers' highly personal and private problems into an aggregate and dep ersonalized stuff, emblematic of a total social situation: the city. The entire process, like the "grazing" practices of Ja'in renounc ers (Laidlaw 2000:623), transforms a "personal substance, closely identified with the donors," into "an anonymous and undifferen tiated substance." Laidlaw's argument is different, though, inas much as he argues that by causing the object to disappear at the moment of transaction, the renouncers' means of consump creates a gift: "Here, the gift as object is made to disap pear once it has been given, so there is no longer the same 'it' to speak." (2000:623) Alms in Dakar achieve a slightly magic. By making the unique origins of each object disappear by creating a tightly worked veil of ignorance around 41 40 Gretchen them, almsgiving creates the possibility of knowledge on a differ ent scale. No longer closely linked to their donors, these objects (dechets, "castoffs") and the people who consume them (Sow Fall's dechets humains) become productive of potential knowledge about society as a whole. The number of sacrifices grew over 2007-2008, a growth visible in the increase in the number of beggars and traffic problems at cer tain intersections. At the same time, people began to speculate more and more openly about where all of these gifts were coming from, what kinds of private problems, exactly, could lead to the need to give so much? Who was giving? And, as individual portions of alms appeared to increase in size people began to see the edges of govern ment problems: a cure this big surely pointed to a big disease, what had the afflicted done, and where had the money come from? Knowing about the City - C'est etonnant, la Ville .. La vie va de complications en complication < The City is astonishing .. Life goes from complication to complication. - C'est certain les choses sont de plus en plus difficiles. That's true .. things are getting harder and harder. -Fall 1979:13 By late 2008, the street and the city had become the most impor tant subjects of conversation, both public and private, and for good reason. Violent riots broke out when street vendors were forcibly removed from streets near the city's largest market. Young street vendors alternated interviews with journalists with torching cars on the main boulevards. 9 At the same time people watched prices in the market, particularly government regulated prices of staples of city- cooking, which increased vertiginously. to The price of a sack of rice jumped 150 percent in a few months (apparently between sets of shipments). Cooking oil increased in price several times for an over- rise of about 50 percent. Powdered milk nearly doubled in price. ll At the moment prices were spiking, staple goods disappeared from the marketplace: one might spend a full day visiting markets and shops all over the city to purchase enough rice to prepare food for a funeral. Even purchasing the household's monthly ration of rice at the end of the month became an ordeal, the cost of the search for rice itself becoming an additional major expense. In political Sarax and the City cartoons, "Goorgoorlu"-the popular term for the hardworking everyman-was depicted limp on his sofa or floor at home. The housewife, however, took to the streets herself: the street vendors' riots were followed by a series of marches and protests by mothers of families, who decorated themselves in empty oil bottles and rice sacks. Even before the outbreaks of protest, everyday activity on the street and in the market was a site for the diagnosis of the city and nation. Conversation often centered on discussion of the number of new SUVs on the street as a possible sign of where the government was spending its money. Those with tinted windows were ered especially significant. Tinting requires a special permit lead to a police stop for those without one. Not appearing-being able to hide behind tinted glass, for example-is thus a sign of privi lege, and much is vested in the possibility of acting without being seen. Similarly, obscured moments in a chain of transactions are read as the work of those who can travel behind tinted glass. Visible effacements or absences that create certain kinds of knowable ignorance-things one knows one can't know-are similarly viewed as potential signs of the acts of people in power. The absence of rice in shops was read as a sign ot actiVities at a level of organization opaque to the average consumer (e.g., merchants withholding goods from market in anticipation of the next govern ment announcement of price increase). The movements of natural gas cylinders (in lamentably short supply)12 were a key topic of con versation. When a shortage was coming, where the canisters could be found, how many of them might be at a given location, and in what sizes: all were taken as possible means by which to gauge prepare for) the short-term situation. Often secretive conversations between female kin, office-mates, and friends centered on timing the purchase of household staples and monthly supplies of food, affect ing decisions about the scale of purchase of individual staple foods.13 Similarly, the search for a needed commodity led to secretive actions within hidden social networks, as adult sisters patrilocally dispersed throughout the city sent text messages to each other's cell phones: "Are there gas cylinders in your neighborhood?" "Yes. My shop keeper will hold a small one for you. I put down a deposit. Don't anyone." Understanding the circulation of rice and fuel had practical cations for the short term, at the same time, attempting to know where they could get rice and gas also required that people attempt to find a larger order behind their movement. Thus, tracking rice 42 43 Gretchen Pfeil and fuel became an occasion for explicitly political speculation as people attempted to discern the agents behind these fluctuations.1 4 Speculative talk about the general movements of commodities as signs of the actions of government occupied conversation, shows, and the pages of news dailies. "These Human Castoffs" The streets of Dakar are full of beggars, a fact that has attracted substantial foreign attention, and a number of unsuccessful inter ventions by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), humanitarian agencies, and foreign missionary groups. The large number of beg gars is often understood by outside observers as a transparent sign pathologies. Because a large number of beggars are tal ibe or child Qur'anic disciples drawn from across the region, some believe it points to forced child labor and abuse (Sengupta 2004). Others conclude that the streets are crowded with beggars because people give, making the beggars a sign of the city's benevolence, not its moral turpitude (Dickenson 2006). During my preliminary fieldwork in Dakar in 2005, I studied personal and mass-media interpretations of beggars. People living in the city acknowledged and at times agreed with outsider interpreta but often framed the situation in very different terms. In for mal interviews about the meaning of beggars on the street, Dakarois suggested that this was a symptom of pathology on two scales. First, the growing presence of beggars was ascribed to desertification and deepening poverty in the rural areas, as labor-intensive farm ing methods no longer yielded sufficient millet and peanut crops (see also Perry 2004). Second, the growing beggar population was said to reflect the deepening of longstanding political and economic problems in Senegambia and the surrounding area also Antoine et al. 1995). Many suggested that instabilities in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, and other countries in the region had sent a flood of migrants to Dakar. This movement reflected both contemporary distribution of resources and the residues of colonial administra tion; Dakar is relatively rich in both commerce and infrastructure, and is the former capital of Afrique Occidentale Fran<;aise (French West Africa). The interpretations that I heard in 2005 recurred in interviews during 2006 and through the difficulties of 2007-2008. period, however, greater familiarity gave me access Sarax and the City to other forms of talk. The topic of the population of beggars was picked up and dropped during women's daylong visiting sessions, 'hispered as people walked down the street, mentioned between patrons at the corner shop, and the topic of debate in taxis. The tone of these conversations was always astonishment: an observation on the street led to a moment of shock and then reconsideration. The action of one anonymous beggar could suddenly attract a person's attention, and in discussing his or her surprise the observer would seem suddenly to glimpse a new view of the city as a whole. In these contexts people consistently talked about the (purportedly) grow ing number of their growing audacity, and their (supposed) increase in wealth as signs of pathology of a different order. A curi ous explanation was often given: the changes in the beggar popula tion reflected the growing number and amount of sacrificial alms that support them. This, many concluded, was a sign of the growing number of reasons to make sacrifices, the increase in size of indi vidual alms, a sign of escalating stakes of sacrificial practice. Examples of speculative interpretation of alms mounted over the course of my fieldwork. Most occasions were overheard and and thus difficult to capture. In one instance, though, I was able to observe an entire conversation, which perfectly encapsulated the many aspects of the genre that I had come to recognize. It took place in late 2008 during a weeklong strike by garbage workers 15 , in response to government's nonpayment of salary. The follow ing narrative is adapted from field notes that I made immediately afterwards: I am in a taxi with an older woman I know well, we are going to the dentist because I need a root canal. She is with me because I am scared of the dentist, and this makes a good excuse to take the afternoon off from her busy office. Before we got in the taxi she had a quick and sharp talk with him about how much we'd pay to go from Ouakam to Place de l'lndependance: 2,000 francs CFA (-$4). While she is settling into the back seat the conversation continues. When she talks with taxi drivers, I always listen. This driver is a man who could be much older than her. He has workedjn the city for over thirty years; she has worked in a major national office in Dakar for the same length of time. He is her favorite type of taxi driver, and so the two of them begin a heated discussion of the changes the city has to various things in the landscape as signs of change, as signs of the problems of this regime. We pass the new overpass,16 just before the Poste Fann and the driver tells us that he saw a woman and her child hit here the other 44 Gretchen Sarax and the City 45 day-beggars of course. My companion leans in, "oh there are so many of them! We used to see prostitutes here [she gestures towards an infamous bar on the corner before the Postel but now it's all beg gars!" They nod in agreement. Talk turns to a beggar both knew, but who no longer works this corner (he's built his house back in his home village, apparently, and has retired). (Ndeeysan!17 The lady says.) Though both know him, they do not call him by name. Rather, they describe him as "the old man in the wheelchair, from Kolda." The two of them are enjoying the conversation immensely. This talk is fresh and off the cuff, the subject of new construc tion and its new consequences. The are standard. The image of the beggar killed in traffic in front of this hospital was already a commonplace when Aminata Sow Fall composed La Greve des Ratti! The house that alms built is also a common theme of talk about beggars, and a similar house is the setting: of half of the action in Sow Fall's novel. 18 Then the driver points to parking lot near a large grocery store (frequented by the cream of Dakar society). He begins to tell a story: "You know, I was stopped there, a few weeks ago, praying, and someone told me to go over to a private car, a black Escalade. So I went, out of curiosity, you know, people were teIling me to go. There was someone inside the car with its tinted windows." The woman interrupts: "Oh you have to KNOW someone to have those on a private car ... " They nod and cluck in agreement. He continues: "This hand is passing out of the skinny little space at the top of the window. So I mine, turn back towards my taxi, it open, I see white fabric. I put it in the trunk and forget it. It's when I get home that I remember it, thinking I could maybe make some clothing for the kids out of it, if it was enough, I open the package. Well fa sigh] I unfold the fabric and I see red paper highest denomination of banknotes, each worth about $201. It was a sum of [about $200 USD]." From here the conversation takes a turn that surprises me. The two work together to read an agent or source back from this enve lope of money, a relationship they treat as one of simple part whole metonymy. First they follow this line of speculation through quantity: it was determined that more than $4,000 must have been given away. They calculate this sum based on an estimate of the number of packets handed out, and the assumption-grounded in their own broader experience of almsgiving practice-that each envelope money contained an equal portion of some larger amount. Having arrived at this size of the they begin to discuss what a sacrifice of this scale donor. They reason that no one gives away $4,Ovv has earned, no matter what he wants or what he is trying to escape. Therefore, this money could only mean one thing: the $4,000 (remember, this is the estimated "total" of alms that they believe were given out) was possibly itself only a smaller portion of a much larger sum, embezzled or stolen. Alternately, they suggest, this sum of money had been called for as alms, and the person thus directed was then compelled to procure the money to meet this request: "In which case he must surely have a serious problem!" the taxi driver says. and think of the problems that he'll have to fix now that he's done this!" The lady agrees; a sad look briefly crosses her face. turn to the physical qualities of the notes, which they read as a further source of information about the situation that led this money to appear on the street: crisp sequential 10,000 francs CFA notes must, they reason, come from a brick of notes at the bank. Banknotes do not stay crisp long. Therefore, this money could not possibly be the result of an accumulation of money hoarded over time. Nor could this be a large sum collected through an aggrega tion of money from smaller transactions (in neither case would the bills be sequential, nor would they be uncreased). Finally, and for similar reasons, the bills could not come from a payout from a ton tine or rotating credit union (for classic descriptions see Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962).This particular group of notes-the taxi driver and the lady decided-must be the result of a division of a larger set of bills drawn new from the bank. They are therefore understood, as are the tinted windows of the black SUV from which they emerged, as signs that this event of almsgiving is closely linked to high-level government or financial agents. pause for a minute and pick up a new conversational thread: the current garbage workers strike. I write a few notes down on a of paper. Then, just as we are preparing to out of the taxi, the talk takes a final turn: "The thing is, 1 pity [the man in of sanitation workers]." The taxi driver continues, visibly saddened, "I sympathize with all of them [yerem naa teen, iioom iiepp]. 1 know that there is nothing you can do in that situation, you want to do the right thing and then you have some kind of other need ... " 46 47 Gretchen Pfeil "Or someone comes into your office and tells you he has another need ... " the lady says, "And what can you do? You have no choice at all. These people higher up in the government can make things so complicated." She turns her eyes to me, "Pay the driver." We've pulled over as far as possible from one of the giant, stinking piles of trash. And while she is pulling herself out of the seat, I quickly hand him the money. Ideally, almsgiving of the sort described in this conversation is com pletely anonymous: both donors and the objects they give are gen eral and are intended to efface all knowledge about the history of the transaction. They are interpretable precisely because of the attempt to remove or obscure marks that would identify their history. The ritual is effective-and the objects meaningful-in proportion to the complete anonymity of the objects it produces. The most generic token of a particular commodity makes the best sacrificial "victim" in this case. But this anonymity-the ignorance surrounding the object-is also the key to its productivity and meaningfulness. As the story makes clear, though, this anonymization allows people in the city to begin to track and to comment on the scale of gov ernment corruption, something that is otherwise difficult. In this case, it was precisely the lack of marks of past transaction on the bills-their newness-that was seen as significant. Moreover, the very act of giving was itself visible. Like the garbage that crowded the streets, aggregate alms and the beggars that partially embody them-seemingly useless and unproductive in themselves-pointed to the money and services that had disappeared. Ignorance and Sacrificial Objects as Medium - Qu'est-ce qui te pousse vers les mendiants? What draws you to the beggars? - Ce qui me pousse vers les mendiants! T u te trompes, Sagar, tu ne vois jamais rien! Tu ne discernes jamais rien! Ne sais-tu pas que tout m' eloigne d'eux! What draws me to the beggars! You're mistaken, Sagar, you never see anything! You never understand anything! Don't you know that everything distances me from them! -Fall 1979:60-61 Sarax and the City Notwithstanding the potlatch-style qualities of the donor in the taxi driver's story, sarax remains a form of sacrifice, not gifting. Dakarois have an elaborate register for the latter, which is much nearer to the classic form of the Maussian prestation. The circu lation of gift objects in the city and beyond expands the fame of individuals and households. While alms are hidden from view and protected from talk at the moment they are given away, gifts are staged as the condition of possibility of forms of talk, focused on the identity and character of the donor as a specific, named, individual representative of a lineage or other corporate group. For example, griots produce praise for the individual character and noble ancestry of donors in response to (or anticipation of) transfers of wealth from their patrons (Irvine 1989). Discussions of proper women's clothing-assumed to be given to them by their husbands-lead to knowledge, and talk, about their husbands' virtue and social status (Heath 1994). Womens magazines' gossip columns and features take up the same verbal work: interpreting objects given publicly-presented at ceremonies or displayed in pub lic as the results of gifts intended to be publicized-as rich signs of the character of the giver, positive or negative. Thus when a well known singer (a griotte) gave away several SUVs on her birthday, or when another upended a 50 kg rice sack of US dollar bills over her husband's head before a live audience, the meanings of these actions attached to each individual's social person, and to hers alone. Still, these publicized forms of giving also rely on practices that create and capitalize on partial ignorance. As Deborah Heath (1994) has shown, it is common knowledge among Senegalese women that their peers secretly "sponsor" each other's role as donor in public gifts; the secret sponsor effaces her own role and allows her friend to engage in remarkable displays of generosity. Similarly, it is an open secret that the gold jewelry that a bride wears in her wedding photos-seen as a mere fraction of a sizable transfer of bridewealth given by her new husband's family-is of