My analysis goes like this. Frafra migrants faced in Nima the problem of establishing economic forms based on durable relations of partnership and hierarchy. Three basic models for how to go about this present themselves. The most obvious and apparently profitable is the contractual ethos of the civil society they think they have joined—individualism, rationality, the market, impersonal law, the bourgeois package of modern urban life. Here economic relations are in principle entered freely *by choice; but the contract imposes binding obligations sanctioned by state law. There are reasons why this does not generally work for these migrants. State law does not apply except in the form of erratic punishment. Market supply and demand are unpredictable, so that the substantive conditions of rational calculation are largely absent. Frafra migrants generally lack formal education and have not been socialized to become dtiful citizens. They are, for example, rarely on time and impersonal disciplines must be invented from scratch. They have no grounds for confidence in outcomes established by contract.
Looking for some alternative form of guarantee, the migrants turn to the antithesis of modern civilization, their own customary moral institutions founded on identities of ethnicity, descent, extended kinship, and family. These are reinforced by a common language and religion, by the social obligations of shared birth and community. This option too is fallible. Their customary institutions do not travel to southern cities as an integrated whole, and important public sanctions of domestic hierarchy are missing—lineages, ancestor worship, the security of earth cults. The migrant community is an egalitarian brotherhood of floating young men linked to the patronage of resident big men. It cannot sustain the authority and reliability of kinsmen. In any case kinship—with its focus on identity, sameness, a collective self defined opposed to the generalized other—is a poor foundation for reckoning biateral economic relations. The idea of shared but separate interests cannot readily be expressed through kinship idioms except through marriage—which for most migrants is unattainable where they live and work. Unsurprisingly, Frafra migrants lose faith in their traditions as a viable framework for urban economic life.
Denied relian9ce on either of the poles of traditional*** and modern society, they fall back on a sphere of social life that people, perhaps friends, make out of their free‑floating relationships. This, as Mauss argued cogently in The Gift (1925), is the true locus of society, where self and other meet in mutual understanding and obligation, where interests and risk are negotiated within relations formed by shared knowledge and experience (even secrets), mutual affection, and personal /choice. Friends are free, and they remain free or they are no longer friends. Society in this sense is always personal, active, and concrete; perhaps sometimes magical, even charismatic—straddling the paired concepts, nature and reason, isolation and totality.
Does friendship work for the Frafras? It has to work, although rarely without the reinforcement of some other social interest. Moneylending illustrates the point. Loans in Nima are never made to strangers. Landlords lend to tenants, patrons to clients. The borrower often invokes friendship when soliciting a loan; claims of familiarity are the normal rhetoric of economic life in Nima. Kinsmen make poor borrowers since they equate the lender’s interests with their own. Small traders sell to strangers for cash. Once their customers become more familiar, they grant them special privileges—extras and eventually perhaps credit—engendering trust by means of gifts and a kind of friendship between buyer and seller, although their first en6counters were anonymous. Regular clients with substantial debts are few, and the traders must pick them carefully: they are as selective with clients as moderns are with their* personal friendships. But this does not prevent Frafras and others like them from invoking friendship quite casually in their economic relations, an inflation of the social currency that full members of civil society would likely resist.
Most migrants fail to transcend the mores of fighting hill tribesmen in the social chaos of the slum. But some of them do, espially if they make a break with traditional religion, for both negative and positive reasons. They need some social and cultural distance from the axioms of a society where personal freedom is hedged in by kinship obligations on all sides. World religions also confer membership of new associations which lend organization and sanctions to negotiated social relations. Similar claims could be made for secret societies and criminal fraternities.
In Ghana, Islamic brotherhoods controlled much of the intermediate level of business between the state‑made corporate sector and its amorphous hinterland. They did so in informal ways documented brilliantly by Abner Cohen (1969) for the Hausa trading diaspora based in northern Nigeria. Frafra Christians did not join organizations relevant to their business activities, such as Masons, Rotary, Lions etc. But they did often elevate their wives to being their business partner, friend, and equal. Anthony Pagden in the 1988 collection told us that Neapolitan social theorists—and a number of more familiar thinkers—proposed this conugal model, as an alternative to the oppressive inertia of familism and segmentary politics often expressed by the macho complex of public male rivalry and private patriarchy. The idea of two working as one, the tried but often abused notion of wife as friend, is a recurrent theme in busin6ess history.
Some Frafra migrants learnt to trust those whom they chose as friends, especially if they could draw on associations or marriage. Pieces of paper were largely worthless. But personal relationships are created over time, so that exchange relations in Nima were above all a learning process. People found out by trial and error what worked for them; and the failure rate was high. Accordingly, problems of managing information and developing effective social tactics restricted their ease of entry into the competitive markets cherished by mainstream economists. The ethnographic section showed that no easy correlation can be drawn between entrepreneurial success and an ability to make friends or engender trust. The successful transport entrepreneur relied on kinship and contract, while the hustler made more of trust between his adolescent clients and himself.
Trust is essential to dealing, as is known by tdiamond traders and game theorists, with their suckers, free‑riders, and lemons. But the routines of production* are not easily managed by an ethos of personal freedom. Kinship and contract each offer a durable model for hierarchy and control based on parental and legal sanctions respectively. Hence traditional rural societies have room only in the margins for achieved relations of friendship, while trust accumulates in the interstices of mass societies organized by markets and states. Trust is central to social life when neither traditional certainties nor modern probabilities hold—in weak states or relatively lawless zones of public life, and in the transition to capitalism, especially in the mercantile sphere of circulation where credit is so important, but not as a basis for industrial production and division of labor.
Trust is therefore the negotiation of risk occasioned by the freedom of others we know personally to act against our interests in the absence of strong constraints imposed by kinship or legal contract. Domination and common interests offer a more pervasive and durable basis for social economy than friendship and trust.
TABLE Elements of a triadic model of social organization
KINSHIP ASSOCIATION CIVIL SOCIETY
Status Relationship Contract
Family Personal Impersonal
Community Network Individual
Nation/descent Social life/alliance Market/state
Nature Love/friendship Mind
Self Self/other Other
Same Like/Similar Different
Custom Experience Law
Habit/conviction Sentiment Calculation
Traditional Charismatic Rational
Religion Magic Science
Language Poetry Logic
Closed Secret Open
Necessary Free Necessary/free
Certainty Probability Chance
Long-term Medium-term Short-term
No evidence Some evidence Strong evidence
High feeling Mixed feeling Low feeling
FAITH TRUST CONFIDENCE
The list of triadic word sets above captures some of my argument. Like all words, these are ideal types; they either make for good communication and insight or not. Real people and societies do not conform to these types: lived experience is always a mixture, and our interest turns readily to the varying emphasis of different arrangements. Whereas many languages have words for some of the conceptual pairs in the table—such as kinship and friendship, confidence and trust—cultural categories and social forms are often hybrid constructs. This was pointed out by Julian Pitt‑Rivers (in his excellent chapter ‘The kith and the kin’ in Fortes’ Festschrift (1973).
Starting from the observation that Fortes’ link between kinship and the ‘axiom of amity’ was odd when most cultures contrast kinship and friendship, Pitt‑Rivers argues that, in the Mediterranean region at least, key social relations are often a fusion of the two polar types, both obligatory and free, the kinsman‑friend as a fictive family member: patron, godfather, brother‑in-law, indeed affinal relations in general. Something similar exists in religious brotherhoods and the sworn secrecy of excusive club members who adopt the symbolic attributes of blood and common substance in their rituals.
A familiar critique of utilitarianism is that the contract rests on non‑contractual instituions that are both prior and irreducible to its logic (Durkheim 1893). Hence capitalist firms are organized not only by public laws legitimizing exploitation, but also by stressing paternalism and mutual trust within their firm. Real social organization depends on creative combinations of social types, and successful mixtures vary according to their situational effectiveness. Only some academic social scientists suppose that modern society could ever be founded on rational choice alone, or that the simple‑minded identities of primitive kinship-based societies have no room for individual persons, as all societies must in practice.
In sum, modern English usage, inured as it is to the abstractions of mass society, makes no systematic discrimination between persons, ideas and things. If we rely on the language and stereotypes of our times, we cannot understand the evolutionary shift in emphasis from personal to impersonal relations caused by modern society’s greater size and complexity. The value of my ethnographic case study is that it forces us to conceptualize social life on the margins of the developed world; and to concede that ‘trust’ may occupy a rather different place in social organization there than it does in the imagination of economists.
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