I am just getting home after a few days away. Things seem to be firing up in my brain, and tomorrow I will find out how really fired up the brain is.

Before I left I read a post on the Freakonomics blog over at the New York Times website. I probably should say that I have been dallying more and more with economics these days; for instance, my reading list for the holiday included Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, and Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. I finished the former and I am still reading the latter. It seemed only fair to read from the accused before I file behind Ms Klein - if I file behind her.

Anyway, back to Freakonomics. One of the bloggers, Justin Wolfers, wrote a post that got my economic anthropological feelers out. Mr Wolfers was wondering why buying and gift-wrapping a CD made the gift more real than if he had bought the MP3 format on iTunes and transfered the property rights to the giftee. This becomes an issue for him, especially since he knows that the person would probably simply convert the CD to MP3 files, and probably never listen to the CD itself. He wondered why it seemed that physical gift felt more real than the gifts of bytes. His question:

What explains our schizophrenic attitude toward the invisible economy? We embrace the flow of bits and bytes in our daily lives, but we feel reluctant to give them as gifts.

I have checked the comments on the post but I did not see anybody who actually mentioned the anthropological idea of gifts. Now, I am wondering whether anybody has ever thought to bring Marcel Mauss to the 21st century, and to look at the kind of issue Mr Wolfers raises through his lens. I would appreciate it if anybody could point to this kind of work.

(Please see the full post and comments here.)

Hat-tip to the Culture Matters guys.

Now that the fieldwork is over it is time for me to write an anthropological study. I have been trying to make the chapterisation, and when i finish with that II will draw up a timetable. I must say that it is not going too smoothly at the moment, but I realise that the choices I make in the chapterisation are really important so I am trying to take my time.

That is what has been happening.

Anthropologists of economic relations are well experienced in dealing with the deployment of informal relationships by economic actors. These informal relations are often based on kinship ties and patron client relations. The paper aims to examine a particular manifestation of a mixture of both kinship relations and patron client relations. Rather than starting off with any assumptions about the relationship between these relations, or discussing the functions they serve, the paper aims to describe the relations among Igbo migrant traders in Cotonou. The trade in used clothing in the Republic of Benin is not just dominated by Igbo migrants, but almost all of the traders are from one local government area of Abia state in Nigeria. Looking briefly at the history of the trade in used clothing in Lome and Cotonou, the paper presents an examination that shows the way a specific expression of patron client relations is structured. It describes the modes of recruitment of clients by masters who are often owners of big used clothing businesses; it also describes the way the relationship between the Master and the Boy, or very often Boys, is structured. The paper draws from a year-long ethnographic fieldwork on the informal trade in used clothing between Nigeria and Benin.

The process works like this: start with an informal verbal story, often one drawn from casual empiricism or from non-mainstream economic literature. Then try to build the simplest possible model that will illustrate that story. In the course of the model-building the story tends to change along with your intuition, but at the end of the process you have a simple model that is a very special case, but that makes a lot of intuitive sense and effectively gives you a language to discuss things that previously were off limits.

I could not resist comparing this to what anthropologists do, not when he wrote that he liked working from 'suggestive special cases'. It seems, however, as if the interest in case studies is where any similarities end. I thought about the problem with model building. I know that the issues we deal with as anthropologists are certainly different from the issues economists deal with, but I still can't shake off the urge to call attention to my feeling that anthropologists don't quite like models. It seems like we most often seek to complicate things, to add more 'variables' to the mix, because we understand too well how difficult it is to ascribe causality. In other words, Krugman's goal of searching for the simple model is almost the direct opposite of what anthropologists do.

I remember discussing, recently, with a colleague who thinks that anthropologists let themselves be held back by too much detail, so much so that they are unable to contribute so much to policy formulation. I guess this post comes partly as a result of that discussion.

Comments please!

One of the problems of being a native anthropologist is the presence of the possibility of being co-opted by the field. As you probably know already, I am a Nigerian doing fieldwork with Nigerians in Cotonou, Benin. One afternoon, one of my friends called to invite me to write an article in the magazine that is going to be published by the Nigerian community in Cotonou as part of the 48th Nigerian Independence Day celebrations in Cotonou. He asked whether I could write an article on the contributions of Nigerians in Benin to the Beninese economy. I know much about that, as that actually forms a part of my research: there is no studying informal trans-border trade between Nigeria and Benin without studying the impact of Nigerians on the economy of the country, so I could reel them off right away. But then, I know that the audience of the magazine is made up of Nigerians, and most likely of officials of the Nigerian state. I am also quite aware of the ‘official’ stance of the Nigerian state towards smuggling, and even towards Nigerians who trade, in Cotonou, in goods that are banned in Nigeria. I had to find a way to write an article with enough meat to qualify for publication in the magazine, and therefore make my friend proud, but with just enough not to incur the wrath of the Nigerian embassy in Cotonou, or to call undue attention to my research.

The compromise was to write a one-page article about the impact of Nigerians in Cotonou by focusing on the social. When I wrote about the economy I had to make sure I mentioned only goods that originate in Nigeria and so contributed to the official economy of the country. My friend explicitly asked me not to write about certain goods that are imported into Benin chiefly to be re-exported, informally, to Nigeria. The questions: was I unethical by agreeing to write the article at all? And was I wrong by agreeing to be selective in the goods I mentioned? Who has ever been in this kind of situation?

Oh, by the way, my friend and I decided to share the credit for the article.

I am in the last few weeks of fieldwork, and it has got really intense. I am discovering holes in my knowledge, and I am trying to plug them before I leave. I realise that I cannot have all the information I would like to have, but that understanding does not stop me from trying anyway.

So, I am around, and I know that I should update regularly, but according to a Yoruba saying, It is the mountain over here that blocks our view of the one behind it.

In Benin, the Beninese Yoruba describe themselves in exactly the same terms. I hear expressions like: ‘No matter what a Yoruba man does, even if he studies in the university, he has to come back to trade. It is simply in our blood.’ Those are about the same words with which the Nigerian Igbo describe themselves. Or, ‘Ha… Yoruba’s love money so much!’ Just like the average Nigerian says about the Igbo.

So, if trade is in the Yoruba blood, how come the Yoruba don’t have that kind of reputation in Nigeria? I point this out to many Beninese Yoruba and they normally don’t have anything to say about it. I then tell them that one has to pay a closer attention to history, and the particular development of each country, in order to be able to understand how each ethnic group came to acquire the description. One has to accept it that the stereotypes are largely true, especially about Igbo businessmen of Nigeria and the Yoruba businesswomen of Benin. Yea, Yoruba businesswomen; gender scholars have a lot to deal with in that.

The conference is open to all disciplines and methodological approaches representing the Social Sciences and Humanities. However, at the same time the Steering Committee is strongly inviting panel proposals which look into the re-scaling and re-shaping of Africa through the various references which are being – or have been – made to the spatial dimensions of human action (social, symbolic, imagined or otherwise). This includes processes of globalisation, regionalisation, transnationalisation, re-nationalisation etc. – at all levels and across time.

Panels are expected to consist of four papers, with a chair and a discussant. Larger panels may be accommodated over more than one session. At this stage the Steering Committee invites potential panel organisers to provide a title and some of the names of participants to be considered for inclusion in the programme. A 50 word abstract and 250 word description should be included. The official conference language is English (contributions in any EU language are possible, but there will be no translation services offered, except for key note speeches).

You can check the site for details

One advantage of this kind of case is that it would be difficult to fall into the pit of explaining away migration by giving the two reasons in the earlier paragraph. Any discussion of the case would have to factor in different nuances of economic interests, contextualized in historical realities. The same with discussions on identity. One cannot simply run away with explanations that simplistically make identity markers – like languages, for instance – the same as the explanandum; one has to pay attention to identity shifts at particular instances and situations. Of course, this has been suggested by many scholars, but it really comes home when one is in the field.

And last Monday, I gave a paper at a seminar in my old university, the University of Ibadan (had my BA there). The paper attempted to explain the reasons for the problems one finds in the institution of apprenticeship among the Igbo. It drew from my ongoing fieldwork with the used clothing traders.