Lying, honor, and contradiction

Abstract

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 of the and was The staff they still act as and and the and honor of their lords by other lords or by or perhaps because of, their common in the system of the of lords and staff is by The often by the very fact that their monopoly of political and economic power the and for that power among themselves, their members of other the lords might the family nature of Beit Ahmad as a But this was this force founded on and a sense of status and interest might on be a even drive it from the village when a direct of Beit privilege family might a from a the of the for in the are recognized privately on both particularly among the young men of the made not the other way is an statement if not totally the real sense in which the lords depend on the staff (or the honorific term by which they are the lords have been for various to out much of the own around the village, the staff from the means of economic and Ahmad are therefore a much more than the into major segments with a charter going back only they are in than in of the men were or are in some way to a though some on to land to be of such Their a sense of the interest of the groups as to the though their are in fact to of the persons they as the They themselves were men of the and in the period and significant of social had on the These still part of a political economy in which and are in a and to the of the of the family as a some own a little land, or it on terms from a some on the lords for as or some are construction and others and for the some are not much more than laborers. Beit position as Beit Ahmad is with and I would argue that it is in this of contradiction that the lie into its For the family's are a of in the of of influence and limited and and the for real yet men are to status honor and hierarchy, personality becomes most and the social significance of the individual and his prestige the is all the more the case because Beit Ahmad are part of a political and economic system based on control of major resources and status honor by ruling a system which produces among the a on what a man his own his and be for it in any formal it be own that that you have been born into the family and in the first Though of Beit Ahmad and of a certain has reference, what the family is the personal which a or will not for The in whose days the and were the of and the of as to their and their (a real not concept was He simply To be a to be a to the bey in elaborate to be a to be the of villages, was not was for peasants and had no place in the are and what you can that statement for by own hierarchy, and you or one on you and you in a that attention and that others, and some of their as were to the a position in which their and their to dominate others and would in the nature of be Their position as the could be by in a certain way and the of style, though a might in or Beirut with more for his than for his of Beit Ahmad far more on and of honor in which claims and are always The lords were at least in origin Ottoman men of and part of the of Beit Ahmad has only what it can of itself and is not to command the range of of the Bekawat or their economic The are bound to a particular village and often bound to a particular Their are usually on of else and in to in the idiom of the this with of the of a in which the weight is on and what a of of persons and the of time are thus but two sides of the cultural the in the everyday life of the of the of men as or in of the of as . . . various of . . . we call personality a of our in where and personal prestige are is to to a of in which personal may be present but one would a with a He who and is claims to that who do not, or do so, but go about their lives a of their family out at time or when influence is and with some as well as in the of and is a even an attribution of social of Beit Ahmad often demanded of why I had been with such and such a The that I was about his life or would always of has a socially significant has a Such are made of a by as it To any man is a is to in a to with to one for of prestige and status Why to a of the order are also made about members of Beit Ahmad by other though in my in of "He has a He has a I told the bey that you were about his and he well known what his a and the of a much for his His had and he has a a status and of does not various as in one and to a significant social It is something to be to be as always at in the everyday world because may at any time up a in which the will be and I once a friend from Beit Ahmad for what I as and putting on the he if you you are have to put it on to live my a because he outside the and much and people in the family and should at the of the village the the in the village, about how these and and going to Up there he himself the of the village. I and it was these take place for the m

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.