Ethnography in a shell game: Turtles all the way down in Abidjan

Abstract

This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of its own narrative and role-play structure, the frame of duplicity sometimes exceeds the control of its authors. My own participation involved a spectrum of roles progressing from 1) innocent passerby, 2) an unwitting set piece meant to convey legitimacy, 3) an ethically compromised ethnographer, and 4) the target of the scam, all the way through to 5) an active participant in deception- with several of the roles converging at times. Ethnography inside a scam allows for reflection into the role of deception in everyday social interaction, as well as within the engagements of fieldwork itself.