The Gift by Marcel Mauss is one of the most profound essays in sociology and anthropology. Mauss was interested in what happened between people, as that is where the social can be found. The structured obligation of the gift is a recurring act. Seen ‘in totality’ as Mass put it, the gift affirms and reproduces cultural values, social relationships and hierarchies. The millions of gift giving acts that take place each day throughout the world are unremarked other than between giver and receiver. Yet these acts bind and symbolise social relationships. They are systems of ethics, resource distribution, status maintenance, and conflict play.

Mauss implies (or Evans-Pritchard interprets in the intro to the 1966 edition) that there is a fundamental difference in the gift exchange between ‘archaic’ and modern societies. Modern economies have substituted a secular, instrumental exchange for the previous thicket of moral-ethical universes. He leaves open the question of whether the instrumental exchange is another type of generalised human moral exchange or is distinct in belonging entirely to the mechanical realm. I put my money on the former, though it does have unique characteristics. Anthropological data shows societies where instrumental necessities are exchanged using non-monetary, non rational means.

Exchange in the marketplace is every bit an invocation of morality and principles of the social system. We can tell that when the rules start to be broken. The reaction is not as one might expect to an instrumental error but a moral breach. As Douglas points out in her foreword to the 2002 edition the distinction creates the category of charity, giving without expectation of reciprocity. A free gift is doled out without social ties between giver and given to. It is a calculated insult, a power play, or worst of all, beneficent pity. Hence the meaningless ‘thank you’ given in return. A gift that is given in expectation or obligation of reciprocity is something else: it is an opportunity for action and solidarity. It presents a challenge to honour to be met. It is creative and socially binding.

Just a quick pro-tip for students here: referring to the subtle differences between two or more different editions of a classic gives you ultimate nerd points with us.

Dr. Masson and myself (Masson and Bancroft, 2018) examined some aspects of reciprocity at work in illicit markets. I want to recap this a little and examine how it applies in more explicit gifting contexts with illicit drugs. We used Parry and Bloch’s (1989) morality of exchange to show how illicit exchanges involved a moral accounting among their members. These elements of obligation to a wider ideal of the illicit market ecosystem helped maintain the resilience of drug markets in the face of a fragile infrastructure.  There are more coercive examples of the offer that binds as examined in the use of credit by drug dealers (Moeller and Sandberg 2017). Higher level dealers use partial debt forgiveness as a way of maintaining control over lower level dealers. In other environments drug users employ micro-exchanges of opiates to maintain a persistent gift economy which maintains a degree of solidarity in otherwise highly atomised and unforgiving surroundings. That can extend to a more generalised reciprocity which does not rely on dyadic exchange. As we said in the article, none of this is necessarily ‘nice’. Gifting can go along with aggression, exploitation and intimidation.

In what sense is crime a coherent action category? There is the positivist sense that there is a state defined category of human action that justifies coercive control and we can leave it at that. That approach leads us up some blind alleys as key terms such as human trafficking are then left undefined, or default to a limited reading of the law. As far as the illicit is considered it’s either a problem of governance, or a dark zone that exists when the state withdraws or lacks the competence to govern it. Critical researchers do not take categories as given and just accept that such and such an act is a crime in the terms and the way defined by the state and society. We should take the existence of these categories seriously as they have significant effects. We also need to delve into the naturalness of them. If they link in fundamental ways to survival strategies and environmental adaption then we’re in a little bit of trouble. Or at least those of you who think humanity is perfectible are. If they link in fundamental ways to the social order then we are in another kind of trouble.

There is some evidence of crime as naturally occurring category. Monkeys in field experiments and in the wild steal from tourists and the researchers who study them, using well worked out plans to do so. In one study of gangs of macaques at Uluwatu Temple, Bali, Indonesia, the monkeys were observed to systematically take items from tourists and then ‘sell’ them back in return for food (Brotcorne et al 2017, 2020). Brotcorne et al measure the rob/barter (RB) rate. It is a form of forced exchange or racketeering by the macaques. RB intensified in groups that were numerically more male dominated. The monkeys must be able to identify the specific tourists they have stolen from in order to extort food. The RB process is a set crime script. Take a non-edible item – presumably as edible items are secured by the forwarned tourist and the non edible ones are less defended – squirrel away and then reappear with it to barter.  Routine activities theory would frame this as offender, target, and absent guardian. Social learning among the macaque is key to honing this behaviour, avoiding numbing brute force hacks.

From that it can be deduced that crime is a competitive behavioural adaption, one that emerges in symbiotic human/animal cultures with certain characteristics. It is not wholly anti-social. It demonstrates and uses ingenuity, organisation, adaptation, and innovation. It socially involved as the macaques steal from and sell to us, recognising how much the category of inalienable property matters to the humans. Whether or not the macaques in some sense recognise the concept of private property, it exists as a category they can usefully act towards. The know some of the rules and exploit them.

There are many other ways in which crime can be fundamentally embedded in a setting. If in a community the only way to secure status is through crime; if social cohesion relies on gang influence; if social order relies on the underworld;  if an economy relies on a supply of illicit labour; if it depends on minerals produced in defiance of environmental regulations; if the most productive and highly capitalised sector of the economy ignores regulatory compliance; if survival depends on it, we can talk of crime as fundamental and necessary. This moves our focus beyond the ‘dark zone’. At one time symbolic interactionist sociologists thought people became labelled as deviant and adopted a deviant identity. Crime existed in the left over grey spaces of the licit world. Now, we see crime designed into systems, and crime that creates its own context, its own technology and architecture. Technical and social networks are crucial to the development of criminal capacity to organise effectively. The capacity to create hybrid systems in terms of state-crime relations, legal-illegal and organisational-platform/infrastructure is crucial. Like the macaques, social learning makes crime systems rapidly adaptive and resilient.

Our first autonomous robot arrived in the house last week. It is a wee fellow, hugging the ground as if cowering in the presence of its true master, the iPhone. A round plastic body, a sensor cluster, wheels and a vacuum are set off with a cheery burble. It is black, so the manufacturer has coded it as a masculine living room product like the television or the hi fi. The alternative is a feminine white good like the washing machine, a much more established robot functionary, secure in its indispensability. We find a room for it in under the TV, slotted in the pile of leads which I am sure connect to something but not quite what.

We went through the usual routine when taking delivery of a new pice of tech or software, of adapting ourselves to the machine. This process has been noted since Karl Marx identified how the factory worker puts his or her craft into the steam powered loom. Then the loom becomes the crafter and the worker its servant. Uber drivers know what I’m talking about. Ours is more prosaic, like the process where cafes are designed with tiling patterns that show up well on Instagram. An analogue filter is applied to make the digital perform better. The robot is sensitive to dangling cords and rugs and confused by reflective surfaces. The floordrobe is moved out of the way. Doors are propped open. Then the robot can begin.

Over time we become used to its strange shyings. One day it will not enter the kitchen. What does it see there? It runs skittishly through the living room and lingers in the bedroom, jamming itself into the corner and having to be lured out. It pauses thoughtfully in the hallway before returning to base. The robot’s friendliness and our anthropomorphising of it belie what it is. Unlike the old washing machine, it is one end of a vast data stream. Robots were once envisioned as universal servants, then as rampaging oppressors. Neither comes to pass. Robots do not serve us, they bypass us.

This post was sponsored by our robot overlords

Street encounters and digital encounters are hybrids. Trying to understand them separately will trip the ethnographer up (Lane, 2018). Lane elaborates the digital element to street encounters and the reverse using a multi-sited ethnography which traces encounters through street and digital domains.

Doing so means he avoids assuming the meaning of what’s online. In one case, the ‘respect’ code of the street is given another dimension as encounters can be recorded and reviewed. Rivalry is played out online, through Twitter, Facebook and Insta. Reputations can be trashed when it is shown that a previously tough player tries to dodge a physical challenge. However more context is given on each encounter. A video that looks like a one on one defeat with the protagonist backing down from a fight is later shown to be an unfair three to one ambush. It is therefore less fatal to the victim’s reputation. Boyd’s concept of networked publics is used. People living hybrid lives have to act towards many audiences some of which are invisible to them or cohere around their performances at a later point. A really intriguing picture emerges of mutual interrelationships such as. shared facebook friends and rivalry between opposing blocks or gangs. In a way the rivalry could not exist without mutual conduits – often young women – acting as weak tie players between parties to transmit threats, taunts and warnings and to act as a networked public. How male is the code of the street? How does the digital change that – it seems to be a space for girls to have a bit more autonomy and control, a bedroom culture.

In Lane’s work The Pastor follows lots of local youth on Twitter and does a kind of in person predictive crime analysis. He notes suggestions of violence and motivating the community around flashpoint encounters like when groups are going between parties, or when retaliation looks likely. He uses text to communicate with parents and Twitter to communicate with/monitor teens. Doing so bridges two networked publics, using a network of spotters – so covering both in person and online.

A critical part of the gendering of cybercrime is where it takes place. Where is it done: in sweatshops, industrial parks, in homes. We are still missing out on the bedroom where much cultural performance, and much cybercrime takes place. Domesticating cybercrime in terms of both target and perpetrators will lead us back there (Horgan, 2019).

Horgan, Shane Liam. “Cybercrime and everyday life: exploring public sensibilities towards the digital dimensions of crime and disorder.” (2019).

Lane, Jeffrey. The digital street. Oxford University Press, 2018.

… the heat is on the bottom level

It has been a norm that in the UK we expect public figures to be held to a higher standard than us schmoes. Ordinary folk can make daft statements, fool around, run over the family dog and still be invited to the family barbecue. Public figures are meant to at least hang the dirty laundry behind the house. Back in the Hanoverian era that was not at all the case. Epic sexual libertinage and self indulgence was the mark of the true aristocrat. The Victorians came along later to spoil things for everyone and introduce the discomfiting idea that the personal behaviour of the Royal household, members of the House of Commons and celebrity writers should be something we might seek to emulate.

Twitter governance inverts that. The lesser folk can be pursued and banned for harassment, calls to arms, racially inflammatory statements, generally rambunctiousness. Certain public figures, such as ‘world leaders’ and candidates for high office, can do this rather a lot with no fear of the ban. Twitter effectively defines itself as a public broadcaster for these purposes, with a duty to carry the statements of public figures, but without the duty and accountability of a public broadcaster.  They do not balance Narendra Modi tweets with opposition tweets, for example. When it comes to that part of the equation, Twitter defines its role as marking out an open public square. If you want balance, Q, you will just have to rage tweet your own responses.

Inverted governance is the norm in many places, reflecting a general wariness of the elites towards the masses. Sections of the population are in some instances seen as liable to bouts of ungovernable rages, and an all round threat to the public good.  One of the greatest public sociologists, Christopher Lasch, termed that the revolt of the elites. National elites have more in common with each other than they think they share with our unwashed selves.  Partly because academics are half in, half out of the elites (am I kidding – we are totally part of the elite) we often focus too much on competition between elites. The replacement of one part of the elite by another part may not mean as much throughout society as we are wont to think.

… in the abstract and also not literally in the concrete

It’s a delusion of a certain type of policy wonk that if you just tweak a society’s political institutions enough you will get the right outcome. A common reference point is the refoundation of West Germany after the second world war as an economic powerhouse with few external political ambitions (polite euphemism). That turned out no to be true. German political ambitions have been sublimated nicely into the EU where everyone can get on with pretending they do not exist. No harm there.

Can you parachute the Federal Republic into the UK and get the same outcomes? That is the hope of policy nerds. But no. Because there are no such things as political institutions. What we call political institutions are names for specific configurations of power, economy and culture. None is reproducible. Hitler did not come to power because the Weimar republic was not properly workshopped, but because it was politically brittle and unsupported by the political culture. They are not transferable between contexts.

The focus on institutions flatters us as policy nerds because it privileges us above all others. Yes, the globalists may exclude us from their clique at play time, and the populists may have taken our lunch money. But deep down we are biding our time., waiting for our opportunity to carefully balance powers between executive and legislative, and formulate the precise limits of judicial interpretation. We make a category error, just as recently when the UK media declared that British universities were ‘closed’, because the buildings were closed. Universities are not their buildings, and polities are not their texts.

That is why it is wrong to say that Britain uniquely has an unwritten constitution. All countries have an unwritten constitution. As the USA discovered recently, the ‘written’ part means nothing without the willingness of policy folk to follow the vastly greater set of unwritten and sometimes unspoken norms and conventions. The appearance of a working constitution just depends on periods in history when nobody tried to rock the boat, so allowing everyone to continue in their shared delusion that order is produced. That is how institutions function all of the time. The University of Edinburgh is a collective agreement about what we are. Writing it in stone and brick is very reassuring, especially when it comes time to put a pretty photo on the prospectus. And collective agreements can change.

Much of what I’m writing about here I owe to the insights and research of my colleagues Alex Wafer, Kirstin Lardy, Delani Mathevula and Motswaedi. In fact a lot of it comes from a recent talk by Alex.

We know the digital divide very well. Much of economic and social life is now taking place through digital means. People’s ability to access and make use of it effectively is patterned by their economic and cultural capital. There are many layers to the divide. In fact it is less a divide than an overlapping set of centre-periphery relationships. Most users trade privacy for access and ‘free’ use of social media platforms. Some users can buy security and some cannot. Others have very limited, intermittent access. The platforms most users in the West encounter make some basic assumptions that are not correct: that users have always on connections at home, they can easily connect when outwith the home, their use is personal to them and they don’t have anyone looking over their should and so on. This is even less true in the developing world where there is extensive digital innovation alongside significant gaps in infrastructure. There is great developing world innovation – it’s by no means always a case of Western platforms/corporations colonising the space.

With my colleague and friend Alex Wafer of Wits University we are studying digital geographies in and around Johannesburg and the Gauteng province in South Africa. We have worked with Uber drivers, delivery drivers, and residents of unofficial settlements to examine how they use different digital platforms for economic and social life. Our interest is in the informal economy, though we note that really the formal and informal economies are symbiotic. For example, an unregulated transport infrastructure serves labour up to the central core of the formalised economy. Formal economies supply informal ones with resources, the informal economy provides the formal one with usually cheap, temporary labour. Digital platforms are used to communicate, to distribute labour and sometimes as substitute currencies. Digital sparseness applies to the infrastructure and the platforms. Rather than specialised platforms people re-task existing platforms in new ways, sometimes insecure such as using Facebook and Whatsapp for work and payment. Uber emerged as a trust/social credit system used to validate people for off-platform work. For example, a driver may get paid for one ride through Uber, then arrange further rides or other kinds of work through Whatsapp. That allows both customer and driver to use the platform to validate their association while not being dependent on it.

Digital sparseness is a critical problem and manifestation of multiple digital divides. We are dealing with a very sparse infrastructure both technically and physically. Only the better off people have a fixed at home connection. Others have to use mobile devices and scavenge power and data where they can. At there is little available wifi in many settlements people have ot pay for mobile airtime. However package bundles are often too large to be paid for at once. A social economy emerges where people distribute small amounts of data as ‘gifts’ to friends, acquaintances and family. This makes up for some of the limits in the formal data economy at the same time as it ties the very marginalised into it.

A theme that connected our two projects was the different attitude to labour, reflecting the class formation of the labour force in South Africa. As Alex put it, many people in the informal economy had ended up with such little luck in the labour force that they eschewed paid labour. Paid labour had either never been there or only led to precarity or exploitation. In its absence they engaged in the hustle, a tiring never ending activity to scare up trades and deals. Precarity affects the whole labour force though. Many uber drivers were well qualified for the formal economy but recent layoffs and contractions meant they were also unable to find work in it or came to prefer working for themselves. They then moved into the platform economy through Uber. Uber could work in many ways. It could be a way of finding work for informal migrants from the rest of Southern Africa who were shut out of both the formal economy in South Africa and the closed shop of the established taxi system. For some it was a stepping stone for South Africans seeking to put aside capital to start their own business. The Uber hustle was not quite like the informal economy hustle. But maybe we will all have to become used to one or the other.