Author: Dale F. Eickelman

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2004-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781405119924

Secrecy, deception, and lying are as basic to social life as sharing, trust, and community. Yet most moral and ethical codes treat secrecy and lying as dangerous and wrong, or at best as necessary evils appropriate to unusual or extreme situations. As part of the “social imaginary” of any society—accepted and shared background understandings concerning how families, communities, organizations, and institutions operate—learning to keep secrets, deceive, lie, and deny are part of the moral rules-in-use is an integral part of becoming a full and trusted person. In recent years, secrecy and lying have become increasingly recognized in the social imaginary of most societies, but there remains a strong tendency to deflect attention from recognizing the pervasiveness importance of secrecy and lying. Tales of government deception, corporate fraud, and the sexual improprieties of heads of state and royalty enter into public discussion throughout the world. Spy novels in American and European societies make secrecy and deception an adventure, yet deflect attention from the extent to which secrecy and lying are so much apart of the ordinary fabric of society that calling attention to their pervasiveness is dismissed as cynicism or hypocrisy. Police training manuals inculcate techniques of deception and deceit, and the defenders of such techniques consider them appropriate provided that interrogators use them to ascertain the “truth” and stay within bounds accepted by courts, lawyers, and formal review boards—or at least do not come to their formal attention. Whether practices of lying or deception are given the softer label of “deniability” in politics or no label at all, as in corporate deception or advertising, family life, secrecy and lying are pervasive values that help define the boundaries of person, community, and belonging. This book suggests how secrecy and lying can be made a more explicit element of the anthropology of knowledge. As an alternative to a moralizing approach to the subject, it shows how secrecy and lying work in practice—and why they are tolerated and even admired—in different cultural and social contexts. The book, an estimated 200 pages manuscript, is intended to provoke new thinking on the subject and awareness of the role of secrecy and lying in society.