Brands as masks: public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire

Author(s): Sasha Newell

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2013, Vol. 19, No. 1
(March 2013), pp. 138-154
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Brands as masks:
public

and the counterfeit

secrecy

in Côte d'Ivoire

Sasha Newell North Carolina State University

Rethinking Simmel's comparison ofsecrecy and adornment, I consider theways inwhich brands
function much like masking practices,concealing even as they reveal,using thevisibletohide/signify
theinvisible. The classic masking scenario isone inwhich men wear masks and claim tobe powerful
keeping thefact
ancestral spirits, oftheir performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys.
However, thesecrecy isambiguous, forwomen give signs ofknowing and men seem tobelieve in
thespirits they pretend tobe onlypretending tobe. InCôte d'Ivoire, where masks are a symbol of
national identity,consumption focuses around displaying supposedly authentic name brand labels.
Urban Ivoirianscallthisdisplay ofwealth and consumption 'bluffing', exposing theartifice oftheir
supposed affluence. the
Still, success oftheir performance depends on the authenticityof expensive
European and American brands, ina market where most ofwhat isavailable iscounterfeit.
Underneath thepublic secret oftheir performative display liesthedeeper secret thatthey remain
uncertain ofthelegitimacy oftheir purchases. Masks and brands both metaphorically delineate a
métonymie though invisible connection toauthentic power, but thesecrecy ofwhat liesbeneath the
masked performance provides an unstable ambiguity inwhich itisalways possible that thesurface is
that which itrepresents. Brands always contain this between appearance and thegenuine,
instability
forallareultimately copies whose uncertain authenticity we cover up with public secrecy.

Wenow declare
thatthetrademarkof[Côte d'Ivoire] rather
foritisrepresentative,
willbe themask,
and enshrouded inan airofmystery.
toobserve,
pleasing
Minister
Duon Sadia, the ofCôte d'Ivoire,
ofTourism inSteiner
as cited 19920:
53
function
does not
The modern trademark thetrue
toidentify ofgoods.
origin toobscure
Itfunctions
that itwith
tocover
origin, oforigin.
a myth
Beebe 2008: 52

Brand logos are expected to be transparent indicators of authentic quality, and a great
deal of effort is expended worldwide on policing counterfeits and piracy to protect that
assumption. But a more counterintuitive approach might help explain why brands
matter even when most of us distrust the relationship between the logo and the
purported authenticity of the object it adorns. Perhaps the analytic focus of social
science upon branded goods as objects of display and identity blinds us to an important
element of how they are endowed with value in practice: the performative context of
how we enact brand value may be as much about concealment and secrecy as itis about
display. Indeed, I have come to think that masking rituals and the public secrecy that

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Brands as masks 139

surrounds masking performances provide a provocative model for thinking through

brands, counterfeits, and the embodied consumption of such products. I came to this
idea through an effort to understand Ivoirian relationships to American and European
brand-name sportswear. In a market rife with counterfeits, why would social actors
insist on purchasing authentic brand-name clothing in order to perform a seemingly
'false' identity? Especially when audiences were aware of the deception?
During my fieldwork in Abidjan between the summers of 2000 and 2001, I was
confronted with this question as I watched unemployed young men spend all the money
they could scrabble together in a performance of success called bluffing. The bluff
culminated in the danse de logobi , a dance of brands, in which they displayed expensive
American sportswear like Nike, Dockers, Sebago, and Fubu. This dance and the musical
style of zouglou itwas linked to later metamorphosed into the internationally followed
musical genre of coupé- décalé (scam and scram, cut and move) popularized by Douk Saga
and his 'JetSeť entourage (Kohlhagen 2006; McGovern 2011: 116-19 ).* Douk Saga
presented himself as a national hero (the title of one of his songs) who returned to Côte
dTvoire2 from Europe to bring gaiety and luxury to the war-torn population. In other
words, he responded to the economic and political stranglehold on Côte dTvoire by
upping the ante on the bluff, sending people into dizzying spirals of escapist consumption.
This scene involved the act of travailler (to work), which signified the act of dancing as
well as conspicuously giving money to people on the dance floor. Dancing was also
referred to as 'wasting', and a good dancer would be encouraged by calls of 'gaspiller, on
te din (waste, we are watching you) . In this way the bluff collapses and inverts oppositions
of production and consumption - to waste is to work. But the paradox of the bluff is that
those watching were well aware that this was a performance of wealth rather than the real
thing. As their label indicates, the bluffeurs were known for the illusion of wealth they
produced rather than what they actually possessed. And yet everyone acted as though they
were participating in a kind of performative magic, in which the represented became, at
least for the moment, reality itself. While people did sometimes scoff about bluffeurs
behind their backs, in the presence of the performance itself audiences typically
responded with awe. Stories circulated constantly about these displays of wealth and
expensive clothing, and reputations were self-consciously built upon bluff. Bluffing itself
was recognized as a form of artistry, unsurprisingly given the importance of cons in the
'second economy' through which most young men made their living.
Nor was this the first time I had been faced with the question. I went to Abidjan from
Paris, where I had spent nine months with Congolese immigrants whose lack of a visa
prevented them from legitimate income, and yet who took every opportunity they
could to display suits made by the likes of Hugo Boss, Versace, Armani, and Dolce &
Gabbana (Bazanquisa 1992; Friedman 1991; 1994; Gandoulou 1984; 1989; Gondola 1999;
MacGaffey & Bazenguissa- Ganga 2000).3 The sapeurs , a kind of Congolese dandy, also
performed a danse des griffes in which they elegantly displayed the labels of the clothes
they were wearing. There were even clothing duels in which two sapeurs faced off in a
style showdown in which one was obliged to exit the party shamefully in defeat
(Gandoulou 1984). I met a man who had spent nights hiding in hospitals during
Parisian winters, only to walk out in the morning in an outfit that cost thousands of
dollars. Another lived in a single room in a seventh-floor walkup, with only a sink and
hotplate (the bathroom and shower were shared with the rest of that floor), his sole
income drawn from the sale of small amounts of unrefined heroin. He had no closet,
but his walls were lined with suits of the finest quality, and he was never seen on the

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140 Sasha Newell

streets in anything but the best. Amazingly, the phenomenon of la sape has continued
unabated now for thirty years, through multiple civil wars, the tightening of French
borders, and the ageing of several generations of sapeurs.
Amongst the many puzzles to unravel in these stories, a central problem is certainly
the relationship between mimesis and modernity, a primary thread of my book on the
bluff (Newell 2012). I argue there that such mimetic performances in the postcolony are
neither mere re-enactments of tradition using symbols of modernity (Friedman 1994),
nor simply declarations of membership (Ferguson 2006), but rather represent
intermeshed cultural logics in which local understandings of performative magic
merge with the anxieties over authenticity and imitative reproduction at the heart of
capitalist economies. I found that at every level the opposition between real and fake
collapsed into itself, and yet this ambiguity did not seem to impact the importance of
the act itself. Indeed, far from a corruption of proper capitalist behaviour, the Ivoirian
bluff became a model for the interpretation of modernity itself: capitalist value in the
global economy is itself a product of bluffing, and increasingly so, leading to disastrous
events like those of 2008 when people expose that which everyone already secretly
knew, that capitalist value is a product of social construction.
As I focused increasingly upon the aporias of bluffing - a form of display that
conceals, a kind of faking that is revealed and yet remains effective - 1was drawn to the
literature on masking rituals, in which similar dynamics of concealing while revealing
were at play. The fact that such masking events are pervasive across Côte dTvoire - even
if non-existent in Abidjan itself - made such a comparison all the more enticing. The
classic masking situation, examples of which are scattered across the globe (Taussig
1999), is one in which men wear masks and perform as supernatural beings (ancestors,
forest spirits, deities) for women and children, who all at least pretend not to know that
the beings before them are their own husbands, fathers, and brothers, wearing cos-
tumes in order to deceive them.4 The significance of such masking rituals for under-
standing the relationship between brands and counterfeits lies in what they can tell us
about fakes that are treated as authentic sources of power and value, even when - or
-
precisely because the deceit is known to its targets and performers. Just as audiences
of masking ceremonies must know or at least suspect that masks are performed by
members of their village and yet express their belief in masks as mystical creatures,
Abidjanese crowds at an outdoor bar typically knew most of the people present, knew
where they lived, and the circumstances of their daily existence - they could not have
been fooled. Yet the greater the display of excess, the greater the reputation a bluffeur
could garner on the street. This semiotic configuration corresponds to the performative
power of the public secret, of the known deceit found in masking. The persuasive
power of masking practices, in which the origins of both worldly and otherworldly
authority are simultaneously displayed and concealed, offers us important insight into
the uncomfortable relationship between brand image and brand authenticity in Côte
dTvoire and beyond.
As I struggled to understand how Abidjanese youth negotiated these imbricated
logics and what motivated and gave meaning to their destructively costly mise-en-
scènes, I found another aporia within the larger problem of bluffing modernity, another
kernel in which relationships between authenticity and performance kept inverting
themselves: brands. The explicit performativity of the bluff did not free actors from
'the real'. Their reputation depended upon the perceived authenticity of the brands
they wear, and this authenticity was always suspect in a local market saturated with

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Brands as masks 141

counterfeit goods.5 To purchase and proudly display a false label was to reveal one's
inability to distinguish between real and fake. While suppressing their anxiety over the
authenticity of their clothing, bluffeurs had to convince their audience through dance
and performance of their urban savvy and ability to distinguish the 'reali In a sense,
then, itwas once again performance that manufactured the value of the good. While the
specificity of urban Ivoirian understanding of brands reminds us that brands are always
incorporated into local cultural logics, I suggest that Ivoirian performances surround-
ing brands may reveal aspects of the semiotic nature of brands that might otherwise
remain invisible to us. Drawing on the recent anthropological theorization of brands
(Foster 2007; Manning 2010; Mazzarella 2003; R.E. Moore 2003; Vann 2006), I suggest
that brands in general rely upon a gap between materiality and symbolic value that is
always under negotiation, such that the invisible qualities of brands are never truly
perceivable, but simultaneously signified and obscured by their deceptive surfaces. In
this sense the underlying inauthenticity of branded objects, the fact that all are mass-
produced copies worth far less than the value we endow them with, is a public secret
masked by our own performative consumption.
Taussig defines the public secret as 'that which is generally known, but cannot be
articulated' (1999: 5). Public secrecy is all around us, from our social pretence that our
bodies are not all naked beneath the thin veneer of our clothes to the hidden humanity
of our political leaders. The relationship between knowledge and power at all levels is
mediated by public secrecy; it is the 'active non-knowing' (Taussig 1999: 7) of the
audience that provides the potency of knowledge and gives power the illusion of
knowing. The idea that surface and depth, illusion and authenticity are not opposed
but intertwined is furthered by Taussig's insistence that unmasking does not expose or
diminish mystery, but rather extends it,exposing not the truth itself, but the reliance of
truth upon illusion (1999: 53, 105). Thus the fact that everyone knows that masks
conceal human performers rather than deities does not diminish faith in the power of
the masks or the deities they embody. And so with the bluffeurs - their power comes not
from deceit exactly, but from the collective faith in the power of their illusions.
Simmel tells us that secrecy and display are intimately connected, that 'although
apparently the sociological counter-pole of secrecy, adornment has, in fact, a societal
significance with a structure analogous to that of secrecy itself' (1950: 338). The anthro-
pology of secrets has made much of this insight, demonstrating how the power of
secrets can only be used by making known, by publicizing, the fact of possessing
something hidden (Barber 1981; Bellman 1979; 1984; de Jong 2005; Gable 1997; Gottlieb
2000; Jorgensen 1990; Nooter 1993; Taussig 1999). The secret is an 'adorning possession'
made more potent because its exact nature is unknown. Thus the content of the secret
is less important than the fact of its concealed existence, the attraction of its invisible
presence. But the flip-side of the coin has been relatively ignored: consumption and
display may be more contingent upon the ambiguous potency of secrecy than we
typically recognize. As Simmel puts it,'the secret produces an immense enlargement of
life',offering 'a second world alongside the manifest world' (1950: 330). Secrecy offers all
of the potency of the invisible that lurks just on the other side of the visible, present but
out of sight. It is this hidden potency that the surfaces of display rely on in order to
convey value. After all, value is a matter of social convention; it is by nature invisible.
This article thus begins with a discussion of masking, especially that of Côte d'Ivoire,
in order to explore the role of public secrecy and the relationship between display and
the potency of the invisible. Through this ethnographic exploration I build a model for

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142 Sasha Newell

understanding Ivoirian bluffeurs as a parallel to masking, a kind of performative illu-

sion that is at once known to be false and yet respected as having real and potent value.
In turn, Ivoirian consumption becomes a model for understanding the relationship
between brands and counterfeits on a global level as a kind of masking performance
based on public secrecy.

Masquerade: faces and surfaces of deception

Masking is one of Côte d'lvoire's more prevalent and widespread religious practices.
Steiner writes that the Ivoirian state attempted to make the mask 'a symbol of national
identity or character' (1992a: 53). Indeed, as quoted in the opening epigraph, this was an
explicit effort to 'brand' Côte d'Ivoire internationally as the nation of masking, the
zenith of such attempts being FESTIMASK. The idea was to promote national identity
and tourism simultaneously by bringing together all the ethnic groups of the country
in a single masking event. Interestingly, the festival failed because nationals and tourists
alike viewed the performances as 'inauthentic' (Steiner 1992a: 57). 6 Reading forwards,
we can see this as an early (though botched) state effort to produce an overarching
sense of national identity: the very sentiments which later emerged at a grass-roots level
in Abidjan in the 1990s and have tragically led to the radical division of Ivoirians today.
Reading backwards, the festival provides evidence of the key role masks played in
Ivoirian public life in its locally construed form.
Masking ritual performances were not merely aesthetic productions, or moments of
spiritual reflection. As Kasfir says of the Dan of western Côte d'Ivoire: 'The mask system
penetrated the social system, rather than remaining its symbolic counterpart. Masks
personified and carried out real political roles from the judgment of criminals to the
settlement of land disputes' (1988: 7). Masks were the basis of a kind of theatre, but they
4
were not merely representative; they had efficacy. We can speak of masking as the cultural
system, rather than simply its symbolic parallel' (Kasfir 1988: 7). One of the most
widespread and better-known Ivoirian masking rituals was the Poro, enacted by a secret
masking society which stretches across much of West Africa.7 Among its key purposes was
to organize a male initiation ceremony during which the initiates were removed from the
village to live in the sacred grove, a space that was designated as both village and forest,
both living and dead (Förster 1993). This was the space in which the masks were stored,
and which no uninitiated person could enter without risk of death (Bellman 1984: 10).
Bellman (1979), discussing the Kpelle version of Poro in Liberia, describes how boys
were removed from society to the bush and described as dead to women and the
uninitiated. Everyone acted as though they believed the boys to be dead, even though
all were aware of the boys' existence. Secrecy, then, is not really about the content of the
secret so much as the right to know and communicate that knowledge - or as Taussig
puts it,'to know what not to know' (1999: 2). Secrecy thus produces what Mbembe
(2001) refers to as 'simultaneous multiplicities', such that 'both social realities coexist:
the boys are dead, the boys are in the bush' (Bellman 1979: 16). Both worlds were known,
but one could not be spoken in public. During this time the boys were taught the means
of articulation: how to speak the secret language of the society and how to participate
in making and performing the masks. It is only once they had learned the ritual actions
that they grasped the interpretative keys necessary to be able to speak the Poro secret
language (Förster 1993: 35). As they progressed further up the hierarchy of the society,
they learned the secrets of how to perform (and comprehend) masks of greater signifi-
cance and mystery. Thus, hierarchy was built upon the selectively attributed rights to

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Brands as masks 143

articulation of the secret. As Jorgensen (1990) revealed for the Telefolmin of Papua New
Guinea, each level of articulation produces an alternative reality which falsifies those
understandings learned at the previous level.
Justas the boys' 'not-death' is a public secret, the performance of masks is likewise
not-performed. The village audience does not differentiate between theatrical repre-
sentation and the actual presence of these terrifying creatures in their midst; they are
not meant to recognize that these creatures are human fabrications. Despite their
collusion in the production of elaborate illusions, even the performers themselves do
not seem to think of the masks as props, but rather speak of them with dread and
respect, even out of earshot of the women they are supposed to be fooling. Indeed, the
most feared mask, the Kporo, is responsible for severing the double of the person from
the body at death and bringing itto the world of the dead: if the ritual is not performed
properly, the spirit may be trapped in the world of the living, with disastrous results
(Förster 1993: 39). The trick thus has efficacy, much like the healing practices of Que-
salid, Lévi-Strauss's (1963) famous quack shaman, who sought out to reveal the trickery
of magical practices, only to become the greatest healer in the region because he would
never reveal the secret to his trick. Everyone acts as though the masks were real
creatures, even though everyone knows itis a human production, and by virtue of that
the mask takes on real, non-human powers.
However, the most important aspect of the masks for our current purposes is their
relationship to visuality. Mbembe is instructive in his description of the 'autochthonous
status of the image' in Cameroon (2001: 145). He says that the obverse and reverse of the
image, its visible surface and the hidden forces that the surface obscures, were governed
by relations of similarity' such that neither was a copy or model of the other: 'The
invisible was in the visible, and vice versa, not as a matter of artifice, but as one and
the same and as external reality simultaneously - as the image of the thing and the
imagined thing, at the same time' (Mbembe 2001: 145). Mbembe writes that the figu-
rative capability, the power to project an image, an illusion, can be considered in this
context to have the power to bring to life the thing for which the image was a metaphor,
to conjoin the world of the living and that of the shades or spirits. Writing of the Dan,
Reed says that masks do not represent spirits, nor is the person inside the mask
possessed by a spirit, but rather 'the ge [mask] is the spirit itself' (2003: 4).
Some masks are not visible at all, but merely aurally indexed, as one Bellman (1979:
15) described in which a senior member blew a horn meant to be the sound of a witch
screaming while the novices ran behind flapping their arms against their sides to create
the sound effect of whips beating the witch. At the other extreme we have the wonderful
Cameroonian masks described by Argenti (2007) that walk around in broad daylight
without any face- covering, and yet their audience treats them as unrecognizable so long
as they are inhabited by the spirit that possesses them. Even those masks we hang in
museums as classic objects of aesthetic display are not necessarily to be understood
locally as visual objects: 'The more important a Baule sculpture is, the less it is dis-
played, just as in public debates the most senior and respected people speak the least'
(Vogel 1997: 65). Masks are normally kept hidden away in darkness. These are not
objects of visual reverence and contemplation - the etiquette of the gaze is to avert it
before power, and to see that which was not authorized could bring death in conse-
quence (whether mystically or humanly administered).
Even those masks which are clearly made to be visually appreciated, to both please
and deceive the eye (many of them are full-body ensembles that obscure the human

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144 Sasha Newell

form of the wearer), are not meant to be looked at too directly. Vogel (1997) tells us that
language surrounding such masks is closer to that of the theatre, in which much of the
ťarť is the 'artfiiP obscuring of vision to produce controlled visual effects. Display
performances often occur at night, under conditions of inebriation and fatigue, or the
audience is kept at an appropriate distance by subsidiary members or lesser masks
policing the event. But rather than finding that this indicates the weakness of the fake,
that these are efforts to conceal its imperfect imitation of divine power, I want to
suggest the reverse: it is precisely the ambiguity of the unseen that lends these visual
referents their power, for these sacred objects are important in invisible ways. The mask
is a humanly constructed visual display of an invisible but authentic presence; or,
perhaps more accurately, it is the visual sign of the possibility, always uncertain, that
this mysterious force exists.

True Ivoirians, true brands: yere perception and the counterfeit

Justas our concept of the mask is mired in culturally constructed visuality, I think
academic and folk theories of consumption continue to be dominated by the idea of
surface imitation, of counterfeit identities, of passing: there is a moral attachment to
the genuine and a fear of inauthenticity. Our interest in mimesis is squeamish (Fergu-
son 2006), but also carries an obsessive fascination; we cannot look away. Precisely
because the inauthentic carries connotations of immorality in North Atlantic cultures,
we fail to perceive the positive transcendence of both bluffing and masking, its ability
to produce value from 'simultaneous multiplicity>. In this section, using my own field-
work from Abidjan, I undermine the opposition between brand and counterfeit by
considering the way in which both are interlaced with public secrecy: that which is
known but cannot be articulated.
In Abidjan, bluffing was an activity primarily engaged in by unmarried and unem-
ployed urban men (typically between 15and 35) called nouchi (bandits) who publicly
spent large sums of money while wearing expensive brand-name clothing (Newell
8
2012). Although this would seem to indicate a group on the fringes of society, Côte
d'lvoire's economy was such that only 17 per cent of men under 25 had work in 1992 (Le
Pape 1997), a figure that could only have worsened by 2000. There were even fewer
Ivoirian men employed than these statistics indicate, however, because over 35 per cent
of Abidjan's population was made up of immigrants (almost 50 percent in my neigh-
bourhood) and over 67 per cent of the immigrant population was employed. Thus
Ivoirians dominated the informal economy while immigrants took up much of the
low-end legitimate work. Within the urban setting of Abidjan, bluffing became a means
through which men established their claim to national identity or Ivoirité, a specifically
urban vision of cosmopolitan Ivoirian identity.
The importance and danger of this urban vision of national identity has become
increasingly apparent as its logic underlies the violent dichotomization of Ivoirian
society that has riven the country since the failed coup d'état of 2002 (Newell 2012).
While there is not space to elaborate the full extent of this logic here, itis important to
note that it was through the connoisseurship necessary to consume 'real' brands or
detect 'fakes' - or at least the performance of this ability - that urban Ivoirians differ-
entiated themselves from the unrefined' taste of their immigrant imitators. In other
words, within nouchi logic, the ability to detect 'fake' products was necessary to be a
'real' Ivoirian, and thereby granted the performer the ability to detect counterfeit'
citizenship as well.

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Brands as masks 145

The bluff was not usually 'unmasked' by exposing the poverty of the actor - every-
body knew the wealth was an illusion, even if itwas rarely acknowledged. Bluffeurs and
their audiences revelled in the image of success and avoided recognition of its deceptive
qualities, but the spectre of the fake reasserted itself in another form: brand authen-
ticity. The authenticity of the articles of consumption served as a focal point for
evaluations of social personhood, even if poverty did not. Only a gaou (fool) would
publicly consume a fake, and the discovery of such a breach revealed one's inability to
see the difference between the real and its copy. This danger provoked considerable
anxiety in a market saturated with counterfeit goods.
Abidjan's street youth interpreted most hierarchical relationships and value, includ-
ing those among brand-name objects, in terms of a distinction between yere and gaouy
slang terms from the urban language Nouchi (Newell 2009). Yere describes someone
who cannot be scammed because his urban savvy allows him to see through deception,
while the verb ťtoyere is to steal from someone. By contrast a gaou is someone
incapable of discerning his surroundings, and therefore someone easily duped. Since
the savvy urban citizen was likely to gain part of his income from the second economy,
recent arrivals to the city and immigrants were the likeliest targets of his cons, and gaou
qualities were thus readily associated with the population of African immigrants in
Abidjan. At the same time, urban youth applied this opposition to taste and connois-
seurship concerning consumption. A gaou did not know how to dress, or how to
differentiate between a counterfeit and the real thing. Likewise, commodities and
clothing of Western origin were yere in relation to Ivoirian-made products (and Ameri-
can clothes were more yere than French ones), while Ivoirian products were often
superior to those made in other African countries. Geographical locations, both migra-
tory destinations and origins of consumer goods, were arranged hierarchically accord-
ing to this logic of social value.
Thus the competitive display of bluffing - the central act of identity production for
-
young Ivoirian men was not simply a display of money and foreign goods, but also a
display of the cultural mastery of the symbols of modern identity, differentiating
themselves from 'untrue' Ivoirians incapable of making such distinctions. Abdou, a
tailor, expounded on Ivoirian fashion sense:9

Atrue Ivoirianprefersbrands from Welikethis

America especially. kindofclothing
and willwithout
thinkingabout itspend 180,000CFA ($250) fora pairofsneakerswith written
Jordan on them rather
thana suitforthesame price. because itsays
Just Jordan on [Link] there
aresneakersjustasgood
made inCôte d'Ivoire,butnobody wants [Link] wantthese kindsofthings
forlafrime(toshow
off).
They willshow up ina barand sitinjustsuch a way thatyouwillbe forced
toseethebrand and
know that theypaid more fortheir
shirtthan youdid.

It is important that actors are quite explicit that their economic sacrifices are for the
purpose of display; it is for their ability to seduce an audience and demonstrate the
validity of their taste that actors search for the 'real' thing.
Arguments over the relative value of a particular object or brand were therefore
expressions of struggles over social superiority and displays of connoisseurship in
'modern' culture. Benoît, a student of pharmaceuticals at the University of Abidjan,
criticized his younger cousin Christophe for being a gaou for spending the equivalent
of $100 on a pair of shoes when you could get the same thing made by the Ghanaians
around the corner for a couple of bucks. Christophe responded that even if Benoît had

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a million CFA francs, he would still be the gaou , because he didn't know how to
distinguish quality. Later Christophe came over to my apartment still fuming. He said:

Benoît totellme that

was trying dressshoes arebetter
than Sebago. But
hedoesn't know anything...
Look atthe clothes
Benoît wears,hisworthless Me, I appreciate
shoes. realbrands:Sony,Samsung,
Philips. it'sBMW, Benz. Ifthebrand ispowerful
Forcars, ifit'sauthentic,
and expensive, thenitisfor
me.

Benoît and Christophe each believed they had superior knowledge of value, but argued
from different schémas altogether. For Benoît, the discussion turned around the func-
tional materiality of the object in relation to its cost (good value'), whereas Christophe
considered himself to have the ability to distinguish 'powerful' objects from those made
locally and thus disconnected from circuits of power. Employing that ultimate mark of
distinction in which only renowned connoiseurs can safely indulge, the ironic display
of bad taste, Abidjanais youth more recently developed the Soirée Gaou. At such social
events, young people dressed up in counterfeit goods and out-of-date clothes in a
-
competition of anti-style, seeking a prize for the worst dressed further emphasizing
their symbolic mastery through negation.10
Luc, part of the group of underemployed youth in their early twenties who hung around
my neighbourhood, explained that if someone detects that you are wearing a fake label,
itis la honte (shameful). To wear a fake showed that you were a gaou , that someone was
able to yere you into spending money on a worthless object. The moment of purchase is
a test of the urban savvy of consumers, of their ability to differentiate the real from
imitation, and therefore another source of hierarchy. Luc said that itwas very dangerous
to buy clothes at stores like Petit Paris because they had so many imitation labels:

ofthestuff
The majority arefalse
there things, collées
griffes willtellyouitis
(glued-on labels). They
butifyoubuyitthey
an original, willsayafterwards, d him,
'We yere1 wecheated a gaou. Butifit'sus,
weknow, wesay, forthat,
'I can't pay because itisnot Itcan look very
theoriginal'. close tothereal
thing.

When Luc bought his Sebago shoes, he went with a friend who knew how to differentiate:

Itwas atone ofthose Lebanese stores.

They handed us one pairand said itwas 50,000 CFA ($75). [My
friend] said 'no,that'snottherealthing' (because there arethree kinds,from United States, from
France, and from Morocco). They satthereand swore up and down itwas real, straightfromAmerica.
Butwhen wesaid wewere leaving,[theshop owner] 'I think
said, I can findwhat you'relooking for',
and came outofthe back with myfriend
therealshoes. 'Now', said, 'can youseethedifference?' One
was a little
brighterthan and the
theother, leatherwas harder intheback, whereas
stiff, theMoroccan
ones were alreadysoft,youcould telltheywere notas wellmade.

These anxieties were not merely the result of a projected imagination of fakery: the
market was indeed filled with such fakes. One tailor I knew specialized in griffes collées.
While visiting his shop, a man came off the street pushing a bag full of Italian clothing
labels. My friend considered them seriously, commenting that they were beautiful but
pointed out that they did not match with one another. The tailor said, 'They are
worthless to me unless iťs a full set, because I sell clothes to clothing stores where things
have to look real'.
Because of these dangers, Luc preferred to go to Le Black (the city's biggest black
market), where you could find all sorts of second-hand clothing that he 'knew' was real.

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Brands as masks 147

Paralleling Hansen's (2000) findings, the fact that such clothes were worn out and
discarded by somebody made little difference to its value; itwas their authentic origin
that concerned these young Ivoirians.
Another source of legitimate 'real' products were migrants returning back from the
source. In the Nouchi lexicon, migrants who returned from Europe or the United States
were called bengistes , and Beng was an encompassing term for all countries they iden-
tified with modernity. Dedy, a hardened man in his late thirties once renowned for his
style, explained that when they return from Europe, bengistes bring many things to sell:

They arebringing theoridji

(originals). Intheold daysthatwas what wanted,
everyone butthe
Moroccans made so many fakesthat people became really
sceptical.
Theywereafraid
tospend any
money on fakes. So ifyoubring therealthing [back fromEurope] youneed togetsome local
connoisseurs tovalidate
their
authenticity. Iftwoorthree theshoes,
people legitimate youwillhave
people running behind youtobuythem.

This reference to connoisseurs brings us to the question of who had the authority to
make such decisions. Comparing themselves to other Africans, urban Ivoirians often
claimed superior powers of perception when itcame to the invisible forces of modernity,
even though a common Francophone African joke puns on the word Ivoirien as 'ils voient
rien (they see nothing). The mastery of the signs indexing the difference between 'reals'
and 'fakes' becomes key to legitimizing claims of identity- just as the connoisseur displays
the 'naturalized' ability to distinguish quality (Keane 2003). In the urban Ivoirian context
of 2001, the performance of this naturalized ability was a key claim to the authentic
citizenship of Ivoirité, and its failure a sign of counterfeit claims to belonging.
Thus, in a marketplace saturated with counterfeits, where the veracity of the brand
was anxiously doubted in private, a convincing performance of modern urban identity
was needed to anchor the audience's evaluation of the label as authentic - in other
words, when Ivoirians chose to bluff, to faire le show (make a show), itwas a declarative
public articulation. The culmination of such acts was the danse de logobi (the dance of
brands) discussed above, in which Ivoirians said they mettent en valuer (placed value
upon, made valuable) the clothing they had accumulated. As Dom, a high-ranking
gangster, described it:

The danse delogobi istomiseenvaleur leschoses

(place value on things).11 thelabels,
One displays the
gold chains,thewatch. The dance iscomposed ofthese itisvery
gestures, even.
interesting Every
gesture ofthebody oranitem
places value on a part ofclothing.

To perform the clothes was to place value upon them. There would thus seem to be a
self-confirming dialectic between the performer's ability to convince the audience of
the brand's authenticity, on the one hand, and the power of the label to grant the
performer their status as modern subjects, on the other. Nevertheless, few social actors
could escape the anxiety over their choices and the possibility that someone would see
more clearly than themselves.
Justas we saw hierarchical levels of truth and falsity in Poro masking societies,
hierarchies of articulation structure the pragmatic integration of counterfeits in social
action; the genuine quality of the article itself is much less important than who has the
right to publicly declare its authenticity or lack thereof. Goods could only be legiti-
mated by connoisseurs. But who determined who had developed sufficient knowledge
of brands to constitute a connoisseur? Within the second economy networks through

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148 Sasha Newell

which many urban youth survived, relationships were structured according to vieux-
pères and fistons (fathers and sons, respectively). These bonds of fabricated kinship were
maintained through asymmetrical exchanges of tribute and redistribution affirming
authority. A vieuxpère profited from the thefts and scams of his underlings, and recip-
rocated through protection, information, and grand gestures of generosity. These were
not strictly defined gangs, as fistons could maintain relations with multiple vieuxpères ;
indeed, these relationships and the precise forms of hierarchy they forged were them-
selves part of an economy of secret knowledge. However, in my experience, a vieuxpère s
declaration was incontrovertible in his presence; he was the patron and arbiter and he
could instantly delegitimate the use of a new slang term or redeem the value of a
suspect article of clothing. Brand authenticity was in this sense a performative speech
act, and the ongoing suspicion of the counterfeit was a public secret that could not be
spoken. But it was precisely this secrecy that gave the objects consumed their imagi-
native potency, the invisible possibility of authenticity.
I was told the Nouchi word yere originates in the Dioula for seeing, that itdescribes
someone qui voit clair' (who sees clearly), but other interpretations of the word's
etymology include 'self, 'authentic', or 'true'. Dozos (traditional hunters typically of
northern ethnic origin who are infamous for powerful bulletproof magic) utilize the
term dozo yere-yere to differentiate authentic dozos from impostors. However, accord-
ing to Drissa Kone (pers. comm., 2007), a dozo who worked closely with Hellweg (2011)
in his research, the word also signifies clarity or openness. Examples he provided
included the phrase nya yere , which means 'open eyes', or the verb phrase ka da yere> 'to
open the/a door'. He also referenced a TV show in which an actor shouted, 'Jevais te
yere!' as in, 'I'll make you see' or 'I'll "open" your eyes to the truth about who's right/in
charge!' Drissa concluded, 'Quand tu es yere, tu vois clair'. The French phrase 'il voit
clair' was often used in connection with the féticheurs ability to see into the mystical
goings-on of the otherworld, where witches, spirits, and jinnis are at work. Here it
seems that yere refers to more than simply ordinary 'clarity' of sight. Thus, there would
appear to be a semiotic connection between authenticity and the ability to see beyond
the surfaces of things to the inverse, the behind-the-mask realm where potency exists.
Yere seems to connect 'true' or 'authentic' qualities with symbolic openness to
external forces, but with different valences within differing competing discourses. From
the perspective of the traditional hunting society of the dozosy a true dozo was one with
the ability to connect with the otherworld of the spirits, to see clearly where normal
people cannot see, whereas, for nouchi youth, an authentic Ivoirian was someone
capable of distinguishing and absorbing value in the other world of modernity, by
seeing through the commodity surface to its true provenance and value.12
In drawing a connection between masking and brand performances in Côte d'Ivoire,
I am not claiming that the bluffeurs themselves thought of their dances as related to
masking practices, or that they believed that their own yere vision allowed them access
to the world of the supernatural (though it is not impossible that some nouchi youth
thought this way). Their use of yere to talk about urban savvy was a metaphorical
borrowing that draws attention to a parallel semiotic structure between invisible super-
natural forces and those of modernity, a parallelism that has long played into narratives
of witchcraft and its uncanny relationship with technology and capitalism (Comaroff
& Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 1997; H.L. Moore & Sanders 2001; Smith 2008).
The Ivoirian model for the relationship between the spirit world and modernity is
beautifully explored by Dozon (1981) in his analysis of how a Bete man views the

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Brands as masks 149

transformation that his village undergoes in the second world (the invisible double
world existing alongside the world of vis-à-vis [face to face]). A small excerpt of this
remarkable transcript is warranted:

Initsdoubled form, orifyouprefer atnight,myvillageisno longera village. Itisthecapital

Itisa city.
ofa country formed bythefour (once their
Dobé villages inhabitants,our ancestors,occupied this
place called Dobé). There one does not
walk on foot,butdrive ina Mercedes. The main street
ina car,
isnotbizarre and deteriorated itislarge
likethis, thesacred
and straight; forest,theguludjilewhere
our ancestors rest, cathedral
isa beautiful (Dozon 1981:391).

The narrator goes on to describe the secret power structure of the village in terms of a
modern democratic state, and claims his knowledge comes from his ability to see the
invisible signs of the double world and his personal experience within it. Dozon argues
that the transformation of the village into a city is both metaphorical and in some ways
a real description of Dobé village society, for the city is invisibly present in its influence
upon the village, both through back-and-forth migration and as the powerful influence
of absent members upon the lives of villagers through money and politics.
The world of the double, Dozon argues (and this is crucial to our understanding of the
relationship between masking, bluffing, and brands), is not opposed to the real. In fact,
the world of vis-à-vis should be understood as the theatre, while the space of the double
takes on the role of the wings and backstage, where all the invisible manipulations take
place to create the illusion of 'the real'. The discourse concerning occult activity is then a
'theory of the real', and the ability to see into this space is a 'capacity for decoding and
interpretation (Dozon 1981: 394). This relationship between the visible and invisible
allows us to turn to the mask as a mediator between realms, a visible object that allows
'face-to-face' contact with invisible forces and beings. In the same way, imported
brand-name consumer goods allow Ivoirians direct contact with another kind of invisible
force: the mysterious potency of modernity and the invisible hand of capitalist value. So
a cosmology of an invisible world shaping the visible collapses the opposition between
chimera and authenticity, for the real is already a form of deception.
In the nouchi cosmology of modernity, if yere constitutes a kind of openness that
allows connectivity with the external/invisible, itis also a means of seeing the 'truth' of
things. The invisible is a space of imagination once dominated by the dead but now
shared with technological apparatus and the mysterious value form of commodities.
Like the second world of the occult, the 'second economy' of the urban world anxiously
combines deceptive (though materializable) illusions and invisible authenticity. It is a
space of unseen causality that can only be understood by those with the special eyes to
see [Link] this sense the logic of yere and the bluff parallels the logic of the masking ritual,
in which the deception of visual performance references the invisible and authentic
presence for those who have the knowledge to see beyond the illusion. As Ravenhill puts
it inhis analysis of masks, '[T]he visible functions to keep the invisible invisible' (as
cited in Nooter 1993: 58).

The secrecy of brands: commodities that reveal and conceal

To conclude, I want to return to Simmel and a consideration of the implications of the
Ivoirian understanding of brands for the relationship between the authentic and coun-
terfeit more [Link] describes adornment as an expansion of the self, a kind
of radiation that surrounds the individual - sending out beams of attraction that reflect
back as social admiration. He writes:

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150 Sasha Newell

The attraction ofthe'genuine', inallcontexts, initsbeing

consists morethan itsimmediate appear-
ance,which itshareswith [Link] itisnotsomething
itsfalsification, isolated; ithasroots
ina soilthat liesbeyond itsmere appearance, whiletheunauthenticisonly itcan be taken
w hat for
atthemoment. The 'genuine' individual,
thus, isthepersonon whom one can relyeven when heisout
ofone's [Link] thecase ofjewelry,thismore-than-appearance isits which
value, cannot be guessed
bybeing looked at,butissomething that,incontrast toskilled isadded totheappearance
forgery,
(Simmel 1950: 342).

Here we see that the authentic derives its force from the invisible, from what is in fact
obscured by the visible. The counterfeit and the genuine are visibly identical - like a
mask, one cannot read the presence of authentic external value merely from its per-
ceptible form, but everyone must act as though one can. Furthermore, the value of the
genuine is something ťaddeď to the appearance. For Ivoirian bluffeurs , this is precisely
what the accompanying performance is intended to convey: that underlying the surface
a real exists that confirms appearance. Likewise, corporations attempt to link their
products with people (whether consumers or celebrities in advertisements) who will
perform the brand, imbuing itwith the personhood itlacks, despite the fact that none
of these actors has anything to do with production. Thus, display is as much about the
hidden things signalled and yet obscured by the 'face' of things as itis about the surface.
Following Robert Moore's insightful commentary on the unstable semiotic combi-
nation underlying the brand, I want to think of brands as composites of 'tangible,
material things (products, commodities) with "immaterial" forms of value (brand
names, logos, images)" (2003: 334). A branded product, he suggests, is partly a thing and
partly language, and the connections between them are under constant negotiation.
Indeed, following the work of Klein (2000) and Strasser (1989), we should consider the
development of the brand a response to the mass-produced object, a commodity
inherently duplicated unthinkable numbers of times, its production and distribution
rendered invisible. It is not simply a guarantee of origins, but also the fabrication of a
kind of artificial Maussian hau to replace the personhood in the alienated object
-
(Mazzarella 2003: 192-5). Personhood is enregistered at various levels in the fictional
characters (Aunt Jemima, Tony the Tiger) or celebrities (Michael Jordan) attached to
brands (McCracken 2005), as well as in corporations, which are represented as embody-
ing personal qualities, and their consumers, who adopt the brands as part of their
identities. Brands function as Peircian qualisigns, becoming 'lovemarks' rather than
mere trademarks (Callón, Méadel & Rabeharisoa 2002; Foster 2007; Manning 2010).
Abstract, largely immaterial images of 'people1 thus replace the social relations once
held between producer and consumer, as well as the local shopkeepers who once stood
as a personal guarantor of quality (Klein 2000: 8). As the materiality of the object is
reduced to a copy in mass production, its qualitative uniqueness must be reasserted at
the level of the brand.
Indeed, as corporations increasingly produce their goods in distant parts of the
globe in order to profit from cheap labour, the brand of the product is increasingly
distanced from the site of production. In Reinach's and Yanagisako's research on Italian
brands that manufacture their goods in China, Italian representatives of an undisclosed
fashion label are sent to train Chinese workers how to make/fake Italian goods, pro-
viding authenticity by virtue of their Italianata (their Italian national identity). They
ship the finished products back to Italy in order to add the label 'Made in Italy', and then
ship them back to China to be sold in one of their fastest-growing consumer markets
(Reinach 2009; Yanagisako 2008). In Vann's (2006) work on Vietnam, savvy consumers

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Brands as masks 151

are not concerned very much with authenticity; rather, their concern is with the quality
of the good, hierarchizing products based on the proximity of their quality to the brand
they imitate rather than in whether or not it is 'original' or 'authentic'. Thus we find a
fundamental instability in the link between the materiality of the object (including its
authentic indexical connections to the place of production) and its iconic symbolic
content (the meaning or 'spirit' of the brand, and its ability to transfer such associations
to the consumer).
In conclusion, the performance of value and identity through the display of material
objects derives much of its power from the ambiguous relationship between iconicity
and indexicality in the branded good. The 'image-object' (Mazzarella 2003) consists of
an unstable slippage between the constructed surface image of the thing, labelled and
discursively produced, and the inescapable but invisible realness of the object
- its
tactile presence and the historical chain of contiguities that establishes its 'authenticity'.
As Mazzarella indicates, these two aspects can either complement or contradict one
another - this is the gap in the commodity form. What I have conveyed in this article
is that, like masks, brands overcome the gap between image and its unstable link to
authentic materiality through public secrecy.
It only takes the briefest of glances behind the curtain of production to realize that
the brand does not really guarantee, or even say, anything about the product, even when
we consider 'the real thing' (as Coca-Cola likes to refer to itself). Manning (2010) argues
that brands have increasingly lost their intended role as rigid and unmanipulable
indicators of the origin of their products. As they have morphed into transferable
forms of property ithas become increasingly debatable whether they can still indicate
source or even act as guarantees of quality at all. Manning (2010: 37) cites Beebe: 'The
modern trademark does not function to identify the true origin of goods. It functions
to obscure that origin, to cover it with a myth of origin' (2008: 52). And yet, like the
audience of bluffeurs , we all act as though brands denote authentic origins. And as
Robert Moore (2003) shows regarding cases of 'genericide', for brands to be intelligible
at all, we must. In this sense, the logo - whether at the centre of the Ivoirian logobi or
displayed in a US department store - is a kind of mask, visually indicating, yet simul-
taneously occluding the source of its value. And just as the invisible contents beneath
the mask provide its force, it is precisely the ambiguity of brand value that lends them
the potency of the unseen and imagined. In many acts of everyday consumption,
like the audiences of masking ceremonies that Taussig (1999) describes, we silently
overlook the inauthenticity of our commodities, knowing that we are not supposed to
know.

NOTES
The ideas inthis article came from
originally a paper thatwas part ofa 2010American Anthropological
Association panel entitled 'Brands,Counterfeiting, Authenticity,
and Authority' organized byConstantine
Nakassis. This panel led me tothinkthrough ina more
brands and counterfeits subtleway,and I appreciate
the
comments and encouragement Ireceived from thegroup asa whole, our discussant
and especially Asif
Agha.
Constantine Nakassis and Brent Luvaas also gaveme furtherfeedback version
on an early ofthearticle.
Much
appreciation isalso due fortheusefuland encouraging comments from theanonymous reviewers ofmvarticle.
1ToseeDouk
Saga inaction, viewsome ofhisvideos on youtube.
'Sagacité': [Link]
watch?v=KGQlXbe2pq4; 'Douk Saga en
'Héros National': [Link]
Fête':
[Link]
21use theFrench Côte d'Ivoire instead
ofIvory thedecree
Coast following offormer Felix
president
Houphouët-Boigny in1985, as well asUN policy.
I thereforerefer
tothecountry's inhabitants
asIvoirians,
theFrench
following spelling, ratherthan asone typically
Ivorians, findsinAnglophone scholarship.

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152 Sasha Newell

3Formore images and journalistic ofla sape ,seethese websites:

renderings [Link]
com/#/sapologie-au-congo/Web_Untitled_oi7' [Link] ; http://
[Link].e0m/article/[Link] ; and [Link]
post/73905767/the-sapeurs-of-congo-open-gutters-and-gucci-loafers.
4 masks inWest Africa areexplicitly should notbe thought ofas inanimate
Although man-made, they
objects.
When performed, theybecome inhabited bythespirit they represent: they areno longer mere human
theatre,butspiritual beings withauthentic powers overlife, death, and society itself.
Forthisreason I
sometimes describe masks asagents inorder toleave ambiguous the relationship between theperformer of
themask, themateriality ofthemask as object, and the spiritthat themask and itsperformer embody and
make present.
5Itisinteresting here tocompare theanxiety ofthebluffeurs over authenticity with that oftheartmarket
formasks and other carvings inCôte d'Ivoire. Steiner (1992b) tellsa marvellous story ofa negotiation
between an art buyer and an urban merchant inAbidjan, inwhich thebuyer hopes totrade a Seiko watch in
exchange for a mask. Each studiously examined the product oftheother fortell-tale signsofcounterfeiting.
6Following thework ofMacCannell (1976), there isa fascinating parallelbetween themasking and the
'stagedauthenticity ofperformances ofculture forthebenefit oftourists (some ofwhich arethemselves
masking ceremonies!), who must similarlysuspend disbelief inorder toenjoy theauthenticity they havepaid
for(rendering theperformance inauthentic).
7This group isoften mirrored bytheparallel female organization oftheSande, one oftheonly docu-
mented examples ofwomen's masking inAfrica (Bledsoe 1984).
81employ thepasttense torefertomyresearch on the bluff because the popular culture Istudied was,like
allculture, ephemeral. In general,itprobably behooves us as anthropologists toabandon theethnographic
present except when wearestrictly talking about thepresent. Our observations arecontingent on the
moment ofwitnessing - theydo notendure. Itisnevertheless myimpression that many ofthephenomena
ofbluffing I describe continue toexist tothepresent dayand certainly continue toaffect contemporary
politicsand identity. I do use thepresent tense whendiscussing aspects ofprinciple orlogicthat, as
theoretical abstractions, outside oftime.
exist
9Allnames used toreference byinformants arepseudonyms. Itisnotable that Abdou was ofMuslim
origin,butexpresses preciselythekindofdistinction through which Muslims would be excluded as false
Ivoirians inthestruggles tofollow in2002.
10Some masking ceremonies incorporate anti-aesthetic performance ina similar way, such astheGongole
mask ofSande women's society (thefemale corollary tothePoro). The Gongole isplayed bya male performer
asa grotesque, clownish parody ofthegraceful dance and beautiful adornment ofthe female masqueraders.
His clowning highlights thegirls'beauty through a kind ofinverse mirroring.
11Itisalso worth noting thephrase
that mise envaleur was originally a French colonial euphemism for the
exploitation ofthecolonies. Itwas also used byHouphouët-Boigny todescribe hispolicy ofgiving land toany
immigrant who could mise envaleur theterrain with more cocoa plantations, another strong contributing
factortotoday's politicaltensions.
12There aremultiple here.
ironies The urban Ivoirians who characterize themselves asyere frame Dioula
identityas the epitome ofthegaou, whose eyes areclosed totheforces ofcausality that surround them inthe
urban sphere. And yet Dioula identity itselfemerged from theurban environment and isofrelatively recent
origin(Launay 1982).

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Les marques comme masques : secret public et contrefaçon en

Côte d'Ivoire

Résumé
En revisitant la comparaison entre secret etornementation de Simmel, l'auteur examine la manière dont
lesmarques ontun fonctionnement proche despratiques de masquage, cachant autant qu'elles révèlent,
utilisant levisible pour dissimuler l'invisibleetlesignifier. Dans lescénario classique du masquage, les
hommes portent desmasques etprétendent être de puissants espritsancestraux, engardant la réalité de
leur performance secrètepour lesfemmes etlesjeunes garçons non initiés. Ce secret
estpourtant ambigu
carlesfemmes, parcertains signes, montrent qu'elles savent etleshommes paraissent croire aux esprits
qu'ils feignent de contrefaire. En Côte d'Ivoire, où lesmasques sont un symbole d'identité nationale, la
consommation est centréesurlefait d'arborer des marques présentées comme authentiques. LesIvoiriens
urbains appellent « bluffing»cetaffichage de richesse etde consommation, démasquant l'artifice de leur
prétendue aisance. Le succès de leurperformance dépend toutefois de l'authenticité des marques
européennes etaméricaines coûteuses qu'ils arborent, sachant que la majorité des produits disponibles
sont des contrefaçons. Sous lesecret public de cetaffichage performatif secache lesecret plus profond de
l'incertitude quant au bon aloi de ces acquisitions. Masques etmarques, lesuns comme les autres,
délimitent métaphoriquement un lien métonymique mais invisible aveclepouvoir authentique. Le secret
de cequ'il ya sous laperformance masquée crée c ependant une ambiguïté inconstante,au sein de laquelle
ilesttoujours possible que la surface soitbien cequ'elle représente. Les marques contiennent toujours cette
instabilité entre apparence etauthenticité caril s'agit toujours, enfinde compte, de copies dont l'on
dissimule l'authenticitédouteuse à l'aide d'un secret public.

SashaNewell isan assistant atNorth

professor Carolina State He isthe
University. authorofThemodernity
crime,
bluff: consumption, inCôtedTvoire
and citizenship ofChicago Press,
(University 2012). his
Following
workon Côte dTvoire,heisnow researching ofUS kin
inthemaintenance and negotiation
theroleofstorage
relationships.

Carolina State
North
and Anthropology,
ofSociology
Department 3341911
University, Building,
Campus Box
8107,
Raleigh,
NC USA.
27695-8107, afnewell@[Link]

oftheRoyal Anthropological Institute

Journal (N.S.) 19,138-154
©Royal Anthropological Institute
2013

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[Link] on Tue, 13 May 2025 [Link] UTC
All use subject to [Link]