The Social Lives of the Elite: Friendship and Power in Pakistan

The Unbearable Lightness of Trust: Trade, conviviality, and the life-world of Indian export agents in Yiwu, China

“…On the other hand, while this moral lightness emphasizes the wisdom of mistrust—as a skill and resource which affords, to use Caroline Humphrey's (2018:15) words, ‘[a] reflection not only on the motives of others but also on oneself as a person who is also likely to be acting in an untrustworthy way’—it simultaneously gestures towards an aesthetic of male mutuality and amity within which that trust is subsumed. It is precisely the simultaneous merging of, and tension between, affective and instrumental registers of sociality which constitute the moral economy 23 of (low volume and semi-formal) export trade from Yiwu (see also Osburg 2013; Armytage 2015; Allison 1994; cf Wolf 1966: 15). Here, amity and mutuality can coexist with, and indeed sustain, expansive individual economic interests, because such a moral economy rests not simply on the quality of relationships between men, but also on the abjection of the bodies and lives of those women who work in bars and clubs as entertainers and ‘escorts’ (Mayblin 2019; cf.…”

“…Many an anthropologist has argued that when trust between traders, or between traders and their clients, cannot be established or secured by means of formal contracts and regulations-often by virtue of the specific conditions and nature of trade itself (see, for example, Hart 1988;Fanselow 1990;Humphrey 2018;MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000;Roitman 2005;Harriss 2003)-affective relations are relied on as a means to shore up the potential risks and uncertainties of doing business with strangers. While relations of kinship, friendship, and shared ethnicity or religion might not in themselves secure trust, they are, nevertheless, presumed to constitute the terrain upon which practices of hospitality might be mobilized strategically-if not aggressively-to elicit degrees of mutual intelligibility and confidence between possible trade partners (Marsden 2016;Osburg 2013; see also Armytage 2015). To be sure, rather than being solely a feature of so-called informal, transitional, or emerging economies which might lack regulatory structures to ensure long-term compliance and reliability (see, for example, Hart 1988;Cook et al 2004), the building of relational trust remains central, even in the everyday practices of fully fledged, formal markets (Cook et al 2009).…”

“…Building on recent historical (for example, Mathew 2019) and anthropological literature on trade (for example, Marsden 2016;Humphrey 2018; see also Hart 1988;Fanselow 1990), I will argue that the particular characteristics and organization of export trade from Yiwu are such as to require wrapping the careful management of mistrust and suspicion within a language of mutuality and amity, in which affective relations and economic calculation are folded onto each other (cf. Wolf 1966;Osburg 2013;Armytage 2015). Crucially, the apparent tension between mistrust and trust is neither resolved nor erased (cf.…”

Elite ethnography in an insecure place

“…My own fi eldwork with elites in Pakistan, and my ability to access their social worlds and life histories, relied heavily on my positionality and how it intersected with that of my subjects. From October 2013 to January 2015, I conducted 14 months of participant observation with some of the most successful, powerful, and wealthy families in Pakistan-the economic and political "1 percent"-and informal interviews with more than 90 individuals (see Armytage 2015Armytage , 2016. Th e period in which I conducted this research was a particularly turbulent time in Pakistan characterized by several major terrorist attacks, military blocks and operations, large-scale jalsas (demonstrations), and government shutdowns.…”

Commentary: Urban friendship: Towards an alternative anthropological genealogy

“…Contemporary Pakistani bureaucratic, military, business and political elites in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad sustain and advance their elite status through intense networking at parties, weddings and other exclusive social events. These underpin and augument elite friendships (Armytage, 2015).…”