Moral Credit Cards

Abstract

Abstract Finally, in a concluding seventh chapter, we shift our gaze even further downwards, taking as our object the identity documents self-produced by social actors in their various collective engagements—be they neo-traditionalist hunters turned rebels and vigilantes, toxic waste victims, hometown associations members or subaltern political activists from the streets of Abidjan neighbourhoods. We argue that these material traces constitute bureaucratic writings of the self and supports for claiming rights that testify to the deep social embedding of the identificatory logic of the state. They are moral credit cards that, ultimately, offer us the keys to reconsidering the dyadic oppositions of the documentary state and the biometric state by reformulating them in a complex triangulation of identification, debt, and recognition.