Margouillats, Kamikaze Papers, and the René Caillié Arrangement

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 invites the reader to travel through what we conceptualize as a moral economy of identification. It is a journey through two time-spaces that constitute two scales of investigation of this moral economy of forgery. First, the chapter investigates false papers’ production circuits in an urban environment, at the level of the pavements of the courthouse in Abidjan, focusing on the action of the margouillats. Secondly, it studies the social uses of these papers in a rural environment (Anno region), at a micro-sociological scale of analysis of intra-family relations. Ethnographic observations allow us to analyse at a local and national level the popular, widespread practice of arranging identity documents that we call the ‘René Caillié arrangement’. The chapter ends by pointing out the contradictions of the governmental efforts to get rid from forgery with a modernizing approach of civil registration paradoxically based upon a general amnesty of false documents.