Departmental Colloquium Dr. Jan Beek

„Towards an Anthropology of Defrauding“

Dr. Jan Beek [Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Anthropology and Africa Studies]

Since the 2000s, fraud has become an omnipresent topic in the media. Enormous corporations and emerging start-up companies – in car manufacturing, the energy sector, coworking spaces, health technology, cryptocurrency and more – have been involved in fraudulent activity on a massive scale. At the same time, there has been a fundamental shift in people’s reactions to and perceptions of fraud. The public, and even experts, are increasingly unsure about where conventional economic activity ends and deception begins. My research is part of this increasingly uncertain perception of fraud. In my ethnographic research on multi-level marketing schemes in Kenia, I have struggled to make sense of the practices I encountered. Multi-level marketing managers told myriad stories, seamlessly moving from one story to the next, adapting to specific audiences, constantly oscillating between seemingly contradictory frames. My presentation will explore both actors’ narratives and the narratives that anthropologists have put forward in reaction to them. Contemporary defrauding practices seem to be more successful in evading discreditability than historical ones. This evasion is enabled by a specific mode of storytelling – an accumulation of narratives. Ultimately, research on defrauding brings to the fore our own anthropological narratives and their truth claims, challenging us to disentangle and discredit some of the stories we are told.