Nachman - Lies My Informants Told Me

LIES MY INFORMANTSTOLD ME
Steven R. Nachman
Office of Transcultural Education and Research, Department of Psychiatry (D-29)
University of Miami School of Medicine, P.O. Box 016960, Miami, FL 33101
Lying occurs in all human societies, yet few anthropologists have explored this phenomenon
ethnographically. Based in part on my own field experiences, I suggest some of the problems
connected with making such a study. There follows an after-the-fact exploration of lying among
the Melanesians of Nissan Atoll (Papua New Guinea). As is undoubtedly the case universally,
islanders disapprove in principle of lying, but also recognize circumstances under which it is
morally acceptable. Moreover those persons whom others label as liars are not invariably con-
demned for their lies. In fact, as my experience with informants suggests, the most accomplished
liars in the community are also sometimes the most accomplished truth tellers.
You Aitape [New Guinea] man, you lied to me;

You say you came from Sydney [Australia].
You only heard the talk of another man who came from Sydney.
You say you came from Sydney;
Do you think that I was born yesterday?
Siar, New Ireland, song current on Nissan (Neo-Melanesian)
You, my brother, put an end to slandering us;

You, my brother, put an end to slandering us.
Put an end to it, indeed!
You are a liar, for you spoke first to us.
Where are the cuscus,
Those you promised to send us?
Sorry, sorry, friend,
You spoke too much about me.
That is why I worry.1
Nissan song (Nissan language and Neo-Melanesian)
THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION CONCERNS LIES and liars. I had, and still have,
problems in dealing with this issue in connection with my fieldwork on Nissan Atoll,
Papua New Guinea; the first part of the article addresses them. The later parts offer
a brief ethnographic account of lying in Balil Village on Nissan and a consideration
of some of the more accomplished liars among my informants.2
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a lie is "a false statement made
with the intent to deceive." Webster'sNew WorldDictionary extends this definition
to include "false statements or actions," as well as "anything that gives or is meant
to give a false impression." The opposite of "lie" is "truth." However, one must be
careful to distinguish the notion of "truth" as "the way things really are" (so-called
objective truth) from that of "truth" as "the way a person believes things to be." In
referring to "truth telling," I shall be following this second usage.
To the best of my knowledge, every human language, with the possible exception
of computer languages, either has a word or words for lying or, as in the Nissan case,
has a broader term that includes this notion. Also as far as I know, lying is a human
universal, as, of course, is truth telling. Lying occurs to some extent in all human
societies. Indeed it is almost impossible to conceive of a society, other than a narrow
utopian one, in which everyone under all circumstances would speak the truth. I
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LIES MY INFORMANTSTOLD ME 537
make this point because, as an anthropologist doing fieldwork on Nissan Atoll and
as one intent upon collecting the ethnographic truth, I was perhaps more consciously
sensitive to issues of lying and truth telling than I might otherwise have been.
However, in talking about lying among Melanesians, I do not mean to create the
impression that they lie more than other people do, or even that during my fieldwork
these people lied to me any more than I did to them. (The only lies to which I will
admit, however, are methodological ones, such as claiming ignorance of particular
facts in order to elicit varying accounts of them or pretending to approve of practices
and beliefs that I found unacceptable, in order to obtain further information or to
ingratiate myself with informants.)
The idea of doing a study of lying on Nissan arose after the fact of my fieldwork
there, partly because of the quantity of data I somehow managed to collect on the
subject, but also because, in reviewing my field notes, I find uncomfortably frequent
references to people lying to me. Such references often follow the formula: X assures
me that Y has lied to me but that he, X, has told me or intends to tell me the truth.
People also would characterize various of their covillagers as liars. Among the men
so characterized were several of my principal informants in Balil, and not all of them
were the sorts of misfits and impostors that anthropologists normally shun unless
they are interested in deviance. Some were leading figures in the community. For
these reasons I continue to question the validity of information they offered me,
and I only regret that early in my research I did not pay less attention to problems
of kinship and social organization and more to patterns of lying. At least in the
South Pacific, stories of anthropologists being methodically lied to are quite common
among both expatriate Europeans and islanders themselves.3 In a recent work on
Samoa (Freeman 1983:108, 289-90), one anthropologist has even made capital of
such stories in his attacks upon another. Of course one might dismiss such gossip
itself as mere lies, but one might also ask what it is about anthropological fieldwork
that makes the anthropologist vulnerable to them.
I would like to suggest several answers to the limited question of why I did not
explore the issue of lying on Nissan more thoroughly than I did. In the first place,
my anthropological mentors taught me that lying was not so much an ethnographic
issue as a methodological one. They emphasized techniques of observing and inter-
viewing that would enable me to look not at lies but away from them and that
would allow me to filter out from my data all the fabrications and misstatements,
leaving behind a residue of pure anthropological truth. Unfortunately some of the
very techniques of interviewing I employed in order to probe the truth probably
suggested to my informants that I did not trust them and encouraged them to
become all the more evasive. For if people distrust one another, they find less
necessity to be truthful to each other. With the exception of the conduct of occa-
sional legal cases, there is no tradition of interrogation on Nissan and no tradition of
the detective, anthropological or otherwise. Moreover, under normal circumstances
covillagers do not probe one another's statements or in any way challenge their
veracity, at least not in one another's presence. Thus, as one of my Nissan assistants
suggested to me, my style of asking questions made people uncomfortable. Another
assistant, who like the first had the disconcerting habit of periodically cudgeling me
with the truth, indicated that the more often individuals worked with me and the
more familiar (and, presumably, the more dissatisfied) with my methods of inquiry

538 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICALRESEARCH
they became, the more likely they were to lie to me; on the other hand, if I worked
with people only rarely, they were more likely to tell me the truth.
My assistants' criticisms lead to the second reason for my failure to study lying:
my belief that by my becoming an insider in the community, people would be
truthful with me. This belief is common in anthropology and finds its rationale in
the fact that many, if not most, anthropologists have worked with groups that are
subordinate-either to colonial or neocolonial agencies, to a local elite, or to other
segments of a wider society. Those who lack political power may, as a means of
self-protection, resort to lying in their dealings with those who have power.4 As
Sissela Bok points out (1978:18-22), lying is in itself a coercive measure, a source of
power for the liar. By lying to others, one controls the information available to them
and thereby influences their actions. Recognizing the survival value of this lying,
anthropologists and other social researchers sometimes find themselves speaking as
apologists for the people they study, thus dissociating themselves from those out-
siders to whom such people might be driven to lie (see, e.g., Chen and Murray
1976:241,243; Sachs 1969:129; Yoors 1967:48-57).
The inference anthropologists (as apologists) have often drawn is that by be-
coming an insider, one will circumvent people's defensive lying and will have better
access to the truth. In a sense this inference is correct. At least in quantitative terms,
lying to outsiders is perhaps more frequent and more outrageous than is lying to
other insiders. But, as the Nissan situation illustrates, within the community lying
is appreciably more subtle and complex; it assumes a quality that lying to outsiders,
which follows a more predictable course, does not have. In fact, because they never
entirely become insiders, anthropologists are doubly vulnerable. As "inside outsiders"
or "outside insiders," they must contend with a style of lying reserved exclusively
for them.
Another, perhaps less justifiable, reason that I did not systematically investigate
Nissan patterns of lying was the lack of any viable tradition within anthropology
itself for conducting such an investigation. Only in recent years have some anthro-
pologists attempted to describe patterns of lying in particular societies (e.g., Gilsenan
1976; Gregor 1977:104-7). For such traditions anthropologists must turn to the
works of philosophers, theologians, psychoanalysts, child and social psychologists,
and a few sociologists. Some comments are in order about these other approaches.
Contemporary moral philosophers concerned with the ethics of lying must con-
sider two divergent ways of looking at the subject (Bok 1978:32-56; Isenberg 1968:
163-65). The absolutist approach, identified with such figures as Augustine, Aquinas,
and Kant, condemns all lying as immoral and inexcusable. (Yet, with
appropriate
casuistry, some of these thinkers have also qualified the notion of lying in such a way
as to allow would-be liars moral escape clauses.) On the other hand, the utilitarian
approaches of philosophers such as Bentham or Sidgwick regard the lie as morally
neutral in itself and judge lies instead by their consequences in action. To the
proponents of this teleological ethics, there are both good and bad consequences and
hence both good and bad lies. More recent writers, such as Sissela Bok (1978) and
Charles Fried (1978:54-78), have reaffirmed what is probably the popular attitude
toward lying: that, in general, lying is reprehensible, but in particular instances, it is

LIES MY INFORMANTS TOLD ME 539
justifiable. In other words people usually must have reason to lie; they must find
excuses. This position corresponds to that taken on Nissan, where children are
taught not to lie, where almost every argument between villagersincludes accusations
of lying, where gossip censures particular persons as liars, and yet where lying, both
to children and to other adults, is an everyday and rather unremarkableoccurrence.
One could even argue on a priori grounds for the universality of the attitude
that lying to other members of the group is morally wrong, although under certain
circumstances permissible. For lying is a "desecration of the given" (Farber 1974:
134); it violates the basic trust that must exist within a community for information
to circulate effectively and for the group itself to survive.Moreover,as Fried (1978:
68) indicates, the shared communal nature of language itself depends upon an
assumption of truth; thus, "every lie violates the basic commitment to truth which
stands behind the social fact of language." When lying becomes the norm, "words
lose their meaning and their capacity to convey thought" (Hughes 1967:1109).
To the extent that lying is a moral issue in all societies, the anthropologist
who desires to examine patterns of lying in a specific group should ask under what
circumstances people condone or even approve of lying. What other values do people
take into consideration when they judge one another's lies? This approach to lying
contrasts with the dramaturgical and games-theory approaches of Goffman and
other sociologists, who adopt the somewhat cynical, if not downright Machiavellian,
view that human interaction occurs in a virtual moral vacuum (see, for example,
Goffman 1959:66, 72, 251).
This approach also contrasts with that of psychoanalysis, which, as though by
Freudian fiat, almost defines lying out of existence (see, for example, Marcos 1972;
Weinshel 1979; see also Frank 1974:174). It is virtually impossible to lie to a clever
psychoanalyst, because whatever one says reflects a psychological reality that
transcends one's specific intentions. Lying is a symptom; it is a psychological defense,
sometimes an unconsciously motivated resistance to therapy, but hardly a deliberate
act.,
Social psychologists, on the other hand, perform experiments in order to de-
termine the kinds of people who are most capable of lying or of detecting lies, as
well as the types of cues in others' behaviors that indicate to us when they are lying
(DePaulo, Zuckerman, and Rosenthal 1980; Zuckerman, DePaulo, and Rosenthal
1981).6 The significance of these experiments beyond the laboratory (their "eco-
logical validity") is questionable, however, as those who engage in deception research
well know (DePaulo 1981:246-47; Zuckerman, DePaulo, and Rosenthal 1981:9, 25,
32-33, 39-40). Lying occurs in the context of human relationships; the relationship,
often mediated by videotape, of coparticipants in the same experiment, of strangers
who must lie to each other or detect each others' lies on signal, has no parallel in
real life.
Criticism of such experiments must, however, be tempered by recognition of the
difficulties one must surmount in order to examine patterns of lying as they exist in
a natural setting. Except in association with certain games (see, e.g., Hayano 1980)
or in a few ceremonial situations (see below), the observer infrequently knows
with certainty when others are telling lies. Perhaps for this reason above others,
ethnographers, whose research methods depend upon the checks and balances of a

combination of observing and interviewing, have not paid serious attention to the
subject of lying. Most ethnographers know when they are observing rituals; less
often do they know when they are observing (or being victimized by) lies. And, of
course, in a study of lying, participant observation becomes highly problematic.
Indeed even the task of interviewing people on the topic of lying poses unique
difficulties for the investigator, because informants may boast about their accom-
plishments in situations where credit accrues to the successful liar and deny their
moral shortcomings in situations where others might regard their lies as self-serving.
Thus the investigator must deal with meta-lying, that is, with patterns of lying about
lying. Finally a study of lying also raises peculiar ethical issues for investigators who
feel obligated to reveal the intentions of their research to the subjects of it. What
should they tell these subjects? Should they tell the truth about their intentions or
should they lie about them?
Despite the problems that fieldworkers will encounter in such research, lying
is so much a part of human social behavior that in order to comprehend with any
certainty the life of a community, they must come to terms with this issue, for both
ethnographic and methodological reasons. In fact, because the circumstances under
which people lie and the ways they react to one another's lies vary cross-culturally,
methodological concerns cannot be separated from ethnographic ones. Although
certain general techniques for eliciting truthful answers from informants may have a
universal validity, such techniques must, for the most part, emerge from researchers'
understanding of the meaning of truthfulness to the people with whom they work.
The kinds of data that ethnographers will find useful in a study of lying are
suggested by my own somewhat unsystematically collected materials on the subject
from Nissan. Many of these Nissan data are anecdotal; that is, they derive from the
case method. Such cases, based either on my own observations or the reports of
islanders, include quarrels in which accusations of lying occurred; encounters in
which I knew, on the basis of other evidence, that a person lied to me or in which a
liar boasted to me of his lies (usually because they were directed toward outsiders
or were intended as practical jokes); and circumstances in which adults disciplined
children for lying or lied to them as a form of discipline (for example, by threatening
a child with some horror that the anthropologist was to inflict upon it). I also
recorded the actions of those either too young or too unsophisticated to disguise
their lies successfully, and I witnessed ceremonially enjoined behavior in which
people said things that they clearly did not believe. Stories about trickster heroes
and other legendary liars and jokesters also proved invaluable to this study.
A major source of information about lying was gossip. By means of gossip,
islanders critically scrutinize one another's words, actions, and moral character; in
the process they express the values on the basis of which they judge lies. On Nissan,
as in small communities elsewhere, the investigator who wants to learn about
lying
need only say to a person or, better, to a group of people, "Tell me about so-and-so,"
and then await the response. During several sessions with Balil informants, I asked
them to tell me about their individual covillagers. In one such session, two men
portrayed a number of their male covillagers as liars or deceivers of one sort or
another.7 I later asked the pair to list and describe all the Nissan words for lying
and deception. Having collected almost fifty such terms, many of which involved

combinations of a few basic roots with other lexical items, and having decided that
the possible combinations were endless, I gave up.
LYINGON NISSAN
The Nissan word boh means "to deceive" or "deception" and includes, as
a major element, the notion of lying.8 Tut boh is "to tell (or create) lies," as well as
"to spread rumors." The opposite of boh, in its nominal form, is man, which means
"truth," both in the sense of "veracity" and of "verity," and which is possibly related
to the common Melanesian notion of mana. A liar or deceiver is a bohoboholik. Kinds
of boh include bohopakapuk ("feigning knowledge") and its opposite, telteleboh
("feigning ignorance"); wolihkokop ("pretending not to possess something one
actually has"); hingam Balil (named after the village; "requesting something osten-
sibly for another, but actually for one's self"); popolwonaboh ("faking madness");
bohototarbalakos ("falsely claiming to be pregnant"); and bangbangaboh ("pre-
tending to look," but more specifically described as "bending down supposedly to
look for something, but with the actual intent of looking up a woman's loincloth").
A number of terms identify deceptions and lies occurring in connection with seducing
women, spreading rumors, making unkept promises (in one case, that of designating
another as one's heir), and obtaining people's help or, under equally false pretenses,
inviting them to meetings (in one case, to attack them, in another, to rob their
houses during their absence). By affixing the allomorphs tang/tam to such terms,
one can also designate those persons who habitually engage in specific types of lies.
The concepts boh and man also have secondary meanings and connotations. Boh
is often used as an accusation or as a reference to any disapproved statement made
by others. Younger, more westernized islanders also use the term in self-accusation,
implying that they have given false information, but not necessarily with the inten-
tion to deceive. Another meaning of man is "sharp" or "pointed," specifically in
reference to physical objects. That islanders also regard truth as incisive or pene-
trating is suggested by their recognition of a similar connection between lying and
vagueness or diffuseness of speech. To them imprecise, confused speech easily grades
into lying, so that in specific cases the difference between the two (or between lies
and errors in understanding) depends upon one's reading of the speaker's intentions.
In their statements individuals also employ a certain measured vagueness or ambiguity
that undoubtedly protects them against accusations of lying. One of my assistants, a
man in his mid-thirties, even warned me that many of the older people in the village
prefer to be vague. Because in questioning them I often attempted to break through
this defense by requiring detail or by pointing out contradictions in their answers,
some of them had become quite uncomfortable in my presence; the assistant's point
was that I required his intervention during interviews with them. Eventually I became
less demanding in my dealings with such persons, but a few islanders continued to
be so elusive in their conversation that they remained virtually immune to my
anthropological inquiry.
To islanders, lies and jokes are also sometimes indistinguishable; the term tang-
walengaboh describes both the lie-joke and the person who tells it. Moreover, a
popular way of extricating oneself from being trapped in a lie is to claim that one
was actually joking. In several instances I even suspected that speakers themselves

did not know whether they were lying or joking, but awaited the response of others
before deciding how they wished to be understood. The following summaries from
my field notes exemplify such lie-jokes:
Some women were engaged in noisy conversationoutside my house. My assistant,T, spoke
to them, and they fled. He told me that he had claimedI owned a rifle and plannedto come
out to shoot them. They asked him if I would actually shoot, and he replied that one could
never tell about Americans.T brags that he often teases women, especially older ones who
are half crazy anyway. Once he started a fight between two old women who were sitting
togetherpeacefullybefore a pile of fruit they hadjust collected. T asked them where they had
gotten the fruit. When they told him, he respondedthat the owner of the tree in question
claimed that they had stolen his fruit. One of the women denied the theft, but the other,
takingthe side of the owner, accusedher of it. The two quarreled.
When I returned to my house, T and G were there laughing.They told me that Whad visited
the house earlierthat evening,but the two had wanted to be alone. So G told him that yester-
day I beat up B and threw him out of the house. W immediatelystood up and left. Hadthey
actually frightenedW? He himself was a jokester. Had he fooled them into believingthat he
was scared?After all, W did returnbriefly to the house when I was later also present.Orwere
they just trying to tease me into believingthat they had frightenedW? Such complications
as these delight islanders.
The villagersheld a meeting to trace a rumor to its source. The adjudicatingheadmantraced

it to K and L, who had told some school childrenof an affairthat a man of one Balilhamlet
supposedlyhad with a woman of another. The rumorhad spreaduntil eventuallythe people
of the man's hamlet approachedthe headmanin order to deny it. He called the meeting at
which the rumor mongers were identified and fined. The pair protested that they had not
lied, but had only intended to joke with the children. None of the villagerspresent on this
occasion seemedparticularlyupset over the incident.
Many of the lies islanders told appeared to have some humorous aspect, par-
ticularly in people's recounting of them. Such was notably the case of the more
improbable lies and deceptions that made others, often deservedly, appear to be
fools. For example, one man roguishly announced to me that he had pretended to
place a curse on the grave of his father, buried in another village, in order to prevent
weather and dance magicians there from recovering the bones for their rituals.
Children, particularly, would engage in humorous fabrications, perhaps as mere
outpourings of fantasy, perhaps to test the limits of others' credulity. Thus one
otherwise normal adolescent told me that he was not accustomed to dance on Nissan,
but only in Japan. He added, "I flew there last night."
Vagueness, ambiguity, humor, and lying also help to create barriers between
individuals and others' knowledge of them. These acts represent "a restriction of
the knowledge of the one about the other" (Simmel 1950:316); as such, they are an
integral aspect of social relationships. For islanders, shame often follows, and is even
identified with, another's intimate and precise knowledge of oneself. Indeed, lying
on Nissan can be understood only in the context of islanders' attitudes toward and
expressions of shame, which is a veritable leitmotif of their collective existence (see
Nachman 1984; see also Nachman 1982a, which includes a discussion of shame and
humor). Islanders believe that the capacity for shame is the distinguishing charac-
teristic of human beings. To be ashamed, they say, is to feel exposed, naked before
the eyes of others, who come to know the shamed person in a way that he does not
care to be known. Situations involving shame reflect the egalitarian sentiments of

islanders. In the case of men, to act assertively or attempt to dominate another is to
shame him. But the man who boasts or who acts assertively toward others and who
thus exposes himself to public censure also experiences shame. Shame acts as a
restraint upon the expression of emotions such as anger, but it does so only within
limits. Once those limits are passed, anger is released, sometimes in an explosive rage.
Considerations of shame inhibit certain behaviors. However, to the extent
that it also inhibits others' responses to individuals' behavior, shame also allows
them considerable personal freedom, including the freedom to lie. Thus in normal,
nonplayful social intercourse, men do not challenge one another's lies. To accuse
someone of lying or even to imply such an accusation by one's style of questioning
is not only to expose that person, to attempt to know him intimately in a way that
shames him, but also to expose oneself to unwelcome public scrutiny. To accuse
another man of lying is to sever one's relationship with him. Of course, once a
relationship is severed, accusations of lying fly back and forth. Even village headmen,
in resolving disputes involving such accusations, more often seek to reconcile the
aggrieved parties than to probe their accusations to determine the truth. Only in
certain types of songs do accusations of lying routinely occur. Such songs mention
no names, but most listeners can identify the persons and incidents to which the
songs refer.
Islanders' apparently uncritical acceptance of each others' assertions sometimes
creates the impression among European outsiders that they are rather credulous.
But this impression is itself misleading, as the following incident illustrates:
A man from another village visited Balil. He was an ex-luluai (village leader appointed by
Australianofficials), but a person whose reputation as a confidence man, one who even had
been imprisonedfor his duplicity, preceded him. He summonedthe Balil men to their men's
house and made a long, eloquent, and quite convincingspeech. He had come to solicit the
monetary support of the Balil people for a project involvingthe purchaseof a boat to carry
copra between Nissan and the town of Rabaul.In responseto his request for money, each of
the men present agreed to make a contribution. No money was collected at the time; nor
was it ever collected. After the meeting, I asked severalvillagerswhy, in view of the man's
unsavory reputation, were they willing to give him their money. They assuredme that they
were not. They had simply enjoyed his speech; they implied that the least they could do was
to give him their names.
This story not only illustrates the nonconfrontational nature of Nissan social
intercourse, but also several other points I would like to elaborate upon that concern
lying among islanders, and particularly among men.
1). To the Nissan men, lying is least reprehensible in situations involving a victim
who either has no prior claims to the truth or has forfeited such claims. Enemies
have no such claims, nor do Europeans, nor under some circumstances do women
and children. (Of course, in dealing with an enemy, if the intention is to cause hurt,
the truth can be more painful than a lie.) In the case of Europeans, their very
style of discourse implies distrust of islanders; Europeans' assertive behavior and
intensive questioning of islanders threaten to shame them. Europeans often expect
islanders to lie, and the islanders do not wish to disappoint these expectations.
Likewise undeserving of the truth are people who, without offering adequate
compensation, seek to obtain certain kinds of knowledge that others own, particu-
larly knowledge of magical rituals. On more than one occasion, people boasted to
me of teaching phony rituals to others who requested this knowledge without
paying the price. In some instances such boasts were obviously intended either as a

warning to me concerning my inquiries about ritual formulas or as an assurance that
my own payments, when these were offered, would entitle me to the truth.
People with reputations as liars also forfeit their right to the truth. Others do not
hesitate to lie to liars, not only because such persons do not merit better treatment
but also because, in dealing with them, one who desires to avoid an open and shame-
ful confrontation, who desires neither to refuse another's request nor to challenge
its legitimacy, has only one recourse: to lie in turn. The advice once offered by
Jonathan Swift (1886:253) that "the properest contradiction to a lie is another lie,"
would not be lost on contemporary villagers. Under such circumstances a nonmoral
social interaction results, of a kind that has been well characterized in the writings
of Goffman (1959, 1969) and others.
2). Liars and impostors, such as the hero of the above story, are known. Gossip
identifies them. Although in its unrelenting assault upon character, gossip on Nissan
can be quite vitriolic, it also, in general, offers islanders a means for testing the truth
of others' claims, a means that considerations of shame deny them in actual social
intercourse. Outsiders, including anthropologists, have remarked on the contrast
between the seeming gullibility of Melanesians and their extreme cynicism. One
anthropologist has even used this contrast as evidence of a so-called paranoid ethos
in Melanesia (Schwartz 1973). But a more plausible explanation of the contrast is
that gossip simply enables islanders to engage in the sort of incisive probing of one
another's motives and character that they otherwise have no opportunity to engage
in (see Gluckman 1963:313) and that islanders' credulity is only an illusion seen
from an outsider's perspective.
Although most Nissan people occasionally lie, gossip does not label all islanders
liars. Certain types of lies are permissible; they are accepted lies. As such they are
particularly accessible to ethnographic inquiry. In these instances mutual trust is
not jeopardized, for the person lied to at least implicitly recognizes the lie, and the
person doing the lying at least implicitly recognizes that recognition. It is as if the
pair have agreed to the lie in advance. Accepted lies do not violate, indeed sometimes
even uphold, the egalitarian principles of islanders. Of course, because the element of
deception is minimized, accepted lies are not lies according to the strictest definition
of the term. Nor, from the islanders' perspective, are they necessarily boh. But, as
in comparable situations among ourselves, the hearer on Nissan does maintain a
moral option of not accepting another's false statements, that is, of treating them as
lies and, therefore, as reprehensible. Certain obvious and friendly jokes constitute
accepted lies. Ceremonial lies, such as the protestations of mutual disinterestedness
between participants to a pork exchange, also fall into this category. Notable in this
connection is the use of a traditional shell valuable known as boholor ("deceit-lure,"
or "deceit-trick"). In the precontact past, the family of a slain person would offer
this valuable to a warrior, so that he would kill some member of the enemy group
and afterward deliver the body to be butchered and consumed in a cannibal feast.
However, upon delivery of his victim, the warrior would not receive a boholor, as
promised, but another type of shell valuable instead-hence the name.
Polite lies are also accepted. Thus a local headman advised me that if I did not
want to share my tobacco with some other person, instead of simply refusing his
request, I must deny possessing any. If the other should catch a glimpse of my
tobacco, however, I must assure him that I only had a small amount, sufficient for

myself. Another accepted lie is that told to save face, that is, to avoid shame. For
example, one person may offer another an obviously false excuse for his misbehavior.
The other's belief in the veracity of the excuse is secondary, however, to the social
consideration of whether or not he will accept it. If he does not, the first person may
respond with additional excuses or with excuses for his excuses. On one occasion,
without any malicious intent, I forced a villager through a veritable litany of excuses,
until we both retired from the argument. Like many of his covillagers, he refused to
be caught in his lie.
Because speech is multilayered in its meanings, a statement that is factually
false may at the same time serve to convey some genuine emotion, such as sympathy
for its audience. On Nissan sympathetic lies, although usually accepted, may also
produce misunderstandings, as the following account illustrates:
L had offered me the use of his water tank. But one day I went to fetch water from the tank
only to find it locked. Obviously, for reasons unknown to me, L had withdrawnhis offer.
Later that day in the hamlet men's house, villagers clicked their tongues in commiseration
with me. Some declaredthat the tank at issue did not belong to L in the first place; he had
appropriatedit from someone else. Others, particularlytwo brothers, swore angrily at the
absent L and declaimed at the underhandedtrick that he had played me. Afterward, in
conversationwith a kinsman of L, I happened innocently to allude to the brothers'anger.
This kinsman subsequently sought them out and accused them of wanting to fight with L.
I learned that the brothers responded by claimingthat they had never mentioned anything
about fighting;nor had they even expressed anger towardL. They had merely said they were
sorry for me.
The lying did not end with this encounter, but I do not doubt that the brothers had
meant what they said both to me and to L's kinsman. Fights on Nissan arise out of
such statements as theirs.
Related to sympathetic lies are those that islanders themselves describe as "good"
(implying, of course, that lies in general are not good). An islander offered me one
hypothetical example of such a lie: If the husband of an unfaithful woman questions
another about her indiscretions, and if the other, whatever he knows to the contrary,
affirms the woman's fidelity, he is telling a good lie. Such a lie preserves the peace.
Without necessarily approving of them, islanders look upon many lies, ones which
give the speaker no apparent advantage over others and in which the intention to
deceive is slight, as relatively harmless. Some people lie because they speak without
thinking or because they simply wish to make conversation or because, out of a
sense of conformity, they prefer to voice agreement with others. Lies considered
innocuous also include those mentioned above that arise out of errors in under-
standing, vagueness, and ambiguity, as well as those that, according to islanders,
arise out of sheer laziness. A person may lie simply because he is tired or because his
thoughts are elsewhere, so that he wishes to terminate a conversation. Islanders
sometimes use the Neo-Melanesian phrase orait nating ("alright nothing") to describe
the sort of nominal agreement intended to curtail further discussion, whether out
of laziness or for other reasons.
In contrast to persons whose lies are accepted or tolerated, those whom others
recognize as liars have abused their lying privileges. They are guilty of "glutting the
market, and retailing too much of a bad commodity at once" (Swift 1886:249).
Some people lie to achieve power over others, that is, to accomplish their personal
ends at others' expense. Among the most pernicious lies and deceits recognized by

islanders are those associated with lethal sorcery, in which the malefactor may feign
friendship with another in order to gain necessary access to the latter's person (that
is, to those possessions or leavings of the victim that are used in sorcery). Gossip
can be merciless in its treatment of these liars.
3). Confidence men are able to fool people by appealing to their emotions rather
than to their intellects, that is, by taking advantage of those situations in which
people are least likely to exercise their critical judgements (Hankiss 1980:109).
Like other Melanesians, Nissan islanders want to be the equals of Europeans and to
share Europeans' wealth. Cargo cults, chain letters, and other entrepreneurial schemes
have a special appeal to islanders eager to obtain immediate results; sometimes their
organizers are men like the former luluai, who base their careers upon the exploita-
tion of human weaknesses.
4). The villagers' appreciation of this man's speech was probably genuine. Like
people elsewhere, islanders tend to be somewhat ambivalent in their attitude toward
lies, even pernicious ones. Although no islander wishes to be the unsuspecting dupe
of another's lies, everyone enjoys a skillful liar. Nissan oral tradition, like that of the
West, abounds in tales of tricksters and other heroes who resort indiscriminately
and defiantly to violence and deceit. Some legendary figures claim as their major
distinction their skills as liars. Thus one story concerns Bungbungian ("rope of fish"),
who travels from village to village in his canoe. In each village he asks for and receives
drinking coconuts, and in each he responds to people's requests for fish by claiming
to have none, despite the large catch hanging in the water from a rope attached to
his canoe. Nowadays those who manage to fool outsiders, including anthropologists,
also enjoy a sort of affectionate notoriety.
It is necessary to emphasize, however, that islanders' admiration for tricksters
is not an unqualified one. Tricksters are "bad" (sa); they have dissociated themselves
from society; they are the prototype of shameless individuals whom no one can
trust. Thus a review of Bungbungian's peculiar nautical career reveals that he is not
simply a liar but that, in his betrayal of others' hospitality, he violates one of the
most fundamental norms of Nissan society. In Nissan legends and myths, lying
usually occurs together with other types of antisocial, antiegalitarian behavior,
particularly with unjustified violence toward others. Ultimately the world depicted
in these stories is one gone awry, a world in which the criteria of truth and falsehood
depend upon the whims of those with the power to maintain them. Consider this
abridged version of the story of Nanggonggon:
Nanggonggonsummoned the other people of Pinipir(the atoll adjacentto Nissan)to help him
preparea feast. (The story describesthe variousstages of feast preparation.)The feast tables
were set up, the feast baskets filled. But on the day of the feast no one came. They knew he
would not share his food with others. All the basketswere for him alone. Some days later he
saw the people of MantoiaVillage (Pinipir)going to Balilin their plank canoes. He askedthem
where they were going, and they told him. He asked about his feast, how
widely the food was
distributed.The Mantoiapeople said their village was full of food. They knew his ways, that
if they said they had receivednothing, he would kill them. (The sequenceis repeatedwith the
Balilpeople, who declarethat all of Nissanis filled with feast food.)
Stories such as this have a fascination for islanders, but a fascination tempered by
disapproval of the heroes depicted in them. For islanders recognize that unchecked
lying, violence, and other such egocentric acts are inimical to social cohesion (see
also Nachman 1982a).

LIARS
In their characterization of covillagers, my informants identified various types

of liars and deceivers. One type was the jokester, who offended no one because no
one took him seriously, and who, in effect, could not lie because he never spoke
the truth. Another type, described as "a bit of a deceiver, a bit of a madman," was
distinguished by a vague manner and an indifference to truth telling, rather than by
any predilection for deceit. One type of deceiver feigned madness, supposedly to
gain sexual access to some close female relative. He would refuse to work and would
avoid sleeping with his wife; he would lie and speak nonsense, at least until he had
access to the forbidden kinswoman. Then he would recover. Perhapscomparable to
this person was the Balil elder who told me the story of Bungbungianand who also
offered me much obvious misinformation in his accounts of Nissan traditions. When
I speculated to others that the old man was probably senile, they rejected this
interpretation and countered that his style of discourse was typical of the tampolil,
the habitual womanizer.
Noteworthy among those liars who pretended understanding of things that
they did not understand was the type who assumed European airs, laced his speech
with misused, mispronounced, and made-up English words, and boasted of his
familiarity with Westernways-a familiarity that most people humorously recognized
as fraudulent. Two such local men became the object of considerable mockery
among schoolchildren. Concerning one of these men, a covillagermade the following
paraphrasedremarks:
Whenwe were cutting up a sea turtle, he approachedand told us to remove the flesh like the
Japanese do. He said they merely pull it out from the shell. In his lying he comparesall things.
He also pretends to know what he does not know. Once I broughthim a Petromax(pressure
lamp) to fill with kerosene. Some small girls were present,so he would not admit that he did
not know how to fill it. He unscrewedthe pump section, tried unsuccessfullyto pour in the
kerosene, and then declaredthat the lamp was already full. I did not accuse him of lying. I
just opened the tank properly and filled it. All the girls tittered. Whenyou first arrivedin
Balil, people wanted to borrow your knife sharpener,but they did not know what to call it.
He told us to go ask for the tebelston, which he claimed that all Europeanskeep on their
dinnertables in orderto sharpenknives.
This man was always present during my early days on the atoll (until he evidently
discovered that I was a person of no consequence). He repeatedly assured me that
all islanders except himself were liars who would take advantage of me. Men such
as he tend to be sycophantic toward Europeans and, particularly in the latter's
presence, parrot their way of making moral judgments about islanders. Others also
employ this strategy from time to time, but for more practical reasons or for the
purpose of mockery.
Neither this man nor the other types of liars considered above were good in-
formants; they posed no threat to my research. But there were yet other liars on
Nissan who always seemed to succeed in misleading others and who were among my
principal informants. One such man was John (a pseudonym), whose specialties
included falsely claiming to know and practice sorcery, as well as spreadingrumors
about impending fights or spreading rumors that eventually led to fights. Since,
however, these rumors sometimes had a basis in fact, no one could afford to discount
them. On one occasion he sent the men of Balil flying to another village to participate

in a fight that never materialized. John had fooled them, but no one became angry
at him. As one Balil man said, "How could we become angry? We know his ways.
Anyway, what he said was partially true. That is his way, to speak partial truths."
This is the secret of John's success as a liar: he knows how much of the truth to
speak. In reviewing John's career, one is reminded of Mark Twain's advice, "When
in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends"
(quoted in Bok 1978:145).
The following accounts, based on interviews with informants, reveal John's
special talents:
Returningto Balil from a visit elsewhereon the atoll, John announcedthat men from a village
long hostile to Balil planned to attack the Balil men the following Sunday at church. The
villagersassembledto discuss the matter; they summonedJohn, who, upon being questioned,
admitted that his warningswere based on speculation. Nevertheless,when the Balil people
attended churchthe next Sunday,they did not allow their childrento accompanythem. They
were fully prepared for trouble, although none materialized.
SometimesJohn's lies become truths.John and another man apparentlystarteda rumorthat

one of severaljoint owners of some garden property intended to exclude the others from
access to the ground. The rumor spread and resulted in a melee involvinga number of the
Balil men. According to my informant, the rumor had become too entrenched to ignore.
(That is, whether or not people believed the rumor,circumstances,probablyincludingthe bad
feelings it generated, forced them to act as if it were true.) "These are John's ways," my
informantsaid. "He is somewhatincorrigible.He wants everyoneto fight."
John not only lied successfully but also, at several sessions of divination that I
attended, he apparently caused the divinatory tool (a bamboo pole that moved back
and forth along men's outstretched palms) to lie as well.
Because of his disarming openness, his skill with words, and his ability to intro-
spect and to step back from his cultural circumstances and describe them with
seeming objectivity, John was, at least for a brief period, the ideal informant. His
apparent objectivity derived not only from his introspective intelligence, but also
from his cynical refusal unthinkingly to follow the crowd-as well as from his
facility for saying what I wanted to hear. Without hesitation John would tell me
what his covillagers only intimated to me. For example, I knew that many islanders,
particularly those who had not been educated in mission schools, were disillusioned
with Catholicism and attended Sunday mass only for nonecclesiastical reasons, such
as the pressure exerted upon them by their more devout covillagers. By contrast
John refused to attend church and, much to the dismay of the local Legion of Mary,
even refused to have his third child baptized-an unprecedented refusal on Nissan.
Of his refusal John said to me, "Forget it; let him go to the Methodists."
(There are
no Methodists on Nissan.) I replied that Methodists also baptize their young, to
which he quipped, "Forget it;then let him go to the devil." In the same conversation,
John raised theological issues that troubled him, as well as other islanders, and
indicated some of the social pressures that caused less-religious islanders to attend
church, however reluctantly. Without rejecting Catholic dogma as untrue, John
emphasized that the priests had their beliefs and he, as a Nissan villager, had his.
John appeared to be equally honest in his discussions of other personal matters,
even intimate sexual ones.
John's appearances of honesty were deceptive. For instance one day he informed
me that he was learning to become a tampalau, a member of a society devoted to the

practice of weather magic. Without my asking him to do so, John offered to teach
me his knowledge of weather magic. His offer came as a godsend, for until then the
Balil weather magicians had steadfastly avoided sharing with me any detail about
their work. After a session with John in which he described his ritual knowledge to
me, I realized that he knew little about the subject. He then offered to take me to
his teacher, his father-in-law, for further instruction. Our meeting with this senile
elder proved next to useless, at least as far as my knowledge of weather magic was
concerned. But it proved beneficial to John. He had managed to arrange our "secret"
sessions in such a way that everyone in Balil, particularly the other tampalau, had
learned about them. At a meeting the tampalau subsequently held, they decided to
fine John for divulging their sacred knowledge, and they forbade any of their
number to discuss further with me the subject of weather magic. John, I slowly
realized, had gotten exactly what he had wanted out of the affair: more notoriety.
He had used me.
On various occasions John had paid fines for starting rumors that led or almost
led to fights. During one of the episodes of bamboo divination mentioned above,
John was among the persons handling the pole when it implicated him, along with
his senile father-in-law, in the sorcery death of the latter's son. After the tampalau
incident, I concluded-at least for my peace of mind-that I understood John's
problem: he was counterphobic. In a society where people go to great lengths to
avoid being shamed, John thrived on shaming. He did not hesitate to draw censure
upon himself. Sometimes he accomplished this end by lying, sometimes by telling
the truth, which he used both to make his lies more believable and to shock people.
John was a habitual liar, perhaps also a pathological liar, but he was not a mere
liar; in order to accomplish his ends, his lies had to work. Like the trickster of Nissan
story, he sought to remain elusive. Had John been a mere liar, people would have
learned to ignore him. To be censured as he wished, John had to be caught in his
lies, and he achieved this end by embellishing his lies with truth. And he had to be
caught in his truths.
For my part, I was caught off guard. As an anthropologist I knew that people
sometimes lie to create the impression of achieving their cultural ideals. However, I
was not prepared to meet a person who told the truth about his failings, who was
willing to admit that he was not the man his society wanted him to be, who divulged
to me personal feelings that I knew others shared but would not acknowledge,
and yet who was thoroughly dishonest at the same time. In this way "the victim
acknowledges the con man's remark as truth and accordingly reflects that a man
who speaks the truth is an honest man and can be trusted," so that "the truth of the
statement is referred back to the intention and validates it" (Hankiss 1980:109).
Moreover "an able con artist almost immediately ascertains the kind of role a victim
will be attracted to . . , and the con artist adopts the complementary role with all
.
its trappings, both in appearance and behavior" (Hankiss 1980:111). In our game
John played the informant to my ethnographer, and I lost.
John was an effective liar, but he was also an effective truth teller. Perhaps with
the wisdom of hindsight, I now regret not having played a second round with John
and not having learned to use him for my ethnographic ends. But at the time, he was
more of an informant than I could handle.

Another man whom others warned me about but whom I retained as a principal
informant was Tiram (a pseudonym), the headman of one of the several Balil hamlets.
Tiram was a person of stolid dignity, who smiled effortlessly, although rarely. He
was an accomplished storyteller (in fact, whatever he told me took the form of a
story), whose knowledge of the past was unequalled among islanders. Much of my
information about local genealogies and histories, as well as about ritual and other
traditional practices, comes from Tiram. He often appended his statements to me
with the assurance that he told the truth, although other Nissan leaders might lie
to me. While he would send his covillagers to me to talk about Nissan custom, he
himself preferred to meet me alone, lest, he warned, he become confused or even
lie because of others' presence.
On the few occasions when I caught him in a misstatement or contradiction, he
treated it as inconsequential or as a result of his forgetfulness. For example, in
response to my inquiry about weather magicians' use of fires to stop rain, he stated
that this practice did not occur in Balil. Several days later, when I told him that
other men had contradicted his statement, he replied that Balil tampalau only made
small fires. It was the tampalau of other villages who really used fire. Once Tiram
realized that I knew him to be a tampalau, he spoke more freely on the subject, and
he even boasted to me of an encounter with rival tampalau of another village, to
whom he had denied having any knowledge of weather magic. Tiram was never
completely honest with me about weather magic, but given the secrecy surrounding
this knowledge, his attitude was undoubtedly justified. In contrast, he was one of
the few islanders willing to discuss with me his knowledge of lethal sorcery, which
he claimed never to have employed. I trusted Tiram, yet his own covillagers advised
me not to; they insisted that Tiram was a liar.
Tiram's position as a hamlet leader made him especially vulnerable to accusations
of lying. Nissan traditional headmen are known by various names, including "big
man,"".good man," and tamatanoman-"person who has man ('truth')."9 After
informants described to me the deceptive practices of several such Nissan leaders, I
asked them about the appropriateness of the designation tamatanoman. They assured
me that tamatanoman do lie, but only in the service of truth (perhaps like the
leaders in Plato's Republic, whose very honesty gave them license to lie). They
added that villagers even select men as leaders on the basis of their facility with
words. (Actually, at least nowadays, succession tends to follow the male line.) The
inference I make from these statements is that big men are expected to preserve
social harmony by any verbal means at their disposal.
Nissan big men must also deal with the problems of wielding political power in
an egalitarian society, of directing peoples' actions while appearing not to do so
(see Nachman 1982b). To resolve these problems, big men resort to various indirect
strategies of leadership, including lying. For example I once observed Tiram attempt
to lure people to a meeting concerning church issues by deceptively telling them that
there was going to be a fight. In their speeches big men employ rhetorical devices
that, although not identified as lies, involve some conventional misrepresentation.
Thus at the mortuary feasts big men sponsor to validate their claims to leadership,
they make speeches in which they declare their worthlessness and the failure of the
feasts. They express regret that rain has ruined the feasts and that there is not enough
food for all the guests. Such speeches conform to the Nissan pattern of boasting by

stating the opposite of one's boast. But the cleverness of this rhetorical device
becomes especially apparent whenever the same type of self-deprecatory speech is
made during pouring rain to a feast audience that has been inadequately fed.
Nissan big men are also custodians of local tradition; they are knowledgeable in
the ways of the past. But in bringing this knowledge to bear upon contemporary
issues, they must necessarily adapt it to changing circumstances. Communal action on
Nissan requires appropriate precedent, and it is the task of the big man to determine
such precedent. If he does so on behalf of others, they look upon his accomplish-
ments favorably. But if he does so to further his own interests, they characterizehim
as a liar. Nissan big men tread a thin line between applause and censure, between
being regarded as men of truth and mere liars. Some of the accusations typically
levelled against big men include ones of settling village disputes in their own favors
or in those of their families or against those whom they dislike; confusing people's
ownership of land by creating specious land boundaries and genealogies; mobilizing
villagers for their own work projects but not for those of other men; practicing
sorcery; bragging to enhance their reputations; and, in the case of big men who are
also luluai, bringing false accusations against others before Australian authorities.
As for Tiram, gossip appeared to have decided against him. Yet despite the villag-
ers' many complaints about him, they were unwilling to dispense with his knowledge
and services. Nor could I dispense with them, despite any lies he might have told me,
although I believe that Tiram rarely lied to me about anything that really mattered.
Certainly during my two and a half years on Nissan, my relationship to Tiram and
other islanders changed. Many lies on both sides could not be sustained over this
period. New ones arose and were sometimes accepted. I devised clever strategies for
getting around informants' lies, and they undoubtedly devised new strategies to lie
or to avoid my detecting their lies. Thus our lies evolved together.
CHANGE
This discussion has focused on the correspondence between people's communi-

cations and their underlying beliefs, but not on the beliefs themselves. Of course
accusations of lying made against others, notably against members of other social
groups, often occur because the accuser wrongly assumes that these others share his
own beliefs. He looks upon communications that do not correspond to those beliefs
as lies (or acts as if they were). In this way mutual suspicions and accusations of lying
and hypocrisy may characterize intergroup relations, as they tend to characterize
those between Nissan atoll dwellers and foreign officials and missionaries. Like many
Westerners, islanders sometimes evidence a relativistic attitude in matters of belief.
Consider the man who told me that he did not believe in magic, but that if he were
to learn any rituals, he would believe. (Other people also claimed that the efficacy
of magic rests in the belief of the magician himself.) More to the point, consider
John's attitude, shared by a number of his covillagers, that the beliefs of Europeans
are appropriate for them but not for the Nissan people, who have their own beliefs.
Such relativistic good will, however, disappears at times of actual confrontation
between islanders and Europeans.
In recent years the mission-educated youth of Nissan have taken the part of their
foreign mentors in openly accusing their elders of lying and hypocrisy. This latter

charge was brought by one young man, who refused to cry while visiting a house of
mourning. Not recognizing that the crying of visitors on such occasions reflects
sympathy for the mourners (who would be ashamed to cry alone), not necessarily
sorrow at the decease, missionaries sometimes remark upon the manner in which
these same visitors later leave the house of mourning to laugh and joke outisde. To
them and to this young man, the tears shed in the house are false. Similarly, when a
senior villager did not attend church one Sunday because, he said, he was sick, one
youth cynically announced what everyone already knew: that the man had been
working in his coconut plantation.
On Nissan a common response to the remarks of another is o man, meaning
"really!" This exclamation is not intended to challenge the veracity of the remarks.
However, much to the chagrin of their elders, young people often respond to a senior
speaker with o boh, suggesting that he is lying. Such casual accusation of adults is
unprecedented on Nissan and reflects the opening of a genuine gap between the
generations. On the atoll, public accusations of lying, such as those between enemies
or between disputants, indicate social disharmony or breakdown. A comparable
situation has begun to characterize the relations between parents and children.
Because schoolchildren learn to reject the ways of their elders and desire to break
with those ways, they accuse the latter of lying. Moreover such accusations also
reflect an ideological confusion between truth telling and Truth (dogma) telling.
Those who do not tell the Truth-that is, the one espoused in church and school-
necessarily lie. Senior islanders can probably look forward to the day when their
children, then with children of their own, will receive payment in kind for their
disrespect, only to lament with the psalmist, "I said in my haste, All men are liars."
CONCLUSIONS
The Nissan expression tut kiwkiw, "to tell (or create) stories," also refers to
telling lies (tut boh). Islanders acknowledge that good storytellers, such as Tiram,
have a way with words; that is, they have the verbal and other communication
skills that make them effective liars. Thus "imagination is the ally of both lying
and truth-telling" (Farber 1974:134). Islanders expect big men to demonstrate
a similar facility with words (if not to be adept storytellers themselves), which
they employ both to manipulate others and to create socially acceptable meanings
that may, nonetheless, be at variance with the facts. It is notable that at the most
dramatic moment of the mortuary feast, by means of which a big man establishes his
credentials as a leader, he makes a speech to his assembled followers and guests in
which he reverses the truth. Such men as John are also articulate and use words to
manipulate others, but they do so, of course, in their own interests, not those of
others.
Considering only the cases of John and Tiram, one might conclude that the moral
issue for islanders, as for some utilitarian thinkers, is the social acceptability of a
man's words, not their truth or falsity. Comparable claims have been made about
lying and truth telling in our own society (see Turner, Edgley, and Olmstead 1975:
82-83). However, the recognition that opposites such as good and evil, love and hate,
or truth telling and lying are mutually interdependent and under special conditions

coexistent in a complex of opposites does not mean that people will consider any
one of these opposites acceptable in itself. As indicated islanders generally disapprove
of lies, although under certain circumstances they excuse them.
Furthermore what islanders appreciate in the big man and in the storyteller is
the verbal ability that makes them both effective liars as well as effective truth
tellers, but islanders apply other standards to judge the actual expression of this
ability.10 Such standards become apparent in people's evaluation of those who
lack verbal skills but who are known for their predilection to lie or to tell the
truth. The honest man gains widespread approval on Nissan, even if he is politically
inconsequential and an indifferent conversationalist. Similarly common liars become
objects of censure. I note in passing that one of the most transparent and unskilled
liars in Balil was also a mediocre speaker and was the only islander I ever met who
did not know any stories, or so I was told. He once summoned my assistant to
tape-record a story that he wished to tell for me. My assistant later informed me
in his wry manner that this individual had lied about knowing a story and, in antici-
pation of the assistant's visit, had gone frantically from one person to another trying
to learn one.
My situation as an ethnographer who required the services of articulate indi-
viduals paralleled the situation of islanders themselves. We both had to accept the
bad with the good. We both had to bring values other than that of truth telling to
bear upon our dealings with people. I doubt that any anthropologist wants to say
of his chief informants, "inarticulate, but honest." Thus although I managed to
avoid the most obvious liars in the community, it was neither possible nor in my
best interest to avoid the most accomplished ones; for the most accomplished liars
are also sometimes the most accomplished truth tellers. Moreover, although I regret
not having made more systematic inquiries into the issue of lying, I am satisfied
that except during periods of crisis in my fieldwork, I did not become preoccupied
with this issue in a nonproductive way. Such a preoccupation would not only have
jeopardized my relations with people but, by leading to irresolvable doubts, it would
also have meant the abandonment of the ethnographic enterprise itself. Ultimately,
I suspect, ethnography is an act of faith and a record, among other things, of the
human vulnerabilities of ethnographers themselves.
NOTES
1. A Nissan man promised to send cuscus and advice during the preparation of this article
to a fellow islander working in Rabaul and and to Mr. Richard Hinman for his fine editorial
desiring this meat. The former not only failed assistance.
to keep his promise, but apparently also slan- 3. As employed in parts of the Pacific, this
dered the latter. Songs such as this describe term includes Australians, Americans, and
actual events. others whose cultures derive from Europe.
2. First presented as a paper at the 1983 4. This raises the issue, not explored in the
American Anthropological Association meet- present article, of the extent to which lying
ings, this article is based on field research may be considered adaptive (or maladaptive),
undertaken on Nissan Atoll during 1970-72. either from a social or sociobiological per-
The research was sponsored by the National spective. For some discussion of this issue, see,
Institute of Mental Health (Grant No. USPH1- for example, Steiner (1975:205-35), Wallace
T01-MH-12233-01). My deepest appreciation to (1973), Wile (1942).
Dr. Hazel H. Weidman for her encouragement 5. A more extreme position on lying in

554 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
psychoanalysis is represented by Farber (1974), accomplishments; for when informants gossip

who describes psychoanalysis as a type of to the interviewer, they begin to treat him as
gnosticism dependent upon revelatory experi- one of their own. Common sense suggests that
ence, that is, upon the patient's ability to lie. the more questions one asks people, the more
6. Because such experiments sometimes likely they are to construct lies in response.
involve the deception-or, rather, "instructional Conversely, the more spontaneous and un-self-
manipulation" (Allen and Atkinson 1981: conscious people's utterances are, that is, the
284)-of subjects by the experimenters, and more they approximate gossip, the more likely
because many of their college student subjects it is that their lies will be "natural" ones and
probably even expect to be deceived, one must not outgrowths of the interview situation itself
question the social reality that such studies (see also Gluckman 1963:314).
reflect. What is the meaning of lying in a world 8. The term lor also describes various forms
established on the basis of the lie? of deception and trickery that include lies, but
7. On a few occasions, I also asked people boh refers more specifically to lying.
to identify the liars in Balil. One young woman 9. Noman can also mean "really," as in the
named ten men, including her father and two exclamation man noman, "really true!"
brothers, as well as all the traditional and 10. A confusion between lying, which is a
government-appointed officials in the village. form of social behavior, and the capacity to lie,
She maintained, however, that women are which is no more than the capacity to fantasize,
greater liars than men and that Catholic priests permeates writings that celebrate the human
do not lie (or think about sex). Despite the imagination or, more specifically, that deal with
obvious biases in identifications such as these, the creative potentials of language. For example,
there was impressive consensus among people George Steiner (1975:223) writes that "The
concerning the moral strengths and weaknesses series of possible false answers, of imagined
of their covillagers. Islanders also affirmed the and/or stated 'alternities' is limitless. It has
belief that personality traits, including that of neither a formal nor a contingent end, and that
lying, tend to pass down from parent to child, unboundedness of falsehood is crucial both to
so that, at least in the case of men, the sons of human liberty and to the genius of language."
liars are also liars. In defense of my use of Steiner (1975:205-35) also cites others, in-
gossip as a source of information, I maintain cluding Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Popper,
that to induce people to gossip should be who hold comparable views.
considered among an interviewer's finest
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Detection and Perception of Deception: The Review of Existential Psychology and Psychia-
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Culture, Natality, and Family Planning (ed. by Contradiction. Pp. 191-219 in Transaction and
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Rosenthal, 1980, Humans as Lie Detectors. Anchor Books.
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LIES MY INFORMANTS TOLD ME 555
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schwartz, T., 1973, Cult and Context: The
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LIES MY INFORMANTSTOLD ME

You Aitape [New Guinea] man, you lied to me;

You, my brother, put an end to slandering us;

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

The villagersheld a meeting to trace a rumor to its source. The adjudicatingheadmantraced

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

In their characterization of covillagers, my informants identified various types

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

SometimesJohn's lies become truths.John and another man apparentlystarteda rumorthat

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

This discussion has focused on the correspondence between people's communi-

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

psychoanalysis is represented by Farber (1974), accomplishments; for when informants gossip

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

Journal of Anthropological Research 1984.40:536-555.

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