Introduction

On a Thursday in December 2018 in Leipzig, Germany, the selfproclaimed hacker and computer scientist Jan Krissler, alias ‘starbug’, and his colleague Julian showed the assembled crowd at the Chaos Communication Congress how they could fool a hand-vein biometric sensor with the use of a fake hand. The hand was made by capturing their palm vein patterns with a digital camera from which the infrared filter had been removed, mounting the patterns on a wooden hand and covering it with a layer of wax skin (Burt, 2019) (see Figure 9.1). Before this event, vein biometrics was considered one of the most secure biometric technologies. Vein patterns are located under the skin and were therefore considered more difficult if not impossible to fake.

Biometric technologies are digital technologies developed to register, recognize and distinguish individual bodies. Fingertips, faces, eyes, veins and other body parts enrolled for biometrics are considered unique in their dimensions, textures and patterns. These technologies are increasingly being discussed as their use proliferates across contexts. Fingerprint-, facial- and to some extent iris recognition are widely used in border control and consumer electronics (computers, smartphones, cars), for access to restricted sites, for identification of beneficiaries in health or social systems, in refugee camps, and increasingly for identification in banking (Bonneau et al 2018; Jacobsen, 2017, 2019; Grunenberg, 2020a). Biometric technologies are often talked about in terms of convenience and/or security by industry representatives. They are convenient because they make it unnecessary for individuals to remember passwords. As one biometric researcher argued, “You can forget your password, but you can't forget your body” (interview, Peter, professor of biometrics). Furthermore, according to researchers, they potentially enable more seamless interactions: doors that open as you approach, car seats that auto regulate to the particular body of a driver by, for example, registering a fingerprint. Biometric technologies are conceived of as security-enhancing devices because ideally they make it possible to distinguish between individuals who may legitimately cross a boundary, whether a national border or a more prosaic perimeter such as the entrance to an office, and those who may not.

In biometric research the notion of ‘spoofing’ appears to identify a particular form of impostering. The example of palm-vein spoofing mentioned at the opening of this chapter is a case in point.

Introducing the common cuckoo: ‘the quintessential cheat’?

Perched on a branch, a cuckoo hen watches in silence, waiting for a robin to leave her nest. Once the robin leaves to forage, the cuckoo approaches its nest, and crouches amid the robin's eggs. Within seconds the cuckoo lays its egg and flies off. In colour the cuckoo's egg approximates that of the robin. The robin soon returns to resume brooding her clutch. As far as we can tell, she does not react to the appearance of an additional egg now in her nest. On hatching, the robin raises the cuckoo nestling alongside her biological offspring. The cuckoo chick outcompetes some of the nestling robins. This results in the robin chicks’ death by starvation, and the ejection of their corpses from the nest. Upon sexual maturity, the surviving offspring – cuckoo and robins alike – go on to repeat this ecological cycle.

Ecologists describe this behaviour as brood parasitism. Cuckoos are a diverse family of 141 species ranging across all continents bar Antarctica. Not all cuckoo species are brood parasites. Those that are lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Their eggs typically exhibit morphological features resembling those of the host, as we described with the robin. Seemingly none the wiser, the host birds rear the cuckoos’ offspring, often to the demise of their biological offspring. By mimicking host species egg morphology (and in some cases consuming the host bird's egg; Fromme, 2018) the cuckoo reproduces without engaging in parental care. In this way, cuckoo behaviour conjures the idea of imposture in the most intimate of contexts.

In the opening vignette, we tried to depict the cuckoo's actions in purely descriptive terms. But we found it took some considerable effort to avoid using terms like ‘sneak’, ‘invade’ or ‘cheat’ to refer to the events transpiring in the nest. The fact that purposive clinical detachment is difficult to maintain while writing about the nature of brood parasitism is noteworthy. As we discuss in this chapter, cuckoos’ brood-parasitic lifestyles are entangled with human conceptions of imposture. Indeed, human culture is littered with a variety of potent references to cuckoos’ nesting practices. Among these images, we are concerned with the notion of imposture that cuckoos’ brood-parasitic lifestyles evoke.

There are many current debates over the influence of the famous, the agency of fans, and the consequences of the emulation of prominent people. One of the most pervasive anxieties these address is that those who admire the famous, particularly young admirers, will imitate their ‘idols’. While Western commentators investigate the connection between ‘celebrity worship’ and cosmetic surgery (Maltby and Day, 2011), their Asian counterparts explore the relation of the ‘imitation of celebrity models and materialism’ among Chinese youth (Chan and Prendergast, 2008). Psychologists have developed an entire literature on the mimetic impulse in fandom, charting the descent from admiration to empathy to over-identification to obsession (Giles, 2000; McCutcheon et al, 2002, 2003). Their pathologization of this progress is echoed by the Christian motivational writer Kimberly Davidson on what she calls the ‘Celebrity Imitation Complex’:

But there is, Davidson goes on to claim, an alternative – not the abandonment of imitation, but its purposeful practice. Citing the 15th-century Latin devotional text Imitatio Christi, a collection of biblical and early Christian teachings by the Augustinian monk Thomas à Kempis, she maintains:

Paradoxically, in order for ‘Teens to Live Authentically in a Celebrity-Obsessed World’ (the subtitle of Davidson's polemic), they must imitate a very famous figure indeed.

Despite Davidson's self-contradiction, her concerns about the imitation of prominent people reflect pervasive worries about people ‘passing’ into social spheres or occupations barred to them, or presenting themselves as materially or morally superior to their actual condition, convincing others and even themselves that they are different than they are.

Hesitation

The song sounded familiar. I had doubtless heard it before. Its lyrics were fervently performed by its interpreters while standing inside a moving bus. This version of Juan Gianitti's El Camino del Dolor – the Path of Pain – was carefully attended to by most of the passengers in the bus. After the song finished, the younger member of the duo saluted the audience and went to every seat to collect coins and food. This was not the first time they had done this, as I could deduce from their skill in managing the movements of the bus while successfully playing the guitar and singing. I was returning from Altos de Cazucà, a slum in a town called Soacha located in the south-west of Bogotà where people moving into the city usually settle after escaping from the still ongoing situation of violence in Colombia. When the duo came off the bus, I decided to join them and initiate a conversation. This impulsive and intuitive act resulted in a revealing encounter with Luis and his son who generously shared their story after I explained my interest in their performance and experiences (Figure 13.1).

When asked about their lives before coming to the city, Luis seemed to repeat the lyrics of the song they had just performed in the bus. Like the song's author, they too had once owned a farm. They lived there until 2008, when an armed group that occupied the region assaulted and assassinated Luis’ wife and daughter before expelling him and his son from their land. “Even if it was safer to go back, I would not do it”, were the words he used to describe their reluctance to revisit a place full of painful memories – their own Camino del Dolor. Luis told me how he moved among different towns trying to find a job and a place to stay with his son. They both claimed to be earning enough money to survive in the city through their performances on buses.

Something drew my attention while talking. Luis constantly asked his son to hand him things or inquired what time it was. I initially interpreted this as their merely being in a hurry. A powerful revelation in Luis’ story, however, suggested more was going on. Luis had a visual impairment and played the guitar by heart.

I was driving Victor, Otávio and his boyfriend Jorge to a celebration of Candomblé in Alaketu, one of Salvador's old and famous terreiros (temples). Four gays in a rental car, all dressed in immaculate white, as Candomblé ceremonies require. The initiative for the outing had been mine. As always, Victor had been hesitant to accompany me. He dislikes the ceremonies, with their long hours of just sitting, watching the initiates dance to the drumming, and waiting for the orixá spirits to arrive and possess the initiates’ bodies. This time, however, he had figured this was an opportunity for me to meet his friend Otávio, who was ‘from Candomblé’, and might be of use for my research. I do not know what Victor had told Otávio about me, but I dare speculate that the prestige of a European-who-works-at-a-university-and-writesabout-Candomblé had piqued Otévio's interest in joining.

While driving, I explained that the terreiro we were going to visit was a very old one, of great repute and on its way to be recognized by the Bahian state as ‘cultural heritage’. Otávio, a chubby adolescent with straightened black hair wearing a rather risqué lace blouse, exclaimed “chiquééééérima”, which may be translated as “how fabulous”. Otávio lived in a distant suburb of Salvador, and although he was in the early stages of initiation into Candomblé, he had never been to this terreiro. He had not even heard of it. I was reminded, once more, that the Candomblé of anthropologists and the Candomblé of local practitioners pertained to different, only partially overlapping circuits.

Otávio informed us he had just taken a bath, to cleanse himself of the couple of beers he had drank earlier in the day. “With beer in my body, the orixá won't come,” he explained. When we arrived at the terreiro he said that the coming of a spirit called Iansá was certain for his body was restless. “It is as if waves of heat and cold go through my body.” The eyes of his boyfriend Jorge – a silent kid with the fluffy beginning of a moustache, who followed Otávio like a shadow – shone with excitement. Victor responded by saying that it would be a good thing if he got possessed, because that was the kind of stuff I was interested in.

Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an international agenda to reorganize welfare states and their social security provisions around the ‘activation’ of benefit recipients, often in the form of ‘welfare-to-work’ programmes. In the United Kingdom this agenda has been pursued through an emphasis on ‘behavioural conditionality’, whereby entitlement to benefits is made conditional upon the ‘active job-seeking’ or ‘work preparation’ efforts of claimants, whose conduct becomes the object of ongoing monitoring. Controversially, failure to meet these conditions results in punitive and potentially lengthy benefit sanctions – the withdrawal of benefit payments. In the context of pervasive political and media narratives about ‘benefit scroungers’, questions about entitlement frequently become freighted with concerns about fraud and imposture and, for claimants, with an urgent need to appear genuine and deserving.

This chapter explores the choreography of suspicion in welfareto-work services. It begins by situating these contemporary social policies with respect to ‘scroungerphobia’ and long-standing anxieties about skivers and benefit cheats. It then describes these policies and their recent development in more detail, with a particular focus on behavioural conditionality. This section underlines the way policy discourse has often drawn a distinction between practices of support and practices of sanction. Based on fieldwork, the next two sections elaborate the everyday experience, practice and management of suspicion in welfare-to-work services. They show how uncertainty is produced and maintained, and how suspicion is administered and made durable through bureaucratic organization and practice. Here the chapter underscores how this suspicious mode of disordering permeates the field. It is not simply the claimant who is rendered suspect, their status indeterminate, but the meaningfulness of welfareto-work ‘support’ and those who provide it. The final section considers moments when the administration of suspicion fails or breaks down, and the state and its agents become the fakes and frauds.

Scroungerphobia and the anxieties of imposition

Like the other contributions to this volume this chapter uses ‘the imposter’ as an analytic device. This perspective is sensitive to the sorts of anxiety about status and entitlement that frequently attend the welfare state, and which policies of behavioural conditionality and sanctions simultaneously heighten and promise to assuage. The word imposter is rarely encountered in this context, however, and imposter dramas instead revolve around the figure of the undeserving claimant or ‘benefit scrounger’.

Introduction

Instagram is a social media platform founded in 2010 and owned by Facebook (Leaver et al, 2020). It allows users to share ‘posts’ (photos and videos with accompanying text) which are then seen by their ‘followers’ (users that have chosen to be notified when a particular account posts new content). With more than one billion users, Instagram has become a major commercial force, not least as the main platform for the rise of ‘social media influencers’ (Khamis et al, 2017) – a term for popular users who are often paid by brands to feature their products in posts – and increasingly important for politicians (Lalancette and Raynauld, 2019). One influential journalist writes that the Instagram app ‘has become a celebrity-making machine the likes of which the world has never seen’ (Frier, 2020: xvii). In line with this, Instagram is at the heart of what has been called the ‘demotic turn’ across the global media landscape, as ‘ordinary’ people have become increasingly visible – initially through reality television shows such as Big Brother, and more recently through social media (Khamis et al, 2017). This has come to form the basis for what has been termed ‘microcelebrity’, a ‘mind-set and a collection of self-presentation practices endemic in social media, in which users strategically formulate a profile, reach out to followers, and reveal personal information to increase attention and thus improve their online status’ (Marwick, 2015: 138; see also Senft, 2008: 25).

Instagram has shaped a more specific form of microcelebrity, which Marwick calls ‘Instafame’, precisely defined as ‘the condition of having a relatively great number of followers on the app’ (2015: 137). Through Instagram and related social media platforms, such metrics – which are publicly listed – have become critical to contemporary forms of celebrity and the broader attention economy in which what is valued is the ability to gather and maintain an interested audience (Fairchild, 2007). Indeed, these metrics, along with the monetary rewards and perks associated with them, ‘encourage people to actively foster an audience’ (Marwick, 2015: 140, see also Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013). The generalized ability to engage with a public has thus dramatically expanded to include not only traditional celebrities (film stars and athletes), but also the broader field of microcelebrities (who may only be famous for being on Instagram).

Introduction

On 7 September 2011 the career of Diederik Stapel, social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands came to a sudden end. Twelve days earlier his colleague and friend Marcel Zeelenberg had confronted him with detailed evidence that he had fabricated results, evidence which had been meticulously collected by three young researchers of Stapel's own research group. Stapel thought he had managed to talk his way out of it, but Zeelenberg informed the vice-chancellor. After failing to convince the vice-chancellor in their first conversation Stapel, with mounting panic, travelled half the country to visit the places where he had supposedly collected his data, in order to construct a plausible story and make sure he got the details right. It was to no avail, and finally, accompanied by a lawyer, Stapel confessed: he had made up data, and had been doing so for many years. His house of cards, as he would later call it, had come tumbling down. In retrospect, Stapel's confession to the vice-chancellor was a rare moment of order and consensus in a saga that is otherwise characterized by differences of opinion, conflicting stories and a lack of confidence in the discipline of psychology as a whole. While they sat at a table in the vice-chancellor's home, for a brief instant, there was clarity: Stapel confirmed that the accusations were correct, he had fabricated data, he was a fraud. But as the story hit the press and became national news, questions started to be asked again. A few people rather hopefully speculated that it might be a hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Stapel himself. These fanciful speculations were quickly squashed, but many questions remained. How long had it been going on? How many of his papers were fraudulent? A commission had been created to investigate the matter, but it wasn't just Stapel who was under scrutiny. The Stapel affair hit psychology at a time when its research practices were already increasingly being examined. A reform movement was emerging that used Facebook and Twitter as its media to discuss the ways that psychologists produce publishable results. Inevitably the question arose to what extent Stapel's fraud was emblematic of what was starting to be called the ‘crisis of confidence’ in psychology.

On 10 December each year, Swedish national television (SVT) broadcasts live coverage of the Nobel Banquet. This four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza allows us to witness the assembly of the great and the good, celebrities, statesmen and royalty alongside the Nobel laureates and their families, attired in all their finery – some 1,300 guests in all. We watch them parading, dining, talking to one another and even, after the dinner, dancing. We hear the acceptance speeches and we are treated throughout to detailed expert commentary on what they are eating (there are interviews with the chefs and tastings with culinary experts) and what they are wearing (experts in high couture tell us how to appreciate the fashion on display).

The elaborate display of pageantry at the Nobel Banquet reinforces a sense of difference between those present and those watching from the outside. The message is that these guests are entitled to be there; they radiate a sense of privilege simply by being part of an exclusive occasion. For us onlookers, the question can arise: how might we become part of this? Short of actually becoming worthy of an invitation, how could one get into the banquet? What would it take to gatecrash this auspicious occasion? How could one imposter as one of these privileged few? Indeed, are imposters already present at the banquet, and how could one tell?

Distinctions between insiders and outsiders are made and sustained everywhere. During a meeting of our research group a casual discussion about the Nobel Banquet gradually morphed into a broader discussion. We found ourselves able to generate an apparently endless stream of idiosyncratic examples of impostering and of settings populated by imposters and gatecrashers. We quickly came to realise that impostering raises far more general and more pressing and significant issues than the example of the Nobel dinner with which we began, and takes us far beyond the questions of identity and belonging in which these discussions are often couched. From these conversations we set out to consider how the ubiquity of this troublesome figure might help us rethink some of social theory's core preoccupations.

The imposter is everywhere. The cases discussed in this volume attest to the richness and variety of examples of impostering. Our preoccupation with impostering derives not only from the seeming ubiquity of the imposter but also from a long-standing fascination with the relations between appearance and reality.

Introduction

Imposters, as the contributions to this volume show, are promising figures to think with. Such thinking can take multiple forms and deliver various kinds of pay-offs for how we make sense of socio-material relations, of society. This chapter is about non-human imposters. The pay-off it aims to deliver comes from putting these ‘imitations of something cared about’ at the centre of the analysis, as protagonists rather than receptacles or intermediaries of the action. Doing this allows us to let them teach us – chiefly about two things: (1) what, in a given setting, is valued, and (2) how deception and its interception are distributed across ever-changing socio-material alliances.

Thinking with non-human imposters – which from now on I’ll call fakes – in this way starts by treating them as a recognizable class of objects, or more precisely: as objects recognized in the settings in which they operate as playing the part of ‘resembling the real thing but not being it’. Fake museum objects, online reviews, educational certificates, specialty coffee and archaeological artefacts are examples of such objects. Each will be featured in this chapter as the central actor in a specific story. This analytical move is warranted by how, in semiotics and its uptake in actor-network theory, an actant is defined as ‘[w] hatever acts or shifts actions, action itself being defined by a list of performances through trials’ (Akrich and Latour, 1992: 259). Fakes contribute to the action by bringing friction. ‘Resembling the real thing but not being it’ is ripe with narrative tension. Putting fakes at the centre of the action means we can learn from their adventures, from the responses to the appearance-reality puzzles they embody and the socio-material defences and countermeasures they evoke and anticipate. This is what I mean by ‘a relational approach’: following the fake brings various relations into relief. In and through their encounters, fakes can teach us how some corner of our world operates and is stitched together.

Such an approach might raise red flags for some, because it means solidifying and granting an identity to what many critical social scientists would keep in the realm of contested designations.

The art of faking: imposture as successful identity performance

Identity never is something we ‘find’ and then ‘keep’ for good but something we continuously have to work at and work for in changing social and cultural contexts. Rather than a stable entity, identity is always malleable and in flux and needs to be re-invented and stabilized in repeated performances among various groups. The construction of personal identity thus always requires an audience which has to validate the performance as convincing, true and authentic. Identity, in other words, relies on the recognition of the ‘Self ‘ through an ‘Other’. Cases of imposture, first of all, constitute instances of successful performances in which an audience became convinced of, and sometimes enthralled with, a staged identity. We, secondly, can only speak of imposture if such an identity is then recognized as ‘fake’; otherwise we simply continue to believe in it. It is, then, neither the performance nor the resultant identity that mark an imposture as fake but the revelation of the fact that someone appropriated an identity he or she was not entitled to. Imposture, thirdly, often causes a scandal because people feel betrayed and outraged that someone pretended to be a member of a certain group in order to gain status and/or profit. Often, however, people also feel ashamed of their own poor judgement and for wholeheartedly having bought the performance of the imposter. It is the spectre and fetish of authenticity itself that often produces imposture and the audience's need for believable identities.

As the introductory chapter for this volume convincingly argues, imposture is a complex act which raises fundamental questions about symbolic and social orders. Just like the breaking of a taboo, in the end, serves to reinforce the norms of a society at a given time, successful acts of imposture and their later revelation disturb the social order and lay bare its underlying parameters and mechanisms. The more successful an imposture, the greater the uproar at its revelation, because not only the imposter but the audience is being exposed. Imposters not only tell us a lot about how identity is constructed in general but also reflect on the cultural beliefs, desires and stereotypes of their audience at a certain time. Hence imposture, as the editors of this volume conclude, has great analytical potential.

Once upon a time, there was a bricklayer and/or carpenter and/or taxi driver living in the city of Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast. His name was Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez. At the same time, there was a guerrilla living ‘somewhere in Colombia’. And he, too, had the name Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez.

Just a coincidence, then. A case of random ‘homonymy’, a namesake with no consequences. But of course not. If that was the case, we would have no story to tell.

So let's start our story with its dramatis personae. Conventionally, the characters populating a drama are persons; and indeed some of our characters, like the ones we have already mentioned, and will repeat here, are people; some even citizens:

• • Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez, working man of Santa Marta

• • Jorge Ivan Restrepo Llano

And then there is:

• • Mono Jojoy, guerrilla (Jorge Briceño) (Jorge Briceño Suárez) (Jorge Suárez Briceño) (Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez) (Luis Suárez) (Luis Suárez Rojas) (Victor Julio Suárez Rojas) (Victor Suárez Rojas) (Oscar Riano).

Yes, that's right. The bracketed names are ‘alternatives’. The character, the guerrilla, Mono Jojoy (now, there's an odd name; surely false!) has these other nine ‘to his name’, as it were. The taking of alternative names is very common among the more (in)famous leaders in the world of Colombian left-wing guerrillas, the FARC-EP, the ELN, and of the right-wing paramilitaries, the AUC and their successors, the so-called Bacrims, and of course the drug gangs. Often, as in the case of our character, these are of two types. A ‘nom de guerre’, formed on the model of a standard name (‘Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez’, for example) and a nickname (like Mono Jojoy).

Please, consider if you will the intrigues that the figure of the magician holds for thinking about the imposter. Doubtless you appreciate that entertainment magic (aka ‘modern conjuring’) involves reciprocally recognized and monitored deception. While magicians might proffer all sorts of verbal and non-verbal explanations for their feats, audiences are aware that both can function as techniques of subterfuge. Magicians, in turn, craft their performances by anticipating that many eyes and ears are primed to detect tell-tale signs of chicanery. Robert-Houdin's much-quoted characterization of the conjuror suggests still another level of pretence; while the conjuror takes on the guise of a magician, this semblance is only an outward show that obscures the real role: actor.

In what follows, I want to set the performance of magic and the act of impostering next to each other in order to appreciate how they can mutually inform one another. In doing so, my intent is to examine how imposters and their audiences co-constitute each another. I am going to do so from an unconventional tack. Rather than approaching conjuring from the lofty heights of internationally renowned performers – the David Copperfields, Penn & Tellers, David Blaines and so on of this world – my attention is mainly with the stuttering forays of a beginner with little claim to skill. Namely, me. It is from a position of comparative ignorance and inability that I want to voice certain appreciations about co-constitution.

Motley impostures

Let's start with some basics about persona as this can serve as a portal into many other issues. As part of their performance, conjurors frequently adopt a range of guises. Maybe you have seen one play the part of a psychic, mad scientist, clown, streetwise hustler, psychologist or, perhaps the most devilish of all, ‘themselves’. Each of these guises is able to be enacted in ways more or less suggestive that the performer does (or does not) possess extraordinary abilities. Each persona can also more or less serve as a ruse for dissimulation.

Within the history of magic, an extreme example of impostering was realized by the American performer William Robinson.