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doi:10.1111/sjtg.12033

‘Here, we don’t just trade goods,

we also “sell” people’s lives’: Sari-sari stores
as nodes of partial surveillance in a Philippine
fishing community
Nelson Turgo
Seafarers International Research Centre, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Correspondence: Nelson Turgo (email: turgon@cardiff.ac.uk)

Home-based neighbourhood stores (locally known in the Philippines as sari-sari stores) are a
ubiquitous feature of most Philippine communities. They are small to medium-size trade stores not
unlike convenience stores in the West where people buy goods in small quantities. In the Philip-
pines, these stores play a vital role in providing everyday economic sustenance to low-income
communities. But more than an economic hub, sari-sari stores also function as a social hub that
connects people and acts as eyes and ears of the community through the people who make use of
their services. In a sense, sari-sari stores are the community’s ‘myopticon’ where people’s day-to-
day dealings with everyone in the community and its environs are reported and discursively
brought under the gaze of the ‘entire community’. Being myopticon as opposed to Foucault’s
panopticon, surveillance in sari-sari stores is partial, non-hierarchicalized and could be resisted by
people in the community. Nonetheless, regardless of the ‘myoptic’ features of sari-sari stores, their
presence in the community ‘interpellates’ everyone’s daily existence and instantiates a discursive
space from which a structure of informal social control is enacted among community members.
Sari-sari stores then are an important reminder of how our built environment is also about
contestation and negotiation of everyday life as we make use of space and as the architectonics of
space both constrain and empower our manoeuvring in places.

Keywords: gossip, myopticon, panopticon, Philippines, surveillance, sari-sari (trade) stores

Introduction
On my first day in the field, I went straight to hopping from one sari-sari store to
another. Having grown up in a place not far from the community, I knew that sari-sari
stores were the best place to establish a network and introduce my research to as many
people as possible in my initial days of fieldwork. The fishing community though small
in population and land area compared to other communities in Banaag (not the real
name of the town) was rather a peculiar place because of the sheer number of stores
dotting the area. People in the community told me that the proliferation of sari-sari
stores could be attributed to the lack of available local jobs and with the advent of the
fisheries crisis, the need to supplement livelihood from other income sources helped
spur their mushrooming. The community’s location was also beneficial to its people’s
entrepreneurial spirit since people from adjacent communities usually passed through
its main street on their way home. Thus, sari-sari stores thrived even in the direst of
economic times because of the patronage of people from other places as well. Further-
more, a micro-lending facility managed by a local non-governmental organization
(NGO) allowed the easy financing of these home-based enterprises. However, more
than serving as an economic resource, it was also made salient to me during my time
spent in sari-sari stores that these trade stores also act as a social hub where people
spend an inordinate amount of time to observe daily life in the community as it unfolds

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 34 (2013) 373–389

© 2013 The Author
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography © 2013 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and
Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
374 Nelson Turgo

before their very eyes. Sari-sari stores, I noticed, are a hub for social talk; no topic is
spared, from local political affairs to people’s private lives. As one of the store owners
told me, ‘Here, we don’t just trade goods; we also “sell” people’s lives.’ This statement
is revelatory since it speaks of the stores’ role in managing the traffic not just of goods
but also of daily affairs of people in the community.
It is the function of sari-sari stores as sites of surveillance, as observing decks, as it
were, which will be the focus of this article. As a space where people in the community
can freely see life unfold on the street, interact with others, generate and obtain
information about community life, sari-sari stores have a panoptic feel to them to say
the least. Thus, one day, as I was inundated with information as I hopped from one store
to another, I had the uncanny feeling of prying into the lives of people in the commu-
nity; it felt like having a full view of what was going on in the public and private quarters
of everyone’s life.
To explain the kind of surveillance taking place in the community, I make a case for
‘myopticon’, a departure from, though obviously derivative of, Foucault’s panopticon.
Myopticon comes from the Greek word myopia which in the medical parlance refers to
shortsightedness of vision, the inability to see distant objects clearly because the images
are focused in front of the retina. The vision of distant objects is blurry, undistinguished
and therefore, escapes the scrutiny of the viewer. These characteristics of ‘myoptic’
vision correlates to the kind of sighting taking place in sari-sari stores. While everyone
in view is seen, the view is partial as some are seen more clearly than others. In using
the term myopticon, I highlight the idea of an uneven, shortsighted and blurry vision
that myopia connotes which then extends to the kind of partial and uneven surveillance
being enacted in stores. Thus, I propose that the use of myopticon here signifies the
disciplinary effects associated with the limited power to gaze at subjects and the ability
of subjects to return the gaze which has implications on the kind of surveillance at play
in any given setting. To further highlight how myopticon is deployed in this article, the
explanation made by Whyte (2011) concerning the kind of surveillance that asylum
seekers experience in Danish immigration centres is worth reiterating here:

The prison plans of Jeremy Bentham on which Foucault’s theory draws propose a system of
normalizing power based on the total surveillance and isolation of inmates. The myopticon, by
contrast, models a near-sighted and partial system of surveillance practices, knowledges and
sanctions, deployed as though it were panoptic . . . This implies a different kind of power to that
of Foucault’s panoptic model, one that relies more on uncertainty than on accurate knowing
or disciplining its subjects, and that as such has quite other consequences for the people under
its myopic gaze (Whyte, 2011: 18).

In addition, as surveillance in sari-sari stores is decentralized, haphazard and unsystem-

atic, myopticon parallels the observation made by Lyon (1994) about our present
condition where surveillance is

not a neat pyramidlike structure of control . . . but something much more like a creeping plant
that sends out shoots here and there, growing rhizomically. This may be thought of as aspects
of a ‘surveillant assemblage’. . . that is decentralized, polycentric, and only very partially
predictable (Molz, 2006: 380).

The uncertainty of the gaze and uneven nature of surveillance is what makes
sari-sari stores myoptic in contrast to the Foucauldian panoptic gaze. The use of myo-
pticon then in this article, in the context of and contravention to Foucault’s deployment
of panopticon, is underpinned by the following: there is no total surveillance but rather
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 375

a narrower range of vision of subjects; the power to gaze does not translate automati-
cally to total disciplining and thus, the gaze in sari-sari stores is open to resistance; and
the architectural features of sari-sari stores allow face-to-face interaction of the viewers
and those who are being viewed, which negates the see/being seen dyad of Foucault’s
panopticon and sets forth a different set of dynamics on how the disciplining of subjects
takes place.
Following this introduction, I explain the context of the study and describe the
research area and method. Thereafter, I review existing literature on home-based
neighbourhood stores and explain how the article is positioned within the contempo-
rary debate on the functions of these stores in people’s everyday life, primarily in
developing economies. I then discuss gossip and panopticon, after which I examine the
architecture of sari-sari stores in the fishing community studied and explain their
myoptic features. Discussion of the empirical data of the study follows and the conclu-
sion sums up the arguments presented earlier.

Context of the study

This article is part of a bigger study which looked into the everyday life of people in a
small fishing community in the Philippines in the light of a localized fisheries crisis. In
this study, through their everyday life activities, the community was conceived ‘with
distinctive ensembles of class and culture, power constellations and patterns of state/
society relations’ (Oncu & Weyland, 1997: 1) but at the same time was seen as
embroiled in the cultures of globalization (Jameson & Miyoshi, 2004).
The fishing community was an impoverished community whose already dire eco-
nomic condition was made even more precarious by a localized fisheries crisis (Turgo,
2010). Most people in the community had minimal education which made them
severely unequipped for jobs that required formal training and specialized skills. Having
no resources to compete outside for jobs, they had very limited spatial and consequently,
social mobility.
Fieldwork was undertaken for a period of six months, from July 2008 until the first
week of January 2009. I am fluent in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the
Philippines. I grew up in a community not far from the fishing community and my
father was a fisherman. My family still lives in the place where I was born. In effect, this
study could be categorized as an insider research (Turgo, 2012a; 2012b).
Data for this article were gathered through participant observation in sari-sari stores.
Interviews were also conducted in the houses of research participants. Stores’opening
hours were usually from 6 am–8 pm. The busiest hours were from 10 am–12 noon and
from 3 pm–6 pm. During these hours, people would, aside from buying, observe life on
the street and converse with whoever was present in stores. In any given store, the
number of customers lingering to kill time would usually be, depending on the size of
the store, from three to six persons at any one time. Some would stay longer in the
stores, primarily before and after lunch. Throughout the day, there was a constant traffic
of people in stores.

Function(s) of sari-sari stores

Home-based neighbourhood stores, locally known as sari-sari stores in the Philippines,
are micro-economic enterprises mostly managed by women (Bonnin, 2006) and usually
located on the main street of communities. They are small trade stores that sell goods
in small quantities. Similar stores are usually found in most urban and rural areas of
376 Nelson Turgo

Figure 1. A typical day in a sari-sari store. The tindera (store attendant/owner) cleans kitchen utensils in the
full view of everyone while her husband looks on. Customers, on the other hand, kill time in the store, squatting
in the premises, or in the case of one customer, bringing her own chair for a more comfortable chat. In some
stores, chairs are not provided but this does not discourage people from staying on.

developing economies like Bolivia (Coen et al., 2008; Schroeder, 2000), Mexico
(Bromley, 1998), Colombia (Gough, 1996) and South Africa (Ligthelm, 2005). In South
Africa, they are commonly called spaza shops and are defined as businesses ‘operating
in a section of an occupied residential home or any other structure on a stand in a formal
or informal township which is zoned (or used) for residential purposes and where
people live permanently’ (Ligthelm, 2005: 202). This definition could also be applied to
sari-sari stores in general. These stores in developing or transition economies, being a
part of the informal sector of the economy, are usually seen as a means to economic
survival (Ligthelm, 2005).
In the fishing community as in other Philippine communities, sari-sari stores are built
right in front of the house or in fact are part of the house, facing the street (Figures 1,2).
Usually, there is a large window where customers and the store attendant transact
business. In some stores though, customers could come in and choose their items
personally. Chairs are laid out in front of the stores, providing customers with a reason
to stay and consume an inordinate amount of time in stores. I estimate that on average,
people in the community would visit their favoured stores at least three times a day for
30 minutes to chat with people. Others would spend even longer hours. Those who did
were mostly women and men who were not working or had irregular jobs and had
plenty of time to kill. The composition of the crowd in stores was mixed though there
would be more women than men at any given time. Men preferred to congregate at the
shore, talking among themselves while squatting on the sand or playing volleyball.
Sari-sari stores sell all types of goods, mostly basic necessities. A quick rundown of
what they sell include rice, noodles, canned goods (like sardines, meatloaf, corned beef,
etc.), soap, eggs, coffee, cooking oil, toiletries, milk, snacks, soft drinks, bread, fruits,
vegetables and medicine for ordinary aliments like cough and colds. People patronize
sari-sari stores for various reasons that include convenience, the ability to purchase
goods on credit, the sense of friendly relations, dependability between vendor and
patrons and the availability of goods in quantities and prices that are suitable for low
income budgets (Bonnin, 2006: 136; Gough, 1996).
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 377

Figure 2. Sari-sari stores are usually part of the house. The tindera sits comfortably on the ledge unmindful
of passers-by while another customer sits opposite her. There is an air of informality; customers who familiar
with the tindera can sit on the ledge as long as they do not get in the way of the operation of the store.

In most studies that deal with home-based neighbourhood stores, the focal point of
discussion concerns their economic role in the lives of people with low income
(Dannhaeuser, 1980; Silverio, 1982; Chen, 1997) or the gender dimension that char-
acterizes their everyday management (Bonnin, 2006). Very few, in fact, had problema-
tized their non-economic functions. One exception is the study made by Coen et al.
(2008) in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In this study, the authors explored small trade stores’
socio-economic importance in the configuration of the day-to-day survival and oppor-
tunities of local residents. They catalogued and explained the other functions of small
trade stores, to wit: local loud speakers, informal social control, social-emotional
support, a helping hand, etc (Coen et al., 2008). It is their entry on the importance of
trade stores as eyes and ears of the community primarily through the agency of tiendera
(name for store attendants in Bolivia; in the Philippines, they are called tindera) that
needs unpacking and is relevant to this article.
Being a permanent fixture of stores, the tiendera are in a unique position to meet
many if not all people in the community on a regular basis. They are also privileged to
become the repository of stories told by customers about themselves, other people and
the community itself. In a sense, unwittingly, the tiendera become the eyes and ears of
the community. In turn, as related by Coen et al. (2008), the tiendera relay to customers
what they see and hear. It is in this context that tiendera comprise critical bolts in the
structures of the neighbourhood micro-level social processes sustaining safety, convivi-
ality and shared value systems (Coen et al., 2008: 335). This characterization is helpful
in a number of ways because it frees small trade stores from their economically-centred
role in communities. But there are some curious absences in the analysis which need to
be attended to in order to further understand the socio-economic importance of small
trade stores especially in the context of their spatial and social affordances.
While there are studies devoted to the primary role of sari-sari stores as providers of
everyday necessities, its secondary role – that of a place where people meet to observe
life on the street and exchange information about community life among each other –
has yet to attract the attention of social scientists interested in the study of how built
structures affect the conduct and regulation of social life. A glaring lacuna therefore
378 Nelson Turgo

exists in most studies of trade stores: the importance of spatial network that sari-sari
stores provide in the traffic of people and information among community members and
its implications on how power to discipline people is played out in everyday life.
Furthermore, there is a failure to recognize the infrastructural role of sari-sari stores –
their emplacement in the geographical grid of the community – as viewing decks of the
community at large where people meet to socialize, observe daily life on the street and
in effect, unobtrusively and unintentionally, spy on each other’s life. In many ways,
without them knowing it, people in the community become complicit surveillance
agents of the community and constitute an assemblage of eyes and ears that survey the
happenings in the community. In addition, sari-sari stores provide a critical space for
neighbourhood narratives to thrive and be tossed around. This highlights the impor-
tance of structures in facilitating social relations and the execution of power in places
(Lefebvre, 1991). Physical space always offers more possibilities for activity than any set
of social roles can define. Buildings and layouts can be reread in surprising ways, and
space opens more possibilities for movement than the current social grammar dictates
for its use (Kolb, 2011: 163). As shown by Besnier (2009) in his study of Nukulaelae
people, cooking huts provide them with a social space not just to gather to partake in
meals but also to socialize with and influence others. The built environment provides
people with the opportunity to utilize spaces for various reasons depending on their
needs. It is no wonder then that the different uses of sari-sari stores in the fishing
community also signify that:

[. . .] from a spatial point of view, societies vary, it seems, not only in the type of physical
configuration, but also in the degree to which the ordering of space appears as a conspicuous
dimension of culture (Hillier & Hanson, 1988: 4).

The role that sari-sari stores play in the regulation and management of affairs in the
community could well be one local manifestation of the embeddedness of places to local
cultures and the conceptualization of space by people in the community. As Molz
argues, ‘surveillance is always implicated in particular structures of power and knowl-
edge that are materialised in infrastructures and labour relations . . . as well as in
everyday activities, mobilities, and interpersonal relations’ (2006: 391). This will be
made more evident in the following section.

Gossip and panopticon

Defining gossip is a contentious exercise but for the purpose of this article, gossip will be
defined as ‘an evaluative talk about a person who is not present’ (Eder & Enke, 1991:
494). This loose if not broad definition is borne out of Besnier’s observation that ‘an
airtight and cross-culturally valid definition of what constitutes gossip is probably not
possible because the category itself is subject to context-dependent interpretations and
possibly contestations by members of the same society’ (2009: 14). In recent studies,
gossips are seen to have a social function (Besnier, 1989; Li, 2011; Percival, 2000; Rooks
et al., 2011; Rosnow & Fine, 1976). Ellickson (1991), for example, showed that in some
rural county seats of California, people largely govern themselves by informal rules that
are enacted largely beyond the grasp of governmental institutions. Thus, through
gossiping, people are forced to attend to their wandering cattle which destroy plants and
fences, lest they are subjected to unending gossip to the detriment of their family’s
reputation. As will be made clear in the article, gossip serves a social purpose in the
community and is constitutive of the functioning of the decentralized and non-
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 379

hierarchical surveillance emanating from sari-sari stores which in turn affects how
people attend to their everyday social practices.
The concept of panopticon goes back as early as 1787 when Jeremy Bentham
explained it as ‘a technological fix for society. A new mode of obtaining power of mind
over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example . . .’ (Dobson & Fisher, 2007: 308).
The prison plans of Jeremy Bentham on which Foucault’s theory draws propose a
system of normalizing power based on the total surveillance and isolation of inmates
(Whyte, 2011: 18). The people being observed would be illuminated around the clock
but could not see or talk to one another including their observer.
Over time, the threat of constant observation leads to internalization and reduces the need for
discipline so that, finally, ‘discipline, regulation and surveillance are taken for granted’ (Zuboff,
1988: 319, cited in McKinlay & Starkey, 1998: 2).

The power to dominate then cannot be resisted since the idea of being watched
becomes internalized and people in the process become docile subjects. For Foucault the
panopticon served as an apt model for describing the way modern states used technolo-
gies of visibility and systems of surveillance to exert control over populations (Molz,
2006: 380). Panopticon was the architectural representation of the ‘will to power’ of
modernity (McKinlay & Starkey, 1998: 2).
With the advancements in technology though, the metaphor of panopticon, that of
a geographically specific entrapment of subject, becomes limiting (see, for example,
Brivot & Gendron, 2011). As people become more mobile, as the subversion and
cooptation of the panoptic gaze becomes evident, and as technologies create new ways
of monitoring subjects (Humphreys, 2011; Lyon, 2001; 2011), the limitations of pan-
opticon to characterize surveillance in everyday life become even more glaring. This
prompts Bauman (1998; 2000), for example, to claim that we are in fact in the era of
post-panopticon (see also Boyne, 2000; Brivot & Gendron, 2011; Haggerty, 2011). He
proposes that it is much more beneficial to view contemporary life as under the regime
of synopticon (Bauman, 1998; 2000; see also Doyle, 2011) or maybe both under
panopticon and synopticon (Mathiesen, 1997).
Contrary to Foucault’s panopticon where the few see the many, Mathiesen’s syn-
opticon is about the many seeing the few. The latter’s innovation is predicated on the
explosion and proliferation of mass media which enable the lives of the very few (movie
stars, global academic superstars, sportsmen, politicians, etc.) to be viewed constantly by
and known to so many. For Mathiesen, the two (panopticon and synopticon) mutually
reinforce each other and constitute what he calls the viewer society, though with a
caveat: ‘the synopticon now displaced the panopticon and was pre-eminent’ (Doyle,
2011: 285). Synopticon’s power draws on the pervasive power of the mass media,
primarily the television. Mathiesen’s synopticon provides another way of characterizing
surveillance in contemporary society but just like Foucault’s panopticon, it is limiting.
As explained by Doyle:
The panopticon and synopticon are metaphors and all metaphors are deliberately reductive.
Clearly the generalizations made by Foucault, Mathiesen and similar thinkers are so sweeping
that they are difficult either to support wholly or falsify unilaterally. Reducing a complex global
apparatus of power to a micro-level metaphor of ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ obviously effaces
many complex institutional arrangements. Reducing surveillance to ‘seeing’ likewise collapses
many of its dimensions into literal watching (Doyle, 2011: 298).

The article steers away from using synopticon to characterize surveillance taking
place in sari-sari stores because just like panopticon, synopticon’s power to gaze is
380 Nelson Turgo

sweeping and total that there is no room for resistance. Mathiesen (1997: 230) argued
that mass media profoundly affect audiences: ‘synopticism, through the modern mass
media in general and television in particular, first of all directs and controls or disciplines
our consciousness’. Furthermore, ‘as the notion of the “few” suggests, Mathiesen (1997)
was also focused on top-down influence, describing a dominant role for televised
personalities of other elites behind the scenes’ (Doyle, 2011: 286). This kind of surveil-
lance does not characterize the kind of surveillance taking place in sari-sari stores.
In this context, as surveillance continues in various ways and as the disciplining of
subjects is acted out in many different avenues of everyday life, it is imperative to ask,
for example, in the case of the fishing community, how we interpret the spatial role that
sari-sari stores plays in surveying the daily life of people in the community. How do we
understand and characterize the surveillance and disciplining functions of sari-sari
stores? In a politically and economically marginalized community, where technological
surveillance is not a fixture of everyday life (no CCTV cameras) and where the use of
technology is very limited (no internet connection, low mobile phone density and
ownership of television and radio), in what ways do surveillance and disciplining of
subjects take place? These are some of the questions that the remainder of this article
will try to address. This article therefore is an attempt to further our knowledge of
surveillance in contemporary society – about a community that is politically, economi-
cally and technologically marginalized – as we grapple with how the surveillance and
disciplining of subjects take place even in the most unlikeliest of places like sari-sari
stores.

The myoptic architectonics of sari-sari stores

The location of sari-sari stores makes them acquire a seeming panoptic presence in the
community, quite different and distinct from other social spaces where social interaction
could be initiated. The central metaphor of the panopticon is that of sight: power
operates with and through the interplay of visibility and invisibility. The panopticon is
structured precisely so as to render power to both ‘visible’ and ‘unverifiable’ (Foucault,
1995). Just like the panopticon, the power of sari-sari stores to ‘see all’ comes from their
strategic presence in the main arteries of the community. In the fishing community,
there were seven sari-sari stores on the main street and some ten of them scattered in
small alleys in the interior. In a sense, sari-sari stores were all over the community, more
like a rhizome, branching out to the main and back alleys.
The strategic positioning of sari-sari stores in the spatial geometry of the community
provides them with the power to serve as a network of ‘observing decks’, as it were, for
people to gaze at the tenor of everyday life. Sari-sari stores are the best place if one
wants to ‘see’ people conduct their everyday life in public. In sari-sari stores, people
come and go freely, quietly observe life on the street and indulge in endless chatter with
other people. Or at times, one could have a privileged view of an affray going on in some
houses opposite the store. This characteristic of sari-sari stores is of course absent in
other social spaces. The spatial architectonics of stores permit them to act as a conduit
of the people’s manipulation of space and their enactment of spatial practices (Lefebvre,
1991). Stores are the people’s nodes of connectivity. Thus, as sari-sari stores facilitate the
power to gaze at people, gazing is further extended through the transmission of infor-
mation from one store to another as people go the rounds of stores to buy goods. In
effect, as people hop from one store to another in search of cheaper items or better deals,
so does information about events in the community and stories about people’s lives.
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 381

What people have not seen in person or have no knowledge about, they get to be
informed through their visits to stores and interaction with other people. Thus, sari-sari
stores are a space for seeing and hearing what goes on in the community. Stores render
everyone in the community in a number of ways ‘visible’.
How people generate information among themselves in stores and pass them on to
others is worth telling here. When someone drops in to buy something, it is customary
for people present in stores to ask after her/him. This cursory exchange of words would
often result in a continued discussion about her/his life, even when the person who is
the subject of the conversation has left the store. In addition, people in stores ask
passersby where they are going and the reason for their journey, so one could in fact
derive such information from stores. Some would even drop by the store to inform
whoever is present about her/his travel plans; in fact, many do so to request the tindera
or anyone in store living close by to keep an eye on their houses while they are away.
Often, exchange of words is conducted in a distance, allowing everyone within hearing
distance to hear the conversation.
As shown above, the surveillance power of sari-sari stores is not just concentrated on
their ability to see people but also on their capability to act as facilitator and generator
of gossip. As explained earlier, the location of sari-sari stores allows people to have a
better view of the happenings in the community. As public places, people come and go,
and this allows the traffic of information to flow from one person to another. The sight
of someone also triggers a conversation in the store. For example, one morning as I was
busy tending to customers in the store that I was frequenting (I was asked by the owner
to temporarily look after the store as she was attending a meeting and her husband was
still at sea), an old lady who was not seen for days passed by the store. The four people
present in the store immediately talked about her, speculating why she was absent from
the public eye for days. This old woman, as I soon learnt from the talk, was greatly
indebted and she could be avoiding her creditors. This explains, one of the people
present assumed, her absence for the past few days when moneylenders were at the
community for collection. Thus, as what this incident suggests, by being visible to the
public eye, people become the subject of gossip. I believe that if the old woman was not
seen by the people in the store at that time, I would not have known about her debt and
why she had made herself scarce for the past few days. In other cases, direct interaction
with passers-by allows store regulars to obtain information which could then be used as
seeds for gossip. For example, Rita, a moneylender, passed by the store and volunteered
the information that she was going to the district chairman and that she just had an
argument with one of her cousins. Immediately, people in the store talked about
previous incidents involving Rita and her debtors. Without Rita offering some informa-
tion about her business of the day, people in the store would not have recalled the past
events and speculated on her strained relationship with her relatives and her reportedly
aggressive ways of dealing with her debtors.
However, as mentioned, the power of sight here is not as panoptic as it seems. The
strategic positioning of sari-sari stores in the geographical grid of the community could,
if willed, be undermined in a number of ways. This then brings us to the myoptic
quality, the shortsighted and uneven gaze that sari-sari stores have on the people. This
contravenes the systematic and totalizing gaze of Foucault’s panopticon. Thus, while the
panopticon’s gaze is unavoidable, sari-sari stores gaze could be evaded. If visibility is a
trap (Foucault, 1995: 200), it is also an option for people in the community and thus,
this trap could be avoided. People could choose other alleys or streets; there is a network
of small streets littering the community and people can opt to access unchartered paths
382 Nelson Turgo

for shortcuts, away from the ‘prying eyes’ of stores. In many cases, when a person
becomes a topic for gossip in the community – say a man who was named suspect in a
reported burglary in a neighbouring community – he could maintain a low profile by
asking other people to do the buying for him in stores. Such is the case for Julian who
was rumoured to have been involved in an affray in a wedding party in a neighbouring
town. He was advised by his family to ‘lie low’ for some time and refrain from going
outside especially visiting stores where as his mother-in-law told me ‘pupulutanin s’ya
kapag nakita’ (he would be picked on if seen). The case of Judith is another example.
She was working as a receptionist in a local pub and would often take a much longer
route to her house to evade the prying eyes of people in stores. She was a topic for gossip
in the community when I was doing fieldwork because she was reported to have been
seen numerous times going home with men much older than her. This technique to
elude the gaze of people in stores resonates well with Michel de Certeau’s (1984)
discussion of poaching on the power of social space. As explained by Rofel, ‘de Certeau
suggests that urban citizens poach on urban design by walking through cities in a
manner not originally laid out in the architectural design’ (1997: 170). Among people
in the community, the need to traverse unusual and unused paths and alleys to evade
the prying eyes of people in stores enacts their resistance to the ways in which social
spaces and spatial structures are deployed to tract their movement and therefore make
them visible to the eyes of everyone.
Weather also intervenes in the functioning of sari-sari stores as nodes of surveillance
and information exchange. The monsoon rain from October (sometimes even earlier) to
February limits the movement of people in the community. Unrepentant rain drives
people away from staying in stores; they will only visit them to procure needed goods.
Most of the time when not working, people would stay indoors, discouraged to venture
out by the punitive wind and rain. When this happened, it felt like time stood still in the
community and there was very little information going around. The opportunity to
watch people on the street, observe everyday life and talk about other people’s lives
would then be severely restricted.

The partial and uneven disciplinary power of sari-sari stores

The disciplining power of sari-sari stores is apparent in a number of people that I
interviewed. While this is not widespread, as further discussion will show, people’s
reaction to the surveillance power of sari-sari stores is worth noting. According to my
interviewees, Eva was a moneylender and was harsh on people who defaulted on
payments. She once quarrelled with and physically assaulted an old woman who was
unable to meet her debt obligation as agreed upon. The incident made the rounds of
stores and people talked about it for weeks. While people in the community were used
to hearing her badmouthing people, physically assaulting an old woman was just too
much. For weeks, Eva was the topic of gossip in stores and her movements were
constantly monitored which fuelled further gossiping about her. Apparently, tired of
being the subject of gossip, Eva, when I met her, was already a shadow of her old self.
She became less confrontational. When I asked her about her supposed volte-face, she
laughed out loud and quipped, ‘I became tired of being picked on (in stores), of people
constantly talking behind my back!’ Another case would be Jaime who before my
fieldwork was rumoured to be seeing another woman. His wife was helpless; she was
sickly and very much dependent on Jaime’s support. But unending chatter in stores,
and in the community as a whole, I was told, had a profound effect on him. Jaime, afraid
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 383

that the gossip would reach his and his wife’s relatives, terminated the extramarital
relationship. When I met Jaime, he told me that he had mended his ways and in jest,
he blamed gossiping in stores for cutting off his ‘happy days’.
The examples above show to a certain extent the potency and efficacy of the
surveillance mechanism and disciplinary regime emanating from stores. However as
mentioned earlier, the surveillance and disciplinary power of sari-sari stores is at best
myoptic. And how it works differs greatly from Foucault’s panopticon. Firstly, in pan-
opticon, the power to discipline comes from the invisibility of the viewer. Even in the
absence of the gaze, those being observed act as if they were being monitored, thus
internalizing the disciplinary regime of the gaze. There is no escaping from the surveil-
lance, reforming oneself and the automatic functioning of power.

Hence the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and
permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that
the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the
perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architec-
tural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining power relation independent of
the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation
of which they are themselves the bearers (Foucault, 1995: 201).

In the case of sari-sari stores, the direct opposite happens. It is the visibility of viewers
– the people in stores – which disciplines people in the community. The visibility of
viewers is part of the myoptic functioning of discipline in stores. It both intensifies
disciplines and at the same time limits its power to discipline people since those being
viewed could fight back by confronting and also by avoiding the viewer, thus stopping
the production of the surveillance mechanism itself. Thus, the visibility of both parties
and their ability to interact with one another render the disciplining power partial and
uneven, thus myoptic, like the kind of surveillance taking place in stores.
For stores to have disciplinary effects, they must be seen brimming with people. One
must see people in stores chatting animatedly and eyeing passers-by suspiciously for the
power of stores to function as such. These give passers-by the idea that they may be the
ones being observed or talked about. Or maybe not. Thus, uncertainty also figures
prominently in the disciplining power of sari-sari stores. No one knows who are being
talked about unless they are part of the assembled crowd of chatters. When stores are
empty, they do not pose an immediate danger to people who want to avoid being the
subject of gossip. They could pass by in relative safety, as it were. In essence, surveillance
becomes discontinuous when stores are empty. Thus, the constant seeing of people in
stores, chatting together, reminds people in the community that they could be the
subject of gossip, their whereabouts and activities being dissected in stores. Nita, a
fishmonger, observed:

When a store is full of people, it is a sure sign that there is an interesting conversation going
on. And if they stop talking when I pass by, I know they are talking about me. If they continue
talking even in my presence, I know it is not me. That is my gauge. If I see people then
converging in stores I often ask myself: what are they talking about? Are they talking about
me . . . (pers. comm., 4 October 2008)?

Some people, I gathered from interviews, in their desire to know if they were being
talked about in stores (these people were of course the ones who transgressed accepted
social norms in the community) would sometimes send people to stores to find out if
they were the topic of gossip. In one illuminating experience, while I was chatting with
384 Nelson Turgo

three elderly fishmongers about local politics, another fishmonger in her early 30s
arrived and spent some time in store. When this fishmonger finally left, one of the
fishmongers voiced out her suspicion that the former must have been sent by another
fishmonger who some days ago failed to pay her dues to a fish dealer. ‘She must be
thinking that we are talking about her and she sent her spy!’ she wryly observed. In
another case, I was requested by a research participant to linger in a store where she was
told people were talking about her. ‘Please find out if indeed they are talking about me
and what they are talking about,’ she told me. Indeed, when I went there, people were
talking about her! (She had a reputation in the community of not returning things that
she borrowed).
In some ways, sari-sari stores, primarily when they are crowded with customers,
become the locus of people’s anxiety when they know they have done or are doing
something wrong. The physical presence of the viewers and their visibility in the eyes
of the observed makes their power to discipline the ‘erring’ members of the community
more efficacious. Stores that are devoid of people effect no disciplining power whatso-
ever on anyone. People could of course stop others from talking about them by staying
in stores but who would want to spend the entire day in stores and hop from one store
to another just to make sure that she/he is not the subject of gossip?
Secondly, whereas there is no room for resistance in panopticon, the gumption to
resist the myoptic power of sari-sari stores is possible. And this power to resist is also
brought about by the visibility of gossipers in stores. In this case, visibility is also a trap
for gossipers. While the presence of gossipers in stores could have a normalizing effect
on a number of people, others could opt to resist this normalizing power by confronting
the people in stores. In one instructive experience to highlight how this transpires, I
witnessed a verbal tussle between two women in a store. There was much talk that
morning about a fishmonger who was cheating on her husband. Unknown to the
purveyor of the gossip, someone had heard of the talk and relayed it to the subject of the
gossip. Then came the aggrieved fishmonger, flushed with anger, berating the people in
store for sowing malicious information about her. Days after, the people involved in the
affray would only drop by to buy items. They did not linger in any of the stores in the
community. But this of course does not happen frequently as most people are too timid
for confrontation or as the case may be, too guilty to react and therefore had chosen
instead to amend their wrongdoings rather than be the continued subject of talk in
stores.
Other forms of resistance to the normalizing power of gossipers come in different
ways. As mentioned earlier, people could avoid passing by stores and elect to navigate
alternative routes. By electing not to pass by stores, no contact or conversation with
people in store is made; they do not leave information about their daily routine. By not
contributing information about themselves, people in store would have little or nothing
to talk about them and also are not reminded of them. This is of course not always true
since in some cases, prolonged absence could trigger people’s tongues to wag. But such
talk is oftentimes rendered futile by lack of available information to feast on. In addition,
since gossip only affects people’s behaviour through their tacit approval and participa-
tion, those who only visit stores to buy goods, rarely linger in them and do not engage
in gossip are the ones mostly unaffected by them. They were also the ones who would
make use of the formal instrument of the law like bringing cases to the local court rather
than make use of the informal mechanism that staying in stores affords. Claire is a good
example of this. When a neighbour refused to return her a borrowed item, she sought
the intervention of the district leader by hauling the culprit to a formal meeting. Unlike
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 385

many others, she did not resort to gossiping in stores, or elsewhere, to relay indirectly
her message to the person in question. She clearly did not see gossiping as a powerful
social instrument worthy of her time and effort. Some on the other hand would remain
indifferent to what they heard about themselves in stores and would assert that talks in
stores were the preoccupation of the unlettered, the unruly and the undisciplined
members of society, undermining the disciplinary power of gossip on people.

Discussion

Sari-sari stores are not the only platforms for surveillance of people in the community.
There are other instruments as well, formal and informal. For example, aside from
informal family and clan meetings where problems are solved among members, the
community council provides a venue in which people in the community can lodge
complaints against others. Here, cases are heard and decided. If community issues are
not solved on this level, people in the community make use of the municipal court.
Other ways of surveying people are less noticeable and as every local knows, educa-
tional and religious institutions are venues for this. Thus, sari-sari stores are part of a
wider network of surveillance structures that make up what Foucault calls a dispositif,
‘a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philo-
sophical, moral and philantrophic propositions – in short, the said as much as the
unsaid’ (1980: 194). It should be made clear then that sari-sari stores are just a part of
a much more expansive and comprehensive cache of instruments that make and
unmake people into subjectified individuals in any given socio-temporal space.
Sari-sari stores are not designed as such for the transmission of social affordances
such as the management of daily life in the community. They do not constitute a
deliberate architectural and spatial platform from which people spy and report on each
other’s activities. They are not built for surveillance purposes. There is therefore no
group of people, or bureaucrats lurking in some far away offices in the city or the town
hall collecting data and managing the affairs of how people socialize in sari-sari stores
and exchange information about themselves, their neighbours and the rest of the
community. Thus, when people visit sari-sari stores, there is no intention to spy on one
another. But as shown, sari-sari stores are not just for economic ends, they have other
purposes as well. Their meaning and value to people in the community are not complete
and are always in the process of negotiation and contestation. As Kolb cogently argues:

A building’s reality involves more than its physical materials; its use is part of its being. A
building is not fully definite and meaningful until it is enmeshed in networks of activities, but
it is also true that networks of meaning and activity are not fully definite until they are
anchored in space and architecture (2011: 159).

In some ways, as we grapple with modernity, hypermobility and the era of ubiqui-
tous mass media and how they fashion us into ideal malleable consumerist and hedo-
nistic subjects, we lose sight of how some ordinary and everyday spatial structures in
peripheral places can tell us many things about the politics of everyday life on the
ground, where people could initiate surveillance and create among themselves an
informal mechanism of social control. In many ways, this attests to the observation
made by Lyon (2003) ‘that as much as surveillance mediates the relations that shape
social life, techniques of surveillance are also socially shaped’ (Molz, 2006: 379). As a
community where the people are at the losing end of the global power-geometry
386 Nelson Turgo

(Massey, 1993) and at the periphery of technological super hi-way where monitoring of
members are left to the members themselves, people staying in stores to observe life on
the street and exchange information about themselves and other people create a built-in
social mechanism that assists the state in its function of disciplining subjects. Observing
people from stores and narrating their everyday life provide the people in the commu-
nity an avenue for a ritualistic ‘correcting’ of wrong and narrating ways to solidify the
community’s moral foundation. Furthermore, they thus come to police (albeit in pro-
tracted ways) their own behaviour and penalize their own perpetual failure (Bell, 2006:
291).
At the heart of the social affordances of sari-sari stores to monitor happenings in the
community is the sense of how people make sense of their membership in the com-
munity as an ever-evolving group that shares the same geographical and social space
and yet with varying interests and logics of living. As the community had to face one of
its worst economic crises in decades, its effects on the social fabric of the community was
evident. There was a rise in cases of burglary; families were rendered asunder; more
women were reported to suffer from domestic violence and men were driven to alcohol
abuse to assuage the pain of diminished masculinity due to decreased income or being
jobless for a long time. Sari-sari stores then, in many ways, as they perform their
surveillance function, contribute to the maintenance of the community’s social equi-
librium. When people are seen and talked about in stores for their bad habits, they are
in effect being castigated and shamed. For example, those who were talked about as too
dependent on the kindness of other people for survival, those who refuse to work, those
who get drunk too much, among others, were chastised and called names, taken to task
for shaming the community.
However, as the power of surveillance of sari-sari stores is myoptic, social control is
also very much a work in progress as much as people in the community continue to face
everyday life with new sets of challenges and therefore, new ways of coping. While
there seemed to be a continued surveillance of people in sari-sari stores, and talks
continued to be churned out in their premises, people also continue to act out their lives
and in the process, in their quest to survive the hard times, had to commit themselves
again and again to unpalatable practices. As gossiping involves a power struggle
(Galasinska, 2010: 948), this power struggle cannot be disassociated from the commu-
nity’s economic survival, one of the pressing issues in the community (Turgo, 2010). A
misdemeanor corrected weeks ago might play out again in pursuit of, for example,
monetary gains. A fishmonger for instance was admonished behind her back for cut-
throat pricing of fish. When she got wind of it, visibly affected, she mended her ways
and followed the common pricing scheme practised by her fellow fish vendors. Days
before I left the field, she reverted to selling fish at a much lower price again, edging out
competition from others. People in the community started talking about her again in
stores, in increased crescendo and with harsher commentaries. This development shows
the temporal social control present in the community. It is of interest therefore to know
that while some people commit themselves to panoptic performativity (Perryman,
2006) to evade being subjected to constant surveillance, others would continue to
contravene social norms irrespective of the results of their actions.
The importance of highlighting the provision made by sari-sari stores in creating a
network of social space where people enact their spatial practices also points to the role
of women as active players in community affairs. While men in the community also
linger in stores in limited and measured instances, women dominate the seeing and
talking in stores. To say then that women in the community are the purveyors of
Sari-sari stores as nodes of partial surveillance 387

surveillance is not to overstate the case. But being purveyors, I also would like to
underline their role in shaping the contours of the community, its social and cultural
spheres, as people enact their everyday choices of living. When women practise sur-
veillance in stores, they unwittingly contribute to the shaping of a mechanism that set
rules of good conduct for people in the community to follow. When men drink too
much to the detriment of their families and children, when people refuse to commit
themselves to a decent job, when some people fail to return borrowed items or money
on time, more women than men gossip about them, and in effect, women robustly
contribute to both symbolic (Cohen, 1998) and material construction of the community.

Conclusion

Sari-sari stores offer us a rich cache of images and ideas to explain the complexities of
everyday life in a contemporary setting. They provide us with a view on the myoptic
functioning of surveillance and disciplining of subjects, which is far from and unen-
cumbered by the juridical intervention of the nation-state. Among others, their provi-
sion of a spatial network of surveillance helps us understand how people make sense of
their built environment. The function of sari-sari stores to gaze at people and provide a
network of spaces where information about the community and its people could flow
freely – though uneven, highly contested and limited – highlights how strategic archi-
tectural decisions about built form and spatial organization may have social conse-
quences (Hillier & Hanson, 1988: ix; see also Bunnell, 1999). This article therefore
provides another (that is, spatial and social, rather than economic) perspective on
sari-sari stores and expands upon previous academic literature on sari-sari stores in the
Philippines specifically, and in developing economies, in general, by looking at their
sociological function concerning community life, that is, ‘how they fulfill less explicit,
yet distinct, roles in the social functioning of places’ (Coen et al., 2008: 330).
Sari-sari stores in other locations, or other structures for that matter, might have a
different impact upon the lives of people. The presence of other structures (like civic
halls) or practices that look after the norms and values that the community holds dear
might preclude the importance of stores in the observance of daily life and control of
people. Similar architecture in similar locations may have very different impacts
depending upon people’s communication, social and transportation network connec-
tions and the forms of life they enable (Kolb, 2011: 158–59). As Giddens once noted,
everyday surveillance is ‘endemic to modern societies’ (1985: 14) and as shown in the
fishing community in Banaag, this surveillance comes in its distinct form: myoptic,
highly uncertain and influenced by the people’s social relations with one another,
individual predisposition and the available spatial architectonics that the fishing com-
munity has evolved through the years.
The surveillance of subjects – of ourselves by ourselves and by others – will never
end and in fact, by all measure, will intensify in the years to come with the invention
of more invasive technologies that record and track down everyone’s life on and off the
public sphere. Thus, it is no wonder that in the latest technological discourse concerning
the politics of online memory, people anxious of their performative life on the internet
(confessions on blogs, posts on Facebook, etc.) are calling for their right to obliterate
their cyber past. Thus, this contemporary complexity and the placed-based logics of
spatial practices as evinced by the case of surveillance in sari-sari stores and the people
who make use of them compel us to move beyond the metaphors of panopticon (and
synopticon) to capture the utter profundity of social life. The case of the fishing
388 Nelson Turgo

community presents us with a group of people whose mode of surveillance and disci-
plinary regime does not typify the kind of Foucault’s panopticon (or Mathiesen’s
synopticon, for that matter). The people in the community and their uses of sari-sari
stores are a product of the local logics of their spatial and temporal enrolment, and of
their entrapment in their own time-space envelope (Hudson, 2001). This then encour-
ages us to engage, in the words of Donna Haraway (1985), in a faithful blasphemy of the
‘Master’ (Rofel, 1997). By looking beyond panopticon and yet constantly remembering
how it could help us move forward, the complexities of everyday life in peripheral
geographies, like the fishing community studied, will be unravelled to us in the most
arresting ways and the kind of social dynamics that the built environment presents to us
could then be viewed, or maybe gazed at, in a different light.

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