Description
Book Synopsis Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.
Trade Review “This is a great book and one which I found to be immeasurably valuable. It is an extremely rich, ethnographically grounded, and carefully theorized set of accounts which will be an important springboard for anthropologists and others to take up and pursue in their own work.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)
“The book is a great contribution to the comparative studies of trust in various cultural con- texts as well as to the ethnography of trusting with emphasis on moral aspects of such actions. It describes various situations in complex realms of life which affect trust. The approaches discussed give a new perspective on trust in the social and cultural contexts.” • Anthropos
“…an important contribution to deepen reflection on the nature and function of trust in society”. • Studia Nauk Teologicznych
“The ethnographies in Trusting and its Tribulations are particularly effective in challenging conventional Western assumptions about trust, especially the supposed relationship between trust, intimacy/kinship, and equality. They demonstrate firmly what anthropology can add to the description and theory of trust and why anthropology’s voice is essential on this subject as on all practical contemporary social topics.” • Anthropology Review Database
“This impressive volume stands as a powerful corrective to latent ethnocentric tendencies lying at the heart of much contemporary scholarship on the nature of trust… Instead of identifying trust with the intimacies of family life, or attributing it to the conscious calculations of risk-averse individuals, this manuscript reveals the importance of approaching trust as something performed.” • Sharon Hutchinson, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Table of Contents Preface
Introduction: Introducing Ethnographies of Trusting
Vigdis Broch-Due and Margit Ystanes
Chapter 1. Unfixed trust: Intimacy, blood symbolism, and porous boundaries in Guatemala
Margit Ystanes
Chapter 2. Witchcraft: the Dangers of Intimacy and the Struggle over Trust
Peter Geschiere
Chapter 3. Trusting the untrustworthy: a Mongolian challenge to Western notions of trust
Paula Haas
Chapter 4. The Puzzle of the Animal Witch: Intimacy, Trust and Sociality among Pastoral Turkana
Vigdis Broch-Due
Chapter 5. ‘Sharing secrets’: Gendered landscapes of trust and intimacy in Kenya’s digital financial marketplace
Misha Mintz-Roth and Amrik Heyer
Chapter 6. Eddies of distrust: ‘False’ birth certificates and the destabilisation of relationships
Jennifer M Speirs
Chapter 7. Intimate documents: trust and secret police files in post-socialist Mongolia
Chris Kaplonski
Chapter 8. Trustworthy Bodies: Cashinahua Cumulative Persons as Intimate Others
Cecilia McCallum
Chapter 9. Habitus of Trust: Servitude in Colonial India
Radhika Chopra
Chapter 10. ‘You Can Tell the Company We Done Quit’: The Destruction and Reconfiguration of Trust in the Appalachian Coalfields in the Early Twentieth Century
Gloria Goodwin Raheja
