Trusting and its Tribulations: Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust

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.

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

About the Author :
Vigdis Broch-Due is Professor of Social Anthropology and International Poverty Studies, University of Bergen.

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