Trust amid “trust deficit”

Abstract

In Kashmir, traders used the term “trust deficit” both to refer to the lack of faith in the Indian state, and to the mistrust that tinged credit transactions within their own community. Although trust‐based informal credit had been undermined by political violence and mistrust, it remained the basis of capital and commodity circulation in the marketplace, challenging normative assumptions of trust as a prerequisite for credit. The concept of reflective improvidence illuminates how traders maintained economic relations amid violence and volatility by deviating from traditional practices of forecast that are commonly drawn on to determine credit transactions. Instead, the open temporal dynamic between trust and credit emerged as a site where traders transformed commercial and political relations in the flux of war and uncertain futures. Traders forged collectivities that, however tenuous, resisted the communalized narratives that sought to frame the Kashmir conflict. [violence, commerce, trust, credit, frontiers, war economy, Srinagar, Kashmir]

“The economy of trust”? Competing grassroots economics and the mobilization of (mis-)trust in a Catalonian cooperative

“…Rather than offering sweeping generalizations, anthropological works have instead shown the diverse ways in which trust and mistrust work in a variety of socio-cultural settings (Hart, 1988; Robben, 2018; Shipton, 2007). In the introduction to an edited volume on trust and mistrust, Caroline Humphrey (2018: 11) captures this approach succinctly in the following way: ‘The contributions in this book do not take part in causal theorizing about trust in the abstract, but instead address the conditions in which it exists – or fails to exist – in particular circumstances.’ These works look at how trust and mistrust emerge or do not emerge in specific settings and the emphasis is on the fact that trust and mistrust are what Aditi Saraf (2020: 397) calls tenuous outcomes rather than cultural givens.…”

“…Recent anthropological accounts of trust and mistrust move away from artificially dustinguishing (mis-)trust from a whole range of affective experiences such as friendship, solidarity, suspicion, and doubt, and instead examine how trust and mistrust arise in specific socio-cultural contexts (Galvin, 2018; Mühlfried, 2018; Saraf, 2020). In this way, trust and mistrust act as heuristics for understanding a broad range of phenomena ranging from trading in border zones to food provisioning practices (Grasseni, 2014; Humphrey, 2018).…”