Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations

Front Cover
Florian Mühlfried
transcript Verlag, Mar 31, 2018 - Social Science - 232 pages
Scholars have long seen trust as a foundational social good. We therefore have ample studies on building trust in free markets, on cultivating trust in the state, and on rebuilding trust through civil society. The contributors to this volume, instead, take a step back. They ask: Can mistrust ever be more than the flip side of trust, more than the sign of an absence or failure? By looking ethnographically at what a variety of actors actually do when they express mistrust, this volume offers a richly empirical trove of the social life of mistrust across a range of settings.
 

Contents

Introduction Approximating Mistrust
7
Trusting the Math and Mistrusting Humans How Politically Sensitized Engineers of Cryptographic Systems Cope with Ontological Insecurity in the D...
23
How Not to Fall in Love Mistrust in Online Romance Scams
49
When Stories Seem Fake Tacit Mistrust in Domestic Violence Counselling in South Africa
71
Intervention Essay on the Anthropology of the Fiduciary
93
Missing Trust for Surviving Confronting Complexity and the UnKnown in Makeni Northern Sierra Leone
105
Mistrust During the Ebola Epidemic in Guinea
129
Mistrusting as a Mode of Engagement in Mediation Insights from SocioLegal Practice in Rwanda
147
Intervention Doubt Suspicion Mistrust Semantic Approximations
169
Dont Trust Dont Fear Dont Beg
179
Suspicion and Mistrust in Neighbour Relations A Legacy of the Soviet Mentality?
201
Afterword Mistrust after Truth?
219
Acknowledgments
225
Authors
227
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About the author (2018)

Florian Mühlfried is a social anthropologist in the Caucasus Studies Program at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. His research interests include the state, religion, ritual, (not-)sharing and feasting.

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