Description
People in the Romanian village of Sateni distrust each other so much, that they would rather take a building apart than share it. Satenis think of life as struggle for scarce resources--a struggle that can lead to deception, exploitation, or predation. Cooperation with unrelated or unfamiliar partners fails while distrust permeates everyday life and cultural representations. Yet, each person engages in profound relationships with a particular set of people, expressed in cooperative actions. Living in Distrust makes sense of this worldview-one divided between strong moral relationships and deep suspicion towards the rest of the village society-through an ethnography of distrust.Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Radu Umbres offers an interdisciplinary interpretation of social interactions in a low trust society. This cognitive ethnography argues that the costs of misplaced trust made Sateni restrict their cooperative behavior to a safe set of social relationships: family, kinship, and friendship ties. Umbres explains how mutual trust appears by social agreement around culturally-codified institutions and persists only by fair cooperative interactions. Despite scarce representations or investments in the common good, the village society reproduces its low-level equilibrium of cooperation in relative stability. In an exploration of the structural influences on community morality and a defense of distrust, the book also demonstrates how investing trust in family first is an optimal strategy against ecological or political risks.By highlighting a system of dual morality sharply distinct from the Western-liberal ethos, Living with Distrust addresses perennial moral dilemmas and essential questions of secrecy and honesty, distrust and reputation.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Ripping the collective apart Introduction to SateniChapter 1: The Deep Play of Tavern Distrust1.1 Reputation and vigilance in dramaturgical tournaments1.2 Cues and inferences in selective social intercourse1.3 Exploitation and generosity1.5 Domination as proven reputation1.6 Luck and agency1.7 The importance of vigilant minds1.8 Society as competitionChapter 2: The Houses of Trust, the Fences of Distrust2.1 The ecology and ideology of a domestic mode of production2.2 Autarchy as safe atomisation2.3 Domestic survival against authoritarian collectivism2.4 Conspiratorial flexibility and opportunistic collaborationism2.5 Keeping evil away from home2.6 Whitewashed reputations and imaginative suspicions2.7 The household as family coordination and interdependence2.8 A society of householdsChapter 3: Making and Unmaking KinshipPart I. "Brother-brother, but cheese costs money" 3.1 Sibling equity and fair marriages3.2 The many problems of dividing property between relatives3.3 Rituals of kin separation and creation3.4 Moral readjustments in the domestic cycle of reproduction3.5 Partner choice in "holding" and "not holding on to kin"Part II: Adapting relatedness to fairness 3.6 Changing families, changing weddings3.7 Calling out and keeping kinship accounts3.8 Choosing relatives by moral obligations3.9 A fair replacement for blood3.10 The importance of being kinChapter 4: Death and the Regeneration of Trust4.1 Being there: the morality of reckoning death4.2 Death and final reputations4.3 Funeral symbols of mutuality4.4 The society of the dead4.5 The drama of private graves...4.6 ...and the tragedy of the common graveyard4.7 The life and death of trustChapter 5: The Political Stability of Social Fragmentation5.1 The making of a political entrepreneur5.2 Ritual politics and political transactions5.3 Smart thieves and political idiots5.4 Local governance as patrimony5.5 Plus ça change...5.6 ...plus c'est la même chose5.7 The moral reproduction of political marketsChapter 6: Changes in the construction of trust6.1 The hurdles of economic distrust6.2 The road to entrepreneurship6.3 Pricing old trust for new houses6.4 Fairness between the short-term and the long-term6.5 Creating trust under social and technological uncertainty6.6 Cheaters and superpartners6.7 The ethical fashioning of entrepreneurial self6.8 Moral inclinations and moral environmentsChapter 7: To trust or not to trust7.1 Living in a culture of distrust7.2 The weight of history7.3 The flexibility of personalized trust7.4 The future of cooperation and morality7.3 The reasons of distrustNotes References
