Living with Distrust

Radu Umbres is an anthropologist fusing ethnographic research with cognitive approaches to morality, cooperation, and communication. He studied Sociology at the University of Bucharest and the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD in Anthropology at University College London after two years of fieldwork in a Romanian village. After postdoctoral fellowships at Institut Jean Nicod, Paris and New Europe College, he currently teaches at National School of Political and Administrative Studies Bucharest. His recent work focuses on apparently-irrational cultural imitation in cargo cults, the mechanisms of social initiation by pranking, and revisiting other classical themes in anthropology from a cognitive perspective.

Prologue: Ripping the collective apart
Introduction to Sateni

Chapter 1: The Deep Play of Tavern Distrust
1.1 Reputation and vigilance in dramaturgical tournaments
1.2 Cues and inferences in selective social intercourse
1.3 Exploitation and generosity
1.5 Domination as proven reputation
1.6 Luck and agency
1.7 The importance of vigilant minds
1.8 Society as competition

Chapter 2: The Houses of Trust, the Fences of Distrust
2.1 The ecology and ideology of a domestic mode of production
2.2 Autarchy as safe atomisation
2.3 Domestic survival against authoritarian collectivism
2.4 Conspiratorial flexibility and opportunistic collaborationism
2.5 Keeping evil away from home
2.6 Whitewashed reputations and imaginative suspicions
2.7 The household as family coordination and interdependence
2.8 A society of households

Chapter 3: Making and Unmaking Kinship
Part I. "Brother-brother, but cheese costs money"
3.1 Sibling equity and fair marriages
3.2 The many problems of dividing property between relatives
3.3 Rituals of kin separation and creation
3.4 Moral readjustments in the domestic cycle of reproduction
3.5 Partner choice in "holding" and "not holding on to kin"
Part II: Adapting relatedness to fairness
3.6 Changing families, changing weddings
3.7 Calling out and keeping kinship accounts
3.8 Choosing relatives by moral obligations
3.9 A fair replacement for blood
3.10 The importance of being kin

Chapter 4: Death and the Regeneration of Trust
4.1 Being there: the morality of reckoning death
4.2 Death and final reputations
4.3 Funeral symbols of mutuality
4.4 The society of the dead
4.5 The drama of private graves...
4.6 ...and the tragedy of the common graveyard
4.7 The life and death of trust

Chapter 5: The Political Stability of Social Fragmentation
5.1 The making of a political entrepreneur
5.2 Ritual politics and political transactions
5.3 Smart thieves and political idiots
5.4 Local governance as patrimony
5.5 Plus ça change...
5.6 ...plus c'est la même chose
5.7 The moral reproduction of political markets

Chapter 6: Changes in the construction of trust
6.1 The hurdles of economic distrust
6.2 The road to entrepreneurship
6.3 Pricing old trust for new houses
6.4 Fairness between the short-term and the long-term
6.5 Creating trust under social and technological uncertainty
6.6 Cheaters and superpartners
6.7 The ethical fashioning of entrepreneurial self
6.8 Moral inclinations and moral environments

Chapter 7: To trust or not to trust
7.1 Living in a culture of distrust
7.2 The weight of history
7.3 The flexibility of personalized trust
7.4 The future of cooperation and morality
7.3 The reasons of distrust

Notes
References