Overview
Based on two years of fieldwork in a NE Romanian village, this book offers an ethnographic, interdisciplinary interpretation of social interactions in a low trust society. In Sateni, cooperation with unrelated or unfamiliar partners fails to take off while distrust permeates everyday life and cultural representations. This book argues that the costs of misplaced trust restricted Sateni moral expectations and cooperative practices to family, kinship, and friendship ties. Household autarchy and personalized morality offered an optimal strategy against political, ecological or social unpredictability. Trust appears by social agreement around cultural representations of moral behavior, persists by social interdependence, and collapses when interests misalign. Outside family-centric social relationships lies a struggle for scarce resources of land, money or prestige, with deception or predation lurking around every corner. Kinship, economy, politics, and rituals are organised around the distinction between the mutualism of trusted partners and perennial competition against the rest of the world. This ethnography analyses the intersection of ecology, history, traditions, social organisation, technology, and evolved human dispositions for cooperation and conflict which create and change a culture of distrust--
- | Author: Radu Umbres
- | Publisher: Oxford University Press
- | Publication Date: Aug 30, 2022
- | Number of Pages: 248 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 0190869909
- | ISBN-13: 9780190869908
