Trusting and its Tribulations

Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust

Vigdis Broch-Due, Margit Ystanes, Vigdis Broch-Due, Margit Ystanes

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Despite its immense significance and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the complex workings of trust are poorly understood and theorized. This volume explores trust and mistrust amidst locally situated scenes of sociality and intimacy. Because intimacy has often been taken for granted as the foundation of trust relations, the ethnographies presented here challenge us to think about dangerous intimacies, marked by mistrust, as well as forms of trust that cohere through non-intimate forms of sociality.

1

UNFIXED TRUST

Intimacy, Blood Symbolism and Porous Boundaries in Guatemala

Margit Ystanes

‘En la calle solo encuentra uno enemigos’ [In the street one only finds enemies], don Santiago told me in his usual soft-spoken manner, as we shared coffee and sweet bread in his kitchen. A man now in his sixties, he emphasized the importance of making sure the members of his family fulfil each other’s social needs so that they do not have to search elsewhere for friends. Thus, sitting in the most intimate and most protected space of his house, the place for nourishment, nurture and most family gatherings, he emphasized the dangers of the outside world. He told me it is necessary to shield his grandchildren from outside influence, ‘para que crezcan rectos’ [so that they will grow up to be righteous], and underlined his statement by raising his underarm so that it resembled the stem of a plant growing straight up from the ground.

Don Santiago is not the only Guatemalan to perceive the world outside the home as dangerous. Rather, his statements resonate with widespread concerns about the moral risks associated with the world beyond family and kin, as well as the possibilities of falling victims to violent crime. Luisa, a woman in her thirties, explained that she never goes anywhere by herself unless absolutely necessary, and that the fear of doing so has been engrained in her throughout her upbringing:

I was never allowed to do anything, no matter how much I begged. So I got used to living shut away [encerrada], and whenever I had to do errands outside the house it made me scared.

These examples illustrate how in Guatemala, as in other Latin-American societies, the realm of family and kin is considered one of trust, respectability and intimacy. The public realm of outsiders, on the other hand, is considered the location of mistrust, confrontation, conflict and moral risk. This conceptual boundary is often referred to as a distinction between casa [house] and calle [street], and it rests upon the assumption that close, mutually supportive relationships are more easily developed among kin. In contrast, it is considered that close relationships cultivated in the public domain may turn out to be deceptive.

However, as feminist philosophers have already argued (Baier 1986; Govier 1992), domestic intimacy and trust relationships are far from uncomplicated. Guatemalans also recognize this, for as Oscar, a man in his thirties, put it, ‘family is also a kind of prison’. On the other hand, close friendships can be cultivated outside of the family, despite the folk theory claiming the opposite. Thus, in this context, the separation between the private and public spheres is highly porous, with elements from each bleeding into the other.

In this chapter I explore the unfixed nature of trust and mistrust in intimate relationships among ladino Guatemalans – people of mixed origin who foreground the European part of their heritage and identify with national culture, while shoving the indigenous part into the background (Hale 1999, 2006; Nelson 1999; Ystanes 2011). I will critique the commonly reiterated idea that public trust is low in Latin-American societies because people locate trust mainly in the intimate sphere or in clientelistic relationships (e.g., Roniger 1985; Fukuyama 1996). Instead, I will argue that public trust is low among ladino Guatemalans because trust amongst family and kin also finds a very precarious foundation in this context; for as people enter public life they bring with them their intimate experiences of trust and mistrust, and the lessons about their social world thus produced. Hence, the formation of trust in the intimate sphere makes the basis for the formation of public trust, rather than constituting its opposite (see also Ystanes 2011).

Ladino conceptualizations of trust and mistrust that associate the former with kin and the latter with strangers draw, among other things, upon a symbolism of blood. Those who are considered most trustworthy are related by blood – this bodily substance provides the connection that bind people together as a family, and in the most intimate sense, to a house. This is not a uniquely Guatemalan conception, but is widespread in Latin America. Indeed, the Chilean expression casa de sangre [house of blood], which refers to one’s place of primary intimate relations (Han 2012: 16), articulates the connection between home and kinship very literally.

Blood is a powerful yet ambiguous symbol, evoking both good and evil within the body; life and procreation, violence and death. In Guatemala, the way blood has traditionally been associated with both kinship and ‘race’ through the notion of pureza de sangre [blood purity] connects the intimate sphere of the body and kin with public entities such as honour, status and respectability. Ever since colonization, the Euro-Guatemalan elite has thus used marital endogamy to reproduce their privilege and power – both awarded them by a social order in which ‘blood purity’, understood as ‘whiteness’, has been a prerequisite for inclusion into the upper echelons (Casaús Arzú 2007). Blood is thus not just a vehicle for intimacy, kinship and trust but also for embodied notions of superiority and inferiority, social distance and mistrust. During Guatemala’s long civil war, which ended after more than thirty years with the signing of a peace agreement in 1996, these notions took on devastating meanings as the army massacred numerous indigenous villages they considered to be allied with the insurgent guerrillas (e.g., Hale 2006; Nelson 2009). However, the disappearances of political activists and others the army considered a threat to the status quo also left deep wounds in intimate relationships. For the relatives left behind, talking and sharing information about the events was too dangerous, thus isolating each person with their grief and terror (e.g., Hale 2006). While the effects of war is not the focus of this chapter, it is important to acknowledge that the traumas produced during this period, both to individuals and the social body, are likely to have contributed to the precariousness of trust relations described here (Ystanes 2011).

However, just as the symbolism of blood is ambiguous, the formation of trust and mistrust does not follow the culturally defined schema according to which it should fall neatly into two separate spheres. Rather, people are well aware that intimacy is unruly and does not always appear in appropriate spaces or contain the idealized warmth and safety assumed. Indeed, very close friendships can be cultivated in the domain of the street, while family relationships may bring both deception and disappointment. Experiences of trust and mistrust thus weave their way into different places and relationships, connecting intimate and public domains in ways that the conceptual distinction between casa and calle does not account for. Trust and mistrust, intimacy and distance, are thus unfixed entities, which succeed and replace each other, and are never finally settled within persons, spaces or the social body.

Approaching Trust Ethnographically

While trust research is emerging as a field in its own right, this field is marked by lack of agreement as to what exactly trust is and how we can study it (e.g., Grimen 2009), or what kind of concept it is (Corsín Jiménez 2011). Indeed, the illusive character of trust can readily be observed in the tendency to define it as anything from social capital to expectations about the future, encapsulated interests or the willingness to trade, cooperate or take risk, or simply the common-sense understanding of trust may be applied.¹ No theory has established itself as dominant or paradigmatic, and the different conceptions we have do not necessarily travel well across methodological and disciplinary boundaries. This great variety of ways in which trust is conceptualized, illustrates that the phenomena we refer to when we evoke ‘trust’ analytically are manifold. The same goes for the people we work with, whose experiences and understanding of trust are shaped and moulded by the life-worlds they inhabit. The great variety of ways in which the topic of trust is approached both analytically and empirically in the chapters of this volume illustrates the difficulty of pinning down this phenomenon once and for all.

Differences between languages constitute another challenge. For example, when discussing the way he includes Spanish words and expressions in his English writings, the Dominican-American author Junot Díaz explains: ‘For a Spanish speaker confianza signifies a deep feeling of trust and a close, pseudo-familial bond. I don’t know how anyone would be capable of expressing in English that they trust someone to the extent that confianza implies’ (Gustavsson 2013: 36, my translation from Norwegian). For anthropologists as well as fiction writers, then, translating between different contexts and modes of being is a complicated task. Often we conflate the multitude of meanings words such as confianza may have for the people who use them with the significance that trust has for us. Indeed, Haas (this volume) illustrates that investigations of the local concepts we translate into trust may constitute a powerful critique of theories that do not take cultural difference into account.

Traditionally, however, the latter approach has marked trust research to a large extent. Its origins are usually traced back to Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan (1996), first published in 1651. Here the main argument is that human beings are fundamentally untrustworthy, and that it is only by entering a social contract with an absolute sovereign power that the conditions for social trust can be secured. This origin of trust research in contract philosophy brings with it a problematic way of phrasing the issues at hand; trusting subjects are very often, if not usually, conceived of as identifiable with an enquiring ‘I’, and referred to as either ‘I’ or ‘we’. This is very much in line with Hobbes’ own approach, which was to read mankind in himself; as he tried to estimate what motivated other people, he looked inside himself, and asked what he would do in similar circumstances, and why (Govier 1997: 48–49). This introspective mode of knowing exemplifies the way Western philosophers have tended not to conceive of themselves as specifically Western, but rather as representative members of mankind, making universal claims for all human beings.

Many contemporary enquiries into trust are therefore premised on the unspoken assumption that ‘I’ or ‘we’ can include all human beings. To the extent that there is comparison in trust research, it is very often centres on how much or little trust there is in different societies. Typically, it is argued that Latin America and southern Europe have very low degrees of societal trust – with trust first and foremost located within the family or in clientelistic relationships (Roniger 1985; Fukuyama 1996). In contrast, northern Europe is considered to have high degrees of both personal and societal trust (Sellerberg 1982; Miller and Listhaug 1990; Fukuyama 1996).

However, implicit in such comparisons is of course not only the idea that trust is thought about in the same way everywhere, but also that it is formed in identical ways across cultural boundaries.² This is problematic, as the types of behaviour that allow people to feel at ease in different contexts are not the same. For example, in Guatemala people consider it very important to be able to show proper respect, treat others with ritualized politeness, and conceal inappropriate behaviour – even in close relationships such as within a family. For young people, mastering this mode of behaviour is crucial for establishing confianza with their parents. And if their parents feel confianza towards them, they will be able to enjoy greater freedom of movement and less chaperoning. The idea here is not to deceive the parents, but for the youth to show that they can manage themselves in a way that makes them trustworthy – they will not harm the family reputation (Ystanes 2011).

This is in contrast to philosophers such as Baier, who argue that trust relationships built on concealment are morally rotten (1986: 255). So if we try to use dominant Western conceptions of trust to analyse non-Western societies, we very quickly end up moralizing rather than understanding the forms of sociality that produce trust in those contexts.

This brings us to another but related problem: existing theories about trust commonly reject the idea that trust can exist in hierarchical relationships. For example, O’Neill argues that trust can only exist when all have equal rights and duties (2002). Hardin, Cook and Levi (Hardin 2002, 2006; Cook et al. 2005) argue that trust can only exist in relationships between people who have encapsulated each other’s interests. That is, I have encapsulated your interests into mine simply because they are your interests. This means that trust hinges mostly on affection, and that trust outside of the intimate sphere of domestic life plays a minimal role in the formation of complex societies (Cook et al. 2005). These scholars make it very explicit that they reject the idea that trust can exist in hierarchical relationships, yet many others do so indirectly. For example the prisoner’s dilemma game is frequently applied in the study of trust (e.g., Ostrom and Walker 2003), and here all players have equal status and knowledge. As Baier argues, the prevalence of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game points to an ‘obsession with moral relations between minimally trusting, minimally trustworthy adults who are equally powerful’ (1986: 252).

Baier’s argument is that the Western academic tradition has ignored the possibility of trust in hierarchical relationships because of its origin in contractual philosophy. Here it has been taken for granted that contracts were agreements made between equal men, and people of inferior positions have not been included in the analyses (1986: 247–248). However, as she points out (ibid.: 252):

[S]laves [have been] trusted to cook for slave owners; women, with or without marriage vows, [have been ] trusted with the property of their men, trusted not to deceive them about the paternity of their children, and trusted to bring up their sons as patriarchs, their daughters as suitable wives or mistresses for patriarchs.

As is clear from the above, domestic relationships, which are usually considered to be marked by trust, both in Western societies and elsewhere, are also hierarchical (see also Baier 1992; Govier 1992). Indeed, intimacy is hierarchical, as gender and age usually ascribe different roles, rights and duties to members of a household. However, the assumptions about intimacy and sociality that are implicit in most conceptions of trust – for example, that the private sphere does not contain these complications – do not allow us to unpack the complexities that domestic trust relationships involve.

Finally, most conceptions of trust are marked by cognitivism to some degree or other (Grimen 2009). That is, they take trust to be something we make more or less conscious decisions about. This is of course particularly so in game-theoretical approaches where trust is to a large extent collapsed with the willingness to accept risk or cooperate (e.g., Ostrom and Walker 2003), and more context-oriented approaches inspired by game theory (e.g., Hardin 2002; Gambetta and Hamill 2005). Other approaches are cognitivist to lesser degrees – for example those emphasizing the kinds of characteristics that make a person trustworthy, such as competence, good will, etc. (Govier 1997; Grimen 2009). However, such approaches tend to ignore the way that experiences of trust are not simply and straightforwardly produced by the conscious evaluation of available information, but also reach deeply into human experience and life-worlds – as many of the chapters in this volume illustrate.

Daniel and Knudsen (1995a) take such insights seriously, as they consider trust to be not something we experience after careful evaluation of risk but rather what we experience when we do not think about whether or not we trust. That is, trust is defined as an ingrained, taken-for-granted, largely unconscious experience of comfortable being; something akin to what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘habitus’. This means that trust prevails in relationships, situations and contexts in which we feel comfortable, and which do not make us consciously evaluate if we are putting ourselves in harm’s way. Daniel and Knudsen’s concern is situations in which the conditions for trust break down (see Daniel and Knudsen 1995b), yet by emphasizing the role of culture and society, their approach also opens the way for a genuinely ethnographic examination of how trust is produced in actual life-worlds.

My concern here is not to demonstrate that any particular theory of trust is in operation among ladino Guatemalans, but rather to critique claims about public and private trust in Latin America that do not take the complications of the intimate sphere into account. In doing this, I will use the folk theories about what kinds of relationships confianza normally prevails in, and outline the kinds of situations and experiences that people consider to make confianza difficult or impossible. I take inspiration from Daniel and Knudsen’s (1995a) emphasis on life-worlds in the formation of trust, and from the contributions of feminist philosophers who have problematized the domest...