Abstract This article considers how concerns about trust in global health infrastructures—and the surveillance tools they justify—emerge from suspicions anchored in imaginaries of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’. Amid anxieties about corruption in global health circles, I consider how debates about providing per diems to African participants in international projects are articulated in racial terms. Drawing on examples from Malawi, I analyse the top-down push to make such disbursements more transparent via mobile money. Troubling celebratory framings of this technology, I demonstrate how a tool meant to increase transparency instead gives rise to mistrust and strained relations by casting African partners as suspects. While much of the scholarship on trust probes its interpersonal dimensions, this article addresses how bureaucratic infrastructures are constituted by assumptions about whom or what can be trusted. The impersonal and technical characteristics of transparency tools common to global health obscures their underpinning colonial and racial logics.
{"title":"When partners are suspect(s)","authors":"Cal Biruk","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410205","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article considers how concerns about trust in global health infrastructures—and the surveillance tools they justify—emerge from suspicions anchored in imaginaries of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’. Amid anxieties about corruption in global health circles, I consider how debates about providing per diems to African participants in international projects are articulated in racial terms. Drawing on examples from Malawi, I analyse the top-down push to make such disbursements more transparent via mobile money. Troubling celebratory framings of this technology, I demonstrate how a tool meant to increase transparency instead gives rise to mistrust and strained relations by casting African partners as suspects. While much of the scholarship on trust probes its interpersonal dimensions, this article addresses how bureaucratic infrastructures are constituted by assumptions about whom or what can be trusted. The impersonal and technical characteristics of transparency tools common to global health obscures their underpinning colonial and racial logics.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract What is the relationship between life and trust? This article traces how trust is cultivated at Al Ma'wa, a wild animal sanctuary in northern Jordan, where dozens of animals rescued from regional warzone zoos are rehabilitated. At Al Ma'wa, trust is vital , in the sense that it is inextricably linked to what it means for the animals to live a good, ‘natural’, and fully animal life. Yet this vital trust is also bound up in the material conditions of the animals’ enduring captivity, which is said to foster feelings of security and comfort for them. I argue that vital trust upends normative associations between trust and freedom while also exposing how refuge produces differential meanings of trust, care, and life for animals and humans.
{"title":"Refuge","authors":"Kate McClellan","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410203","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What is the relationship between life and trust? This article traces how trust is cultivated at Al Ma'wa, a wild animal sanctuary in northern Jordan, where dozens of animals rescued from regional warzone zoos are rehabilitated. At Al Ma'wa, trust is vital , in the sense that it is inextricably linked to what it means for the animals to live a good, ‘natural’, and fully animal life. Yet this vital trust is also bound up in the material conditions of the animals’ enduring captivity, which is said to foster feelings of security and comfort for them. I argue that vital trust upends normative associations between trust and freedom while also exposing how refuge produces differential meanings of trust, care, and life for animals and humans.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract What is trust to a mining company? This article interrogates the effects of conceptualising trust as essential infrastructure for large-scale extractive operations. Although sentiments like trust are typically imagined to fall outside the firm's purview, mining companies actively blur distinctions between economic-material and social-emotional realms when they draw on intimate social forms like kin networks and communal authority to mould trust into an expendable factor of mineral production. But rather than transforming trust into a discrete, predictable input, firms have unexpectedly manufactured its opposite: desconfianza , or distrust. My study shows how residents affected by mining navigate this distrust by attempting to construct clear boundaries between themselves and the mine. In the process, they reveal the unruly sentiments underlying the operations of extractive capitalism.
{"title":"Trust as affective infrastructure","authors":"Adela Zhang","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410206","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What is trust to a mining company? This article interrogates the effects of conceptualising trust as essential infrastructure for large-scale extractive operations. Although sentiments like trust are typically imagined to fall outside the firm's purview, mining companies actively blur distinctions between economic-material and social-emotional realms when they draw on intimate social forms like kin networks and communal authority to mould trust into an expendable factor of mineral production. But rather than transforming trust into a discrete, predictable input, firms have unexpectedly manufactured its opposite: desconfianza , or distrust. My study shows how residents affected by mining navigate this distrust by attempting to construct clear boundaries between themselves and the mine. In the process, they reveal the unruly sentiments underlying the operations of extractive capitalism.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Digital technologies used to make pharmaceuticals trustworthy promise to displace historical relations, offering instead transparency through data. This article draws from research with manufacturers, importers, and distributors moving medicines between factories and markets to explore trust-making and trustworthiness in pharmaceutical sales. It shows how practices of selling and regulating pharmaceuticals rely on narratives and technologies of safety, risk, trust, and essentialised notions of industrial origin. Following the medicines shows how, rather than displacing social knowledge with data, technologies of trust rely on situated knowledge of institutions and social relations that are the source of both trust and suspicion. Ultimately, both narratives and pharmaceuticals are stabilised through notions of trust as linked to identity in ways that implicate ethnographic as well as industrial practices.
{"title":"Essentialising medicines","authors":"Ramah McKay","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410207","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Digital technologies used to make pharmaceuticals trustworthy promise to displace historical relations, offering instead transparency through data. This article draws from research with manufacturers, importers, and distributors moving medicines between factories and markets to explore trust-making and trustworthiness in pharmaceutical sales. It shows how practices of selling and regulating pharmaceuticals rely on narratives and technologies of safety, risk, trust, and essentialised notions of industrial origin. Following the medicines shows how, rather than displacing social knowledge with data, technologies of trust rely on situated knowledge of institutions and social relations that are the source of both trust and suspicion. Ultimately, both narratives and pharmaceuticals are stabilised through notions of trust as linked to identity in ways that implicate ethnographic as well as industrial practices.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract What is trust, and how is it established in humanitarian operations? Why do humanitarians consider trust a vital resource in their work? Building on the International Committee of the Red Cross’ response to urban violence and the anthropological literature that conceives trust both as a modern social virtue and a technology of power, I examine the ways in which trust is enacted and practiced in humanitarian settings. While the organisation's legalistic logic has traditionally led to a conceptualisation of trust as the end result of a ‘moral contract’ rooted in the Geneva Conventions and operationalised through ‘confidential dialogue’ and face-to-face interactions, more recent concerns for accountability have surprisingly led to the establishment of technocratic procedures where trustworthiness is achieved through the emptying out of social relations.
{"title":"Humanitarian technologies of trust","authors":"Julie Billaud","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410204","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What is trust, and how is it established in humanitarian operations? Why do humanitarians consider trust a vital resource in their work? Building on the International Committee of the Red Cross’ response to urban violence and the anthropological literature that conceives trust both as a modern social virtue and a technology of power, I examine the ways in which trust is enacted and practiced in humanitarian settings. While the organisation's legalistic logic has traditionally led to a conceptualisation of trust as the end result of a ‘moral contract’ rooted in the Geneva Conventions and operationalised through ‘confidential dialogue’ and face-to-face interactions, more recent concerns for accountability have surprisingly led to the establishment of technocratic procedures where trustworthiness is achieved through the emptying out of social relations.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relations between captivity and trust, and a renewed awareness of how mistrust shapes expectations when promises are evanescent and interests difficult to discern.
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"Andrea Ballestero","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410208","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relations between captivity and trust, and a renewed awareness of how mistrust shapes expectations when promises are evanescent and interests difficult to discern.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As growing numbers of migrants wait in Morocco to continue their journeys northwards, the social consequences of this time spent ‘en route’ should be further considered. This time spent waiting fosters new claims to belonging and political identity as would-be migrants to Europe become immigrants to Morocco. This article recounts ethnographically how forms of community emerge amongst im/migrants in Tangier through forms of shared difference and labours. In these borderlands, immigrants use terms such as ‘making boza’ and ‘crossing al-barzakh’ to describe the temporal stance of waiting. In Islam, al-barzakh refers to the firmament separating life and death. This article brings these concepts into discussion with anthropological conceptualisations of liminality to query how forms of being-in-common emerge alongside promises of inclusion and threats of exclusion.
{"title":"Doing Barzakh, Making Boza","authors":"A. G. Bajalia","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410103","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000As growing numbers of migrants wait in Morocco to continue their journeys northwards, the social consequences of this time spent ‘en route’ should be further considered. This time spent waiting fosters new claims to belonging and political identity as would-be migrants to Europe become immigrants to Morocco. This article recounts ethnographically how forms of community emerge amongst im/migrants in Tangier through forms of shared difference and labours. In these borderlands, immigrants use terms such as ‘making boza’ and ‘crossing al-barzakh’ to describe the temporal stance of waiting. In Islam, al-barzakh refers to the firmament separating life and death. This article brings these concepts into discussion with anthropological conceptualisations of liminality to query how forms of being-in-common emerge alongside promises of inclusion and threats of exclusion.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49547955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gracias a Dios, an urban informal settlement in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, this article examines the mechanisms by which investments in Sandinista partisan politics are reproduced even as promises of redistribution made by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front are chronically deferred. Populist governance emerges as the administration of aspirations in the gap between the populist promise and its failure. The residents of Gracias a Dios, who are presumed to be invested in Sandinista politics either by ideological interpellation or pragmatic self-interest, are revealed to be neither deceived nor blindly hopeful. This article argues that the populist promise opens an ambivalent space that animates aspirations and preserves possibility even when experience suggests otherwise. The regime's capacity to foster possibility in lieu of probability is dependent on punctuating everyday life with irregularly timed interventions and on transforming partisan belonging into a stopgap between promise and outcome.
本文利用在尼加拉瓜太平洋地区的城市非正式定居点Gracias a Dios进行的人种学田野调查,研究了桑地诺党派政治投资被复制的机制,尽管执政的桑地诺民族解放阵线(Sandinista National Liberation Front)做出的再分配承诺长期被推迟。民粹主义治理是在民粹主义承诺与失败之间的鸿沟中出现的一种抱负管理。格雷西亚斯-迪奥斯的居民被认为是通过意识形态的质疑或务实的自身利益而投资于桑地诺的政治,但他们既没有被欺骗,也没有盲目地抱有希望。本文认为,民粹主义的承诺打开了一个矛盾的空间,激发了人们的愿望,并保留了可能性,即使经验表明并非如此。这个政权培育可能性而非概率的能力,依赖于用不定期的干预来打断日常生活,以及将党派归属转变为承诺与结果之间的权宜之计。
{"title":"Subjects of Aspirations","authors":"Luciana Chamorro","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410104","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gracias a Dios, an urban informal settlement in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, this article examines the mechanisms by which investments in Sandinista partisan politics are reproduced even as promises of redistribution made by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front are chronically deferred. Populist governance emerges as the administration of aspirations in the gap between the populist promise and its failure. The residents of Gracias a Dios, who are presumed to be invested in Sandinista politics either by ideological interpellation or pragmatic self-interest, are revealed to be neither deceived nor blindly hopeful. This article argues that the populist promise opens an ambivalent space that animates aspirations and preserves possibility even when experience suggests otherwise. The regime's capacity to foster possibility in lieu of probability is dependent on punctuating everyday life with irregularly timed interventions and on transforming partisan belonging into a stopgap between promise and outcome.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69570050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Bharatiya Janata Party won the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, popularising the slogan ‘Achhe din aane wale hai’ (‘Good days are coming’). Even as the good days remained elusive, in 2019, the party won the popular vote again, with an additional promise of culling out putative ‘infiltrators’ from India by announcing ‘NRC aane wala hai’ (‘NRC is coming’). Drawing on ethnographic research carried out between 2016 and 2019 in a largely Muslim working-class neighbourhood next to one of Asia's largest garbage dumps in Mumbai, this article attempts to grasp the force of the state through its affective deferral by examining this aane wala hai form of governance – the forever-deferred, the always-arriving, the ready-to-strike – that is predicated upon weaponising deferral into a tactic of governance.
{"title":"Aane Wala Hai","authors":"Syantani Chatterjee","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410105","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Bharatiya Janata Party won the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, popularising the slogan ‘Achhe din aane wale hai’ (‘Good days are coming’). Even as the good days remained elusive, in 2019, the party won the popular vote again, with an additional promise of culling out putative ‘infiltrators’ from India by announcing ‘NRC aane wala hai’ (‘NRC is coming’). Drawing on ethnographic research carried out between 2016 and 2019 in a largely Muslim working-class neighbourhood next to one of Asia's largest garbage dumps in Mumbai, this article attempts to grasp the force of the state through its affective deferral by examining this aane wala hai form of governance – the forever-deferred, the always-arriving, the ready-to-strike – that is predicated upon weaponising deferral into a tactic of governance.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44290126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Inspired by key concerns of this collective project, this afterword article highlights two main aspects in the discussion of governance through suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of ‘indeterminacy’ (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become, soliciting analyses of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect relates to the politics of punctuated time in light of changes happening in our current culture of temporality. These two aspects integrate my interest in rethinking the classic concept of the (sovereign) decision conceived as separation from towards that of incision as cut through , particularly in light of rising expressions of authoritarian populism, globally, across regimes.
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"Maria José de Abreu","doi":"10.3167/cja.2023.410107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410107","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Inspired by key concerns of this collective project, this afterword article highlights two main aspects in the discussion of governance through suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of ‘indeterminacy’ (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become, soliciting analyses of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect relates to the politics of punctuated time in light of changes happening in our current culture of temporality. These two aspects integrate my interest in rethinking the classic concept of the (sovereign) decision conceived as separation from towards that of incision as cut through , particularly in light of rising expressions of authoritarian populism, globally, across regimes.","PeriodicalId":44700,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135076311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}