Trust: A question of belief

[ This is an on-line seminar; please register on Zoom and read the paper in advance of the event.]

This essay is based on one I published over three decades ago in a collection on trust (Gambetta 1988). It was an ethnographic analysis of 1960s fieldwork done in the slums of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. My original article had three sections. The first was empirical, which I have greatly reduced here. I address there how durable economic relations could be sustained in an urban environment that was marginal to both traditional and modern society. I illustrate with examples the tenor of commercial life and petty enterprise in Nima. I do not highlight trust at first. Only in the third section do I turn to what we may call the philosophy of trust. I focus there on migrants’ attempts to build viable enterprise. An intermediate section bridges the empirical and theoretical parts by exploring the semantics of trust and the set of terms to which it belongs. Anthropology is philosophy with real life examples. I offer here some reflections on what I have since learned, but first a few empirical observations.