Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This issue of CJA—Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust—is guest edited by Anna Weichselbraun, Shaila Seshia Galvin and Ramah McKay, and features articles by Kate McClellan, Julie Billaud, Cal Biruk, Adela Zhang and Ramah McKay, plus an Afterword by Andrea Ballestero.

What do we mean when we talk about trust? Contemporary discourses figure trust variously as a problem, an aspiration, an object of intervention, and something to be dispensed with all together. While the current moment demands new ways of thinking about trust, so too does scholarly work on trust demand similar renewal and reconsideration. To accomplish this, we depart from approaches that engage trust as a diagnostic for analysing other phenomena or objects of study, often with an emphasis on its instrumental importance. Our special issue instead approaches trust as something that itself needs to be problematised. The individual articles demonstrate the theoretical and methodological possibilities afforded through ethnographic study of the practices, technologies, and infrastructures that are often claimed as necessary to produce or sustain it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 440 pp., 1986.

Rosemary Harris, Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster: A Study of Neighbours and ‘Strangers’ in a Border Community. Manchester: University Press, 234 pp., 1972.

Allan D. Coult, Psychedelic Anthropology: The Study of Man Through the Manifestation of the Mind. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 296 pp., 1977.

Eirini Papadaki, The Politics of Kinship: Adoption in Contemporary Greece. Athens: Alexandria Publications, 196 pp, 2021.

Christos Lynteris, Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2022. 322 pp., 6 × 9 in, 44 figures.