Speaking of Trust - by Teodor Zidaru (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores how religion informs acts of trust in Kenyan mutual aid arrangements.

Book Synopsis

This open access book examines the often overlooked entanglements and affinities between emerging models of formal and informal finance and welfare with longer-running religious structures and concerns.

Since independence in 1963, Kenya has seen the steady growth of mutual aid arrangements; a practice which creatively combines market logic with redistributive politics and older forms of reciprocity and solidarity. As a means to providing welfare and pursuing joint economic activity, mutual aid has flourished - despite the failures of neoliberal statecraft, and deepening asymmetries of power and wealth between and within different ethnic groups - and has been largely built up using a language of religious faith.

Observing that many aspects of Christian and indigenous religious life play an integral part in shaping how Kenyans save, lend, distribute, fundraise, and entrust money and value in collective arrangements, Speaking of Trust illuminates and analyses the complex and innovative ways in which Kenyans are reimagining and renegotiating the terms of interdependence across social divides.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

Review Quotes

"Microfinance thrives on trust, but what is trust? The Ekegusii- and Kiswahili-speakers of Southwest Kenya become here our guides to the question that has vexed generations of academic theorists. The nuances of Christian faith, speech genres, gender and age fill these pages, recasting afresh contract and mutuality." --Harri Englund, University of Cambridge, UK

"Kenya has often been represented as a real-life laboratory where financial corporations conduct experiments in financial inclusion. Zidaru's compelling account complicates this trend and brings together themes often considered separately-trust, religion, kinship, gender-to give much-needed insights into ordinary Kenyans' own experiments in mutual help." --Deborah James, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

"An outstanding contribution. Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Kenyan community, it explores how trust, and the breakdown of trust, are talked about and acted on in everyday situations of debt, credit, savings and mutual assistance. It is sensitive to local nuance, ambitious in its theoretical reach, and altogether a pleasure to read." --Karin Barber, University of Birmingham, UK

About the Author

Teodor Zidaru was an Economic and Social Research Council PhD student and is now an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, LSE, UK. He carried out fieldwork on religion and economy in southwest Kenya. His thesis documented the role of narratives about trust and faith in coordinating and negotiating mutual aid.