Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya

Anthro Talks Seminars Autumn 2024

Speaker: Teodor Zidaru, London School of Economics

In Kenya, mutual aid has long mediated contractual forms of trust and mistrust. It underwrites microcredit contracts as well as popular understandings of the social contract. Under the purview state and market institutions, it enables top-down extraction as well as grassroots exclusion. Nevertheless, diverse mutual aid arrangements have thrived and proliferated. People do find help – from peers and friends as well as patrons and wealthier or older kin – to make a debt repayment deadline or pay school and university fees, medical bills, funerary costs, or church construction costs. Drawing on fieldwork in Gusii Seventh Day Adventist and Catholic communities, this paper argues that religion plays a key part in the proliferation and diversification of mutual aid arrangements. Participants recognise the presence of God and other invisible beings as third parties to interpersonal cooperation. Some of the forms of trust and mistrust that arise as a result are contractual; others are mutual; and yet others blur the boundaries between contract and mutuality. Together, they highlight how speaking of and negotiating trust in a language of religious faith naturalizes pre-existing moral prejudices while sustaining possibilities for contingency, creativity, and change.