TY - JOUR

T1 - Episodic mistrust and selective system trust

T2 - Insights from Chinese alternative food networks

AU - Hansen, Anders Sybrandt

AU - Bunkenborg, Mikkel

AU - Sandal, Meina Jia

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2024.

PY - 2024/2/28

Y1 - 2024/2/28

N2 - This article contributes to comparative anthropological theory by analyzing the conceptual dynamics of episodic mistrust and selective system trust that emerge from ethnographic cases. Following the cue from recent studies that cast mistrust as a productive category in its own right, we explore this idea in the context of a complex modern society suffering from recurrent food safety scandals. We study how people in China allay anxieties about the food they and their dependents eat. In our cases, mistrust has no anchoring in an ideology of opacity and yet is shown to be highly socially productive as people deploy, anticipate and attempt to alleviate mistrusting attitudes. While constant mistrust may give rise to ambitions of total surveillance and control, the ethnography illustrates the benefits of episodic mistrust for actors when attempting to establish confidence in both personal relations and systems. The cases reveal the existence of selective trust in particular systems, which differs both from trust in direct personal relations and from social trust as measured in surveys. The article concludes that system trust must be qualified and conceptually disentangled from a general social trust, as selective trust in exclusive systems may allay anxieties exactly because it insulates the actor from involvement in more comprehensive systems that are seen as overly risky.

AB - This article contributes to comparative anthropological theory by analyzing the conceptual dynamics of episodic mistrust and selective system trust that emerge from ethnographic cases. Following the cue from recent studies that cast mistrust as a productive category in its own right, we explore this idea in the context of a complex modern society suffering from recurrent food safety scandals. We study how people in China allay anxieties about the food they and their dependents eat. In our cases, mistrust has no anchoring in an ideology of opacity and yet is shown to be highly socially productive as people deploy, anticipate and attempt to alleviate mistrusting attitudes. While constant mistrust may give rise to ambitions of total surveillance and control, the ethnography illustrates the benefits of episodic mistrust for actors when attempting to establish confidence in both personal relations and systems. The cases reveal the existence of selective trust in particular systems, which differs both from trust in direct personal relations and from social trust as measured in surveys. The article concludes that system trust must be qualified and conceptually disentangled from a general social trust, as selective trust in exclusive systems may allay anxieties exactly because it insulates the actor from involvement in more comprehensive systems that are seen as overly risky.

KW - alternative food networks

KW - China

KW - ethics

KW - food safety

KW - Mistrust

KW - system trust

KW - temporality

KW - trust

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186239528&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/14634996241228673

DO - 10.1177/14634996241228673

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85186239528

JO - Anthropological Theory

JF - Anthropological Theory

SN - 1463-4996

ER -