Living with Distrust: Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village

People in the Romanian village of Sateni distrust each other so much, that they would rather take a building apart than share it. Satenis think of life as struggle for scarce resources--a struggle that can lead to deception, exploitation, or predation. Cooperation with unrelated or unfamiliar partners fails while distrust permeates everyday life and cultural representations. Yet, each person engages in profound relationships with a particular set of people, expressed in cooperative actions. Living in Distrust makes sense of this worldview-one divided between strong moral relationships and deep suspicion towards the rest of the village society-through an ethnography of distrust.

Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Radu Umbres offers an interdisciplinary interpretation of social interactions in a low trust society. This cognitive ethnography argues that the costs of misplaced trust made Sateni restrict their cooperative behavior to a safe set of social relationships: family, kinship, and friendship ties. Umbres explains how mutual trust appears by social agreement around culturally-codified institutions and persists only by fair cooperative interactions. Despite scarce representations or investments in the common good, the village society reproduces its low-level equilibrium of cooperation in relative stability. In an exploration of the structural influences on community morality and a defense of distrust, the book also demonstrates how investing trust in family first is an optimal strategy against ecological or political risks.

By highlighting a system of dual morality sharply distinct from the Western-liberal ethos, Living with Distrust addresses perennial moral dilemmas and essential questions of secrecy and honesty, distrust and reputation.

Radu Umbres is an anthropologist fusing ethnographic research with cognitive approaches to morality, cooperation, and communication. He studied Sociology at the University of Bucharest and the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD in Anthropology at University College London after two years of
fieldwork in a Romanian village. After postdoctoral fellowships at Institut Jean Nicod, Paris and New Europe College, he currently teaches at National School of Political and Administrative Studies Bucharest. His recent work focuses on apparently-irrational cultural imitation in cargo cults, the
mechanisms of social initiation by pranking, and revisiting other classical themes in anthropology from a cognitive perspective.