Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya [Hardcover]

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.

In Kenya, mutual aid has long mediated microcredit contracts and the social contract between citizens and the state. In effect, mutual aid has been organized in ways that contributed to mistrust in financial and state institutions as well as among families and neighbours. Nevertheless, diverse mutual aid arrangements have thrived and proliferated, not least because collaborating parties actively recognize the influence of invisible third parties such as God or Satan. The resulting forms of trust and mistrust range from the contractual to the mutual and everything in-between. Together, they highlight how speaking of trust in a language of religious faith sustains possibilities for contingency, creativity, and change alongside the reproduction of pre-existing inequalities and moral prejudices.

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.

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'slcI