The farming of trust:

Abstract

Certification is increasingly used in diverse spheres of social, political, and economic life, in which it is associated with transparency projects and audit cultures. In the Doon Valley of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, the state government has supported certified organic agriculture since the early 2000s. Although practices of document keeping and inspections required by organic certification were intended to make agrarian practices legible and transparent, in practice they often failed to do so. Officials charged with conducting certification ultimately framed organic agriculture as a moral enterprise, finding sentiments of viśvās (trust, belief, or faith) to be crucial to their work. Rather than producing certainty and transparent knowledge, certification practices may generate forms of uncertainty that compel, and rely for their resolution on, sentiments of trust. [organic agriculture, certification, audit, transparency, trust, bureaucracy, India]

Introduction

“…The collaboration that has led to this special issue began in the few months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In those bewildering early weeks of lockdowns, stuck at home and confined to our Zoom boxes, puzzles about trust and its relations which had initially been piqued by our respective research (Galvin 2018;McKay 2022;Weichselbraun 2019) spilled well beyond them as we reflected on how the sites and interplay of trust, uncertainty, suspicion, doubt, and mistrust seemed to shape and be shaped by government and institutional responses to the pandemic. Here, trust was deeply and visibly imbricated in multiple mutual relationalities.…”

Race and Process: Certifying IberianPigs and Invisibilising Humans

“…It has long been argued in anthropology that the overt claims to legibility and transparency of modern states and bureaucracies are undermined in their practice by strategies of illegibility, obscurity and irrationality (Cañás Bottos, 2015;Das, 2004;Scott, 1998). Anthropological efforts to understand processes of certification in agriculture support similar conclusions: systems of certification designed to render complex production chains, produce as much opacity as transparency when set in practice (Seshia Galvin, 2018a, 2018b. Here I want to push the argument further and show how opacity is not restricted to the practice, but integral to the design and logic of certification schemes, emerging from the keys and theories that underlie the classification systems.…”

Bureaucracy and distributed vulnerability at a Chinese research institute: beyond the faculty perspective on audit cultures

“…Here Cavanaugh echoes an argument made by Michael Power (1997) and reiterated by several anthropologists: that ‘[a]ccountability mechanisms often replace relations of trust in audit culture’ (Cavanaugh 2016: 696 citing Shore 2008; see also Shore & Wright 2015; Stein 2018; Strathern 2000; Tracy 2016; Webb 2019; cf. Galvin 2018). On the face of it, such conclusions resonate with Tao's contention that a fastidious trail of documents facilitates SAPS administrators’ ‘refusal to trust’, but the common vocabulary of ‘trust’ belies quite different analyses of what is at stake in bureaucratic practice.…”