Florian Mühlfried Book order

Focusing on the citizens of the Caucasus, this work explores the social practice of mistrust through an anthropological lens. Mühlfried challenges postcolonial narratives that depict these individuals as "others" by presenting ethnographic observations that highlight mistrust as a tangible reality. By addressing socio-political issues from a non-Western viewpoint, the book offers a fresh perspective on mistrust, contrasting it with the more widely studied concept of trust, and sheds light on contemporary challenges like populism and post-truth politics.

Scholars have long seen trust as a foundational social good. We therefore have ample studies on building trust in free markets, on cultivating trust in the state, and on rebuilding trust through civil society. The contributors to this volume, instead, take a step back. They ask: Can mistrust ever be more than the flip side of trust, more than the sign of an absence or failure? By looking ethnographically at what a variety of actors actually do when they express mistrust, this volume offers a richly empirical trove of the social life of mistrust across a range of settings.

This collection explores theoretical and empirical developments in the anthropology of the Caucasus and Central Asia, originating in or shaped by the Soviet era. Special attention is paid to the creation of local and national schools as well as to the role of institutional and biographical dis/continuities. Within the academic field of anthropology in the Soviet republics, Russia-based research institutes and regional branches of the former Soviet Academy of Sciences played a special role. Explorations of this role and of the impact of ideology are pertinent to the controversial question as to whether the Soviet Union was essentially a colonial enterprise. The authors include leading anthropologists from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as regional specialists from the Russian Federation and western countries. Florian Mühlfried is an anthropologist working for the Caucasus Studies Program at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Sergey Sokolovskiy is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie.