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Teodor Zidaru is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Previously he taught anthropology at King’s College London and the London School of Economics.
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’s compelling account complicates this trend and brings together themes often considered separately—trust, religion, kinship, gender—to give much-needed insights into ordinary Kenyans’ own experiments in mutual help. * Deborah James, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK * An outstanding contribution. Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Kenyan community, it explores how trust, and the breakdown of trust, are talked about and acted on in everyday situations of debt, credit, savings and mutual assistance. It is sensitive to local nuance, ambitious in its theoretical reach, and altogether a pleasure to read. * Karin Barber, University of Birmingham, UK *
