Generating and Maintaining Confianza: Living a "Good" Life Amidst Violence, Insecurity, and Mistrust in Rural El Salvador
This dissertation enters into theoretical discussions with the current literature on El Salvador (Moodie 2010, Silber 2011, Pederson 2013, Montoya 2018) by offering an alternative way to analyze violence, the emblematic theme of scholarly work on the region. Beginning my analysis with the underlying assumptions laid out in what Robbins (2013a) calls the Anthropology of the Good, I suggest that through careful analysis of emic considerations of modern-day violence, the ways in which Salvadorans strive to relate to one another and live ethical lives amidst violence can become foregrounded in the wider anthropological study of the country. To this end, I follow an NGO women’s savings and loans project in rural El Salvador. My primary informants are the employees of the NGO that administer the project and the Evangelical Christian women who participate. In order to successfully work together, these groups of people are highly skilled at generating and maintaining a particular type of complex interpersonal trust known as confianza. Confianza, in wider rural Salvadoran society, is a form of deep, mutual, and transactional trust. As a multifaceted phenomenon, confianza acts as a sort of social currency (Bourdieu 1986); it is one of the primary methods employed to keep people safe amidst everyday insecurity and violence; and it behaves as what I describe as a regulatory value within the wider system of values that ensures that rural Salvadorans obtain their highest value, “moving forward,” in a categorically ethical and collective way. Through a consideration of the geneses and maintenance of confianza across rural Salvadoran society, this dissertation weaves together and provides a range of fresh ideas in many subcategories of anthropology such as the study of kinship, technology, values, migration, and politics. However, the primary theoretical contributions of this dissertation are my original engagements with the anthropology of trust (Lomnitz 1977, Luhmann 1979, 1988, Govier 1997, Tilly 2007) and mistrust (Carey 2017, Muhlfried 2018, 2019, Scchiocchet 2018). Keeping rural Salvadoran understandings of violence as structural and an endemic threat in the forefront of the analysis, I work to develop both universal and Salvadoran definitions and categories of trust, mistrust, and falsehood based on detailed ethnographic evidence.
Trust, Mistrust, Violence, Good Life, Values
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