Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya Book launch with author Teodor Zidaru

Join Department of Social Anthropology colleagues at a book launch and discussion with author of Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya (Bloomsbury, 2025), Teodor Zidaru. He will be joined for the discussion by PhD students in Social Anthropology Yichi Zhang and Valerie O'Neill, and Daniel Knight, Professor of Philosophical Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. The discussion will be chaired by Senior Lecturer in Social aAnthropology, Dr Mattia Fumanti.

In Kenya, mutual aid has long mediated microcredit contracts and the social contract between citizens and the state. In effect, mutual aid has been organised 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 recognise 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.