Managing instability: Trust, social rela- rela-tions and the strategic use of ideas andrela-tions and the strategic use of ideas and

practices in a southern Slovakian village

Davide Torsello

Introduction

The main argument of this paper is that in their decisions people attempt to control the uncertainty of the present time by creating and managing instability. Instability means that they manipulate ideas and acts in a way that to an external observer demonstrate high degrees of inconsistency and ambivalence. What is said is often not replicated or even con-tradicted in practice and what is done does not always corre-spond to moral or ethic principles referred to by actors as underpinning social action. The ambiguity inherent in social practices relates to the strategic use that villagers make of trust and mistrust in their interaction with individuals and with

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Danube

Bratislava Galant

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Krá¾ová nad Váhom

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institutions. Trust creates relations of reciprocity and obliga-tions in the trustee. On the other hand, mistrust imposes constant checks upon the second party which balance the pursuit of personal goals with emotionally and morally ground-ed patterns of social behaviour.

The notion of “amoral familism“ introduced by Banfield to describe a mountain community of southern Italy in the post-war period (Banfield 1958), and recently adopted by a num-ber of scholars to describe the postsocialist realities, consti-tutes the theoretical framework of this chapter. In his famous account of the village of Montegrano, Banfield describes a reality dominated by “backwardness“, economic stagnation, lack of political and civic action and deep mistrust. The author bases his argument on what he calls “amoral famil-ism“, according to which individuals are unable to reach lev-els of collective action because they are concerned merely for their personal and family interests. In his words, Montegrano’s inhabitants act to “maximise the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family, assuming that oth-ers will do the same“ (1958: 85).

A number of factors underly Banfield’s amoral familistic ethos: 1) amoral familism makes it difficult to achieve col-lective action and organization; 2) social and economic con-ditions characterized by amoral familism will favour a “regime which will maintain order with a strong hand“; 3) there is no connection between abstract political principles and concrete behaviour in everyday life; 4) because leadership is refused and distrusted, no one will take the initiative to outline a course of action or persuade others to do so; 5) collective gains are desirable only if one is likely to share them; 6) what-ever group is in power is self-serving and corrupt (1958: 85-104).

These points raise several questions about the validity of Banfield’s approach and its applicability to the postocialist context (Sztompka 1999; Misztal 2001). This chapter will provide possible answers to several questions: how can his-tory account for the present attitudes of people towards trust? How does trust operate to achieve goals in the long

run? If “amoral familism“ is dominant, how can collective action successfully be stimulated by democracy and imple-mentation of institutional reforms? Does interpersonal mis-trust not leave any space for the smooth functioning of insti-tutions? If the state is mistrusted, who is in charge of bring-ing in innovation and development?

The paper is structured in two parts. The fist part exam-ines the issue of how people assign trust to certain institu-tions and social clusters in and outside the village sphere. A general view of trust is outlined with reference to quantitative data. The second part deals with the observation of prac-tices. The family and the village constitute the three spheres in which social relations are articulated in the everyday world.

The fieldwork on which this paper is based was conducted in Királyfa between May 2000 and September 2001. Királyfa is a village inhabited by 1533 persons, 83 percent of whom Hungarians and about 15 percent Slovaks (Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic 2001). The village is situated on the western bank of the Váh river in one of the most fertile regions of southwestern Slovakia (see Danter, Tóth, Liszka this volume).

Trust in social institutions: a quantitative view

After over one year of living in Királyfa¹, intrigued by the fact that people’s actions often did not follow the cognitive crite-ria which shaped these, I recalled an Italian proverb: Tra il dire e il fare c’e` di mezzo il mare(“Between the saying and doing there is the sea“). This suggested to me that under-standing the social features of a community may be a process which goes much further than simply listening to people’s stories and opinions about their living reality in their everyday lives.

For example, people’s open mistrust of the agricultural cooperative is not matched by their interactions with it.

People resort to the cooperative in their everyday life, even when other solutions are possible. They choose to do so according to a series of motives which eventually lead them

to recognize that the cooperative is necessary for their every-day life. This, however, does not prevent them, unequivocally, from running the cooperative down when they talk about it.

What does this attitude conceal? Is it merely a sign of the uncertainty of the present, of profound discontent with the postsocialist change or simply a legacy of the socialist past?

Villagers maintain that the postsocialist transformation has meant that it is increasingly difficult to trust people. Even those who criticize what life was like under the former regime are often willing to admit that today it is harder to rely on peo-ple than it was before. As one informant observed:

After socialism people started turning against each other.

They were afraid, I think, of what was going to change. But this doesn’t explain why they’ve become like wolves to each other. One reason can be that people are busier making money and trying to be successful now, whereas before nobody cared. I’m not saying things were better before, but people were more human and you can note this every day.

Do you know how many times things get stolen here in the village? Anything that isn’t chained can be lost. This is new;

it wasn’t like this in socialist times. Now do you wonder that nobody is ready to trust even their family members?

(Gábor, b. 1952) The pessimism of these words seems to have confirma-tion in a finding of the survey which I undertook on a random sample of a hundred households. To the question: “Do you think that after 1989 it is possible to 1) trust people more;

2) trust people in the same way; 3) trust people less than before“, out of a total of 100 respondents only 2 chose the first option, 22 the second and 76 maintained that people are less trustworthy than before 1989.

One of the possible explanations for the open mistrust may be the villagers’ worsened economic conditions. Indeed, some of the villagers recognize that their economic situation has worsened after 1989, but many of them also say that things have improved and are optimistic about the future.

Data gathered in the household survey reflect people’s views of their personal economic condition and the degree of

satis-faction with their present family economic situation. The first question was: “Do you think that after 1989 your economic condition has improved or worsened?“ Only 10 percent indi-cated they saw signs of slight improvement, whereas 22 per-cent said it worsened little, 40 perper-cent that it worsened a lot and 27 percent that it did not change. On the other hand, the second question asked: “Are you satisfied with your present family economic situation?“ The answers were divided between 55 percent satisfied (4 percent very much, 51 per-cent more or less satisfied) and 43 perper-cent not satisfied (32 percent not satisfied, 11 percent very unsatisfied).

These data do not clearly indicate why people show incon-sistency in their practices and ideas, but they suggest that, generally speaking, worsened economic conditions are not the main source of generalized mistrust because most peo-ple are relatively satisfied with their family’s economic situa-tion. The difference between the two sets of answers indi-cates that what in principle is seen as a pessimistic view of the transformation may turn into a realistically less negative picture when considering the overall family situation. Some informants commented on the two questions, saying: “Well, we should not complain too much, after all we are free today and there is always a future to come, which depends more or less on our choices“. Even among those who attribute the present uncertainty and economic distress to the fall of socialism, there were no indications that postsocialism has not brought anything good at all for them. All of them were ready to accept the idea that personal freedom and the very possibility to “work for the future“ (a jövõért dolgozni) were, nonetheless, the best achievements of the transformation.

In spite of these veins of optimism for the future, howev-er, mistrust and suspicion still dominate public life and this fact becomes manifest as soon as one starts living in the community. Before examining the problem of how mistrust influences everyday social relations within and outside the community, I would like to provide some more quantitative evidence on the use of trust in defining people’s interaction with social institutions.

In order to test the different degrees of trust towards for-mal institutions and inforfor-mal clusters in villagers’ everyday social life (such as neighbours, close and distant relatives, work colleagues and friends), a scale of trust from 0 (the low-est value) to 5 (the highlow-est value) was chosen to evaluate their position towards these categories.

Chart 5 gives a picture of the average level of trust that one hundred randomly-chosen villagers (64 male and 36 female) formulated in relation to 14 different categories.

These include: family, close relatives, distant relatives, neigh-bours, friends, villagers, work colleagues, the church, local officials,² politicians, the agricultural cooperative, village social and cultural clubs, the state and the EU. The highest mean level of trust was obtained by the family³with 4.56, fol-lowed by the category close relatives (3.86) and friends (3.54). The cooperative (JRD) (1.87), the state (1.35) and finally politicians(1.19) occupied the lower end of the spec-trum. Mid-range positions were occupied by work colleagues (2.98) and social and cultural clubs (2.79). On the other hand, villagers scored rather poorly with 2.42. Finally, the trust level for local officials reached 2.7, much greater than that of the cooperative.

Source: Household questionnaire survey

Two conclusions can be drawn from these data. First, opinions about trust depend on the degree of interaction between