The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange and the Sacred in Africa (review)

Reading Parker Shipton's important and award-winning book on Luo livelihood and forms of trust in the midst of a massive crisis of American (and indeed global) finance capitalism is a salutary experience. The first installment in what is an ambitious trilogy of books on credit, culture, and entrustment, The Nature of Entrustment argues strenuously that indigenous forms of trust, including credit, debt, obligation, and so on, are economic, political, moral, aesthetic, and symbolic matters. In contrast to the beliefs of development experts who seek to hasten the adoption of formal credit and property systems, these indigenous systems are vigorous and effective in their local settings.

Fiduciary culture among the Luo provides a robust language and set of practices—a logic broadly construed—through which a wide array of transactions (gifting, marriage, education) are rendered effective and meaningful. It is a lesson, and a moral, that Wall Street needs to take on board. Bernard Madoff, the derivative traders and Ponzi schemers, the purveyors of credit default swaps, and the apparatchniks on the floor of the New York Commodities Exchange have long abandoned the notion that financial risk is only as good as the mechanisms (social, structural, legal, existential) of trust ("confidence" in the Wall Street argot) holding both the lenders and creditors, and the buyers and sellers, in place. In their institutions, practices, and cultural values, the Luo—and Shipton implies there is a much greater resonance across Africa—challenge some of the foundational assumptions of Euro-American neoclassical economics and financial capitalism. Shipton's account is, in this sense, deeply Polanyian in tenor and character.

Shipton's book consists of three parts. The first places his notion of entrustment—"action with thought implied" (33)—on a larger landscape of anthropology and fiduciary culture. This is a demanding task, since the breadth of the concept in effect encompasses much of the history of anthropological or at least social structural theory. I found this section uneven, and treatments of the work of the work of Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault, and Karl Polanyi, for example, much too cursory (and sadly neglecting other relevant work on debt, money, and finance by Jacques Derrida, Janet Roitman, Miranda Joseph, Jean-Joseph Goux, and others). The second part provides a strong introduction to Luo livelihood as it is driven by the complex relations among political authority, forms of commodification, and the intersection of social structure and culturally weighted forms of investment.

The final section—the heart of the book—consists of a series of vignettes of entrustment in action, always entailing a rich and heady combination of ethnographic detail, compelling storytelling, and nuanced conceptual observation. Shipton takes the reader through the entrustment of humans (fosterage) and animals, exchanges and loans of food and land (in which social proximity and distance is key), marriage as an "installment plan," inheritance, debts and obligations, funerary rites, and, not least, how Luo conceive of the relations between themselves and their spirits and divinity as a form of entrustment. It is a measure of the power of his narrative that Shipton can so successfully maintain the argument of entrustment across these disparate and contrasting forms of Luo practice. He is particularly brilliant in showing how lending and borrowing, entrustment and obligation, hinge on identity and intimacy: what and how you may borrow depends who you are and who the lender is—in other words, how banking in the U.S. used to be.

The Nature of Entrustment successfully questions much of the evolutionism of contemporary social theory of finance and economy. Shipton demolishes a trio of conventional arguments: the purported historical logic of the "transformation" from barter to cash to credit; the ineluctable separation of the economic and noneconomic; and the normative aspiration to commodify everything. He properly maintains that economic entrustment cannot be neatly isolated from the ritual, symbolic, moral, and spiritual. The Luo fully understand...