Conversion to world religions enables migrants to escape kinship-bound trust for negotiated association.

Evidence

Most migrants fail to transcend the mores of fighting hill tribesmen in the social chaos of the slum. But some of them do. They are aided in this process if they make a break with traditional religion, for both negative and positive reasons. They need some social and cultural distance from the axioms of a society where personal freedom is hedged in by kinship obligations on all sides. World religions also confer membership of new associations which lend organization and sanctions to negotiated social relations. Similar claims could be made for secret societies and criminal fraternities. In Accra, Islamic brotherhoods controlled much of the intermediate level of business between the state-made corporate zone and its amorphous hinterland. They did so in informal ways which have been documented brilliantly by Cohen (1969) for the Hausa trading diaspora. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2437

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s trust-and-observability theme: religions and secret societies supply organization and sanctions — third-party enforcement structures like the law-merchant institutions the reader has studied.