Economic trust in Accra is built through manufactured familiarity, not preexisting ties.

Evidence

Does friendship work for the Frafras? In a way it has to work, although rarely without the reinforcement of some other social interest. The case of money lending illustrates the point. Loans in Nima are never made to strangers. Landlords lend to tenants, patrons to clients. The borrower often invokes friendship as a way of soliciting a loan; the pretension of familiarity is the normal rhetoric of economic life in a place like Accra. Kinsmen make poor borrowers since they equate their interests with those of the lender. Again, small traders sell to strangers for cash. Once their customers become more familiar, they grant them special privileges (extras and, more important, credit), engendering trust by means of the gift and making a kind of friendship between buyer and seller, even when it was not a precondition for their association. Regular clients with substantial debts are few, and the traders must pick them carefully: in this respect they are as selective as we are with our personal friendships. But this does not prevent Frafras and others like them from invoking friendship quite casually in their economic relations, a sort of inflation of the social currency that members of our civil society would be likely to resist. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2436

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin thesis: trust grows out of observable, sequential interactions (familiarity→gift→credit), exactly the observable-constraint mechanism the reader wants to connect to Saramago’s blindness.
• DEFINE: Illustrates ‘the pretension of familiarity’ as a distinct economic idiom — familiarity invoked instrumentally, not authentically felt.