Kinship-based trust fails when its sanctioning institutions do not migrate

Evidence

Looking for some alternative form of guarantee, the migrants turn to the antithesis of modern civilization, their own customary moral institutions founded on the identities of kinship, descent, and family, reinforced as they are by a common language and religion, by the certain obligations of birth and community. This option too is fallible. The institutions do not travel en bloc to Accra, and some of the important public sanctions of domestic hierarchy are missing: lineages, ancestor worship, the security of their homeland. The migrant community is an egalitarian brotherhood of floating young men anchored in the patronage of a few resident big men. It is not closed or powerful enough to shore up the authority and reliability of kinsmen. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2428

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: When observability of kinship sanctions is lost in migration, trust in kinsmen degrades — the same collapse-of-monitoring mechanism the reader is tracking in Saramago’s blindness.

Related

• Kinship institutions cannot enforce trust once detached from ancestral and lineage sanctions. (similarity 0.93)
• Migration dissolves descent structures and with them household authority (similarity 0.82)
• Family labour fails where kinship organization fails to migrate (similarity 0.81)
• Conversion to world religions enables migrants to escape kinship-bound trust for negotiated association. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Close communities substitute communal sanctioning norms for dyadic trust relationships #qualifies (0.78) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 816