Trust flourishes only in the gaps left by kinship and contract structures

Evidence

Frafras relied on trust as a last resort, for good reasons. Trust is essential to dealing, as is known by the diamond traders and by the game theorists, with their suckers, free-riders, and lemons. But the routines of productive organization are not easily managed by an ethos of personal freedom. Kinship and contract each offer a durable model for hierarchy and control: parental and legal sanctions respectively. This is why traditional rural society has room only in the margins for achieved relations of friendship and why trust accumulates in the interstices of mass societies organized by markets and states. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2443

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that kinship and contract supply hierarchy/control through sanctions complements Hardin’s point that trust requires observable constraints — visible here as parental and legal sanctions.
• ADDENDUM: Fits the law-merchant material already in the reader’s library: reputation and trust substitute where formal institutions are weak.