19 Nov 2018

Trust Amidst “Trust-Deficit”: Credit, Conflict and Improvidence in Kashmir

Lecture at Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Aditi Saraf

Abstract

This talk examines how legacies of regional trade generate claims and attachments that contest frameworks through which the Kashmir dispute is generally understood – that of competing nationalism or communal tension. Particularly, the focus will be on non-formal credit in a wholesale market in Indian occupied Kashmir. Such credit relations persist despite being curtailed by military occupation, political violence and the breakdown of regulatory structures. These systems of promissory payments are also criminalized outside their networks of circulation, particularly by the state. Notions of trust as residing in legal and financial transparency do not apply here, nor those attributed to communal solidarities. Instead, the speaker will show how trust persists by taking on a contingent and experimental form, seeking antecedents in past networks of frontier trade rather than uncertain futures, and in credit forming the basis for trust rather than the other way round.

Contact:
Highland Asia Research Group
LMU, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oettingenstr. 67
80538 Munich, Germany
martin.saxer@lmu.de | +49 89 2180 9639

Privacy Policy

ERC and LMU logos