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Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands

Caroline Humphrey Willem van Schendel Tina Harris Sayana Namsaraeva Tobias Holzlehner Nasan Bayar Hyun-Gw Park Ivan Peshkov Dominic Martin Caroline Humphrey

9789089649829
256 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
The first English-language book to focus on northeast Sino-Russian border economies, Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands examines how trans-border economies function in practice. The authors offer an anthropological understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the state. They argue that the history of suspicion and the securitised character of the Sino-Russian border mean that trust is at a premium. The chapters show how diverse kinds of cross-border business manage to operate, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust.
Author Bio
Professor Caroline Humphrey Professor Humphrey is an anthropologist who has worked across Asia and countries of the former Soviet Union. She is currently based at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge, which she co-founded, and she is a Director of Research at the Department of Social Anthropology. She has been a Fellow of King's since 1978. Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.