This book explores the role of trust in social struggles related to tropical forest preservation in El Petén, Guatemala. The author combines ethnographic exploration of how trust is formed in the local context with insights about postcolonial inequalities, which structure discourses on development and climate change in ways that exclude local actors.
Empirically, the book follows the complicated engagements of local concession-holding forest communities with outside actors aiming to develop archaeology-based tourism in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. A central argument presented is that processes initiated for societal improvement need to be based on trusting relationships in order to be successful. This requires a context sensitive approach that takes into consideration how trust is formed and undermined in specific lifeworlds, as well as postcolonial inequalities.
Theoretically, the book expands existing conceptualisations of trust and emphasises the potential for ethnographic research to further our understanding of this elusive phenomenon.
Margit Ystanes is Associate Professor at Volda University College, Norway. The present work represents a further development and confluence of two lines of research represented by Ystanes’s two co-edited volumes, Trusting and Its Tribulations: Interdisciplinary Engagements with Intimacy, Sociality and Trust (with Vigdis Broch-Due, 2016) and The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America: Decades of Change (with Iselin Åsedotter Strønen, 2018).
