We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
Negotiating Trust and Mistrust
During an integration meeting, Mohamed was asked whether he had any opportunity to talk Slovak in his day-to-day life. Mohamed answered through his interpreter that he had Slovak friends he could practice with. “Slovak?!” Sofia commented incredulously, looking at the others with raised eyebrows. After the meeting, Nina told me she also had a funny feeling about these ‘friends.’ She expressed worries that they might be associated with the local drug scene. At the next meeting with Mohamed, Nina tried to find out more about the mysterious friends. Casually, she asked him how often he met them and how old they were. Mohamed answered her questions and added with a giggle that they shared a joint sometimes.
The revelation that Nina's immediate suspicion was not too far beside the point made me painfully aware of my own subconscious assumptions. The team's intuition that those people accepting Mohamed as a friend could not be entirely kosher seemed cynical to me. I had brushed off Nina's scenario of him spiraling into drug abuse and petty crime as too pessimistic—and it probably was. Yet it still astonished me that Nina's instinct about the involvement of illegal substances, the possession and consumption of which is punishable by severe penalties in Slovakia, was correct.
My misjudgment both of Mohamed's integrity and of Nina's intuition was one of those fieldwork moments that made me acutely aware of the delicacy of “negotiated trust” (Loizos 1994): How to approach the refugees’ and NGO workers’ accounts and my own assumptions with some caution while building trust at the same time? Trust is the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, especially in organizations. A modicum of trust needs to be there to build any kind of relationship; if we cannot believe that people's accounts of themselves hold at least some value, and that the information they convey is by and large in consonance with what they take to be true, ethnography as a method would essentially be worthless. Participant observation, with close attention to the thoughts, speech, and actions of those in the field, can approximate knowledge, but never produce certainty.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
