Trust as affective infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract What is trust to a mining company? This article interrogates the effects of conceptualising trust as essential infrastructure for large-scale extractive operations. Although sentiments like trust are typically imagined to fall outside the firm's purview, mining companies actively blur distinctions between economic-material and social-emotional realms when they draw on intimate social forms like kin networks and communal authority to mould trust into an expendable factor of mineral production. But rather than transforming trust into a discrete, predictable input, firms have unexpectedly manufactured its opposite: desconfianza, or distrust. My study shows how residents affected by mining navigate this distrust by attempting to construct clear boundaries between themselves and the mine. In the process, they reveal the unruly sentiments underlying the operations of extractive capitalism.