Trusting in higher education: an anthropological perspective

This chapter explores concepts familiar to the field of anthropology which may contribute some ideas to this exploration of trust: its contradictions, discontinuities, use and abuse and the obstacles to having a dialogue with it, including the obstacles of institutionalised authorities and vested commercial interests. It starts with the notion of a cultural ecology and moves on to the human relationship with objects and how objects have grown beyond the extrinsic teleos we have been able to impose on them, beyond the functions of the emic-etic and beyond the endogamous and exogamous principles in keeping the cultural ecology sustainable. This chapter considers how such conceptualisations can guide research into such objects and the values, such as trust, which have become enmeshed and misused in the imperative to control them through forms of reductionism and functionalism