Trust: IAN Middleton

Music and Arts in Action | Volume 6 | Issue 2 | 2018
Special Edition – Keywords for Music in Peacebuilding

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Trust
IAN MIDDLETON
Department of Music | Universidad de los Andes | Columbia*
ABSTRACT
The task of increasing trust is central to restorative peacebuilding. Between
confidence and faith, trust bridges actions, beliefs and feelings of the past, present
and future. Musical interaction can help build trust between participants. This is one
of the reasons musical projects can be an effective part of conflict transformation. In
this contribution I consider answers to key questions about trust offered by
competing universalizing theories and culturally distinct groups of people, before
suggesting a broad processual definition. I also show some of the ways music
making relates to trust through a consideration of musicological literature and my
own research in Colombia.
KEYWORDS
Trusting; music-making; peacebuilding; social life; Colombia; tambora; gaita
* Carrera 1 Este No. 18A - 10, Bloque V, Bogotá, Colombia
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Music and Arts in Action 6 (2) 2018 | ISSN: 1754-7105 | Page 73
http://musicandartsinaction.net/
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TRUST
INTRODUCTION
"When we first got here, they called us guerrilla insurgents, loons, even organ
traffickers! But now we're family." I was listening to Fauner Salas, a young
musician I had followed from his hometown to the city of Villanueva in North East
Colombia. He was coordinating a government-funded project aimed at involving
youth in creative community practices, reducing violence and promoting
convivencia (peaceful living together).1 Fauner and his ever-expanding team of
young people, some of whom had previously been protagonists in gang-related
violent crime, were building solid trusting relationships with residents of las casitas,
the new neighbourhood of social housing on the margin of the city, and the rural
hamlets they visited nearby. Most residents of las casitas were victims of internal
displacement caused by Colombia's ongoing civil conflict. Rural hamlet residents
were isolated and threatened by environmental violence associated with agro-
business. Everyone involved in the project had at one time or another been the target
of threats or attacks by far-right neo-paramilitaries. In this tense atmosphere,
Fauner's team managed to build trust, in no small measure through music-making.
I came to study trust through a desire to understand the dynamics of music-making
and peacebuilding I experienced in Colombia and support musicians like Fauner
working to reduce violence there. Anthropologist Michael Taussig (2003) writes
about upwards and outwards spirals of violence, fear and suspicion emanating from
a para-state war machine's attempts to establish hegemony, the violent theatrics of
guerrilla insurgency, and the art of confusion practiced by competing criminal
gangs, which together drive the country's dirty civil conflict. Nearly all my musician
friends there have, like Fauner, worked on musical projects linked to peacebuilding,
mostly independent of direct state efforts (Bouvier, 2009). Over time I became
convinced that if music was genuinely contributing to peacebuilding efforts in this
context it was likely in large part through building trust.
In this article I consider why trust is important to peacebuilding around the world,
show some of the main ways trust has been conceptualised by scholars from a range
of disciplines and offer my own broad definition. I reach this point via five key
questions that I believe any universalizing theory or culturally specific account
should consider.2 Along the way I show how music relates to trust through cases
from (ethno)musicological literature and my own research. I focus on active music-
making (which I take to include dance) rather than the whole range of activities
included in what Christopher Small (1998) calls "musicking," because my research
suggests that is where music's greatest potential for influencing trust lies. My
definition of trust is processual, and three-part. I argue that music-making can
1 Allison Hayes-Conroy and Alexis Saenz Montoya (Hayes-Conroy and Saenz Montoya, 2017) argue that
this translation is better than "peaceful coexistence" as it captures the imbricated nature of involvement in
each other's lives. Coexistence can happen in parallel but living together requires interaction. This sense
of convivencia may be likened to Paul Gilroy's use of "conviviality" as a "the process of cohabitation and
interaction which have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain's urban areas and in
postcolonial cities elsewhere" (Gilroy, 2005). As part of peacebuilding many organisations in Colombia are
(at least on paper) attempting to build such forms of non-violent interactional living. The organisation
Fauner worked for, La Legión del Afecto (The Legion of Affect/Affection/Love), was funded by the state
Department for Social Prosperity (DPS), but actively avoided identifying with the government and
institutionality. The Legión documents its own work extensively, see for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPtassn85o8.
2 I came to see these questions as vital through a broad (though by no means exhaustive) survey of the
varied and often disjointed literature on trust. Some come directly from the work of other academics, while
others are my formulations of salient concerns.
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indeed help build trust among participants and in their broader social groups, which
can in turn be integral to peacebuilding, but that outcomes will depend very much
on the aims and social interaction involved in the specific musical practices in
which participants are engaged. I recognise that music-making can never be a
complete response to the multiple violences of contexts like Colombia, that it can
sometime replace one kind of violence with another, or even be used to incite
(further) violence. Furthermore, trust is only one aspect of peacebuilding, which
itself brings similar potential pitfalls. However, in line with a recent turn in heritage
and peacebuilding studies away from approaches that merely problematise the
issues (Walters, Laven and Davis, 2017), I choose to focus on how music can best
contribute to peacebuilding. By so doing I hope my analysis will be of use to my
interlocutors and others who are already working to reduce violence.
WHY TRUST IS IMPORTANT
Trust is vital for enabling social collaboration and limiting violence between
individuals and social groups of all kinds and sizes. It tends to be eroded by
sustained violent conflict, putting peacebuilders in somewhat of a catch 22
situation: those who most need trust may find it hardest to attain. Writing about
peacebuilding in general, and focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, political
scientist Nevin T. Aiken argues that building trust between social groups previously
involved in violent conflict is central to effective restorative reconciliation (Aiken,
2008). His account rests heavily on the work of sociologist Robert D. Putnam, who
argues that trust is essential for civic engagement and the peaceful functioning of
democratic societies (Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti, 1993). Putnam considers trust
to be part of a group's social capital, which he defines as: "features of social
organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and
cooperation for mutual benefit" (Putnam, 1993, p. 36). For Putnam and his
followers, where trust is limited, people miss out on opportunities that require some
form of collaboration (Harriss, 2003).3 Thus in areas of violent conflict, people not
only suffer from the various forms of violence, but also the missed opportunities
that come from a resultant lack of trust.
Literature on music and conflict transformation notes the importance of trust in
peacebuilding. Coexistence and reconciliation researcher Cynthia Cohen (2008)
writes: "Reconciliation can be understood [...] as a set of deep processes designed
to transform relationships of hatred and mistrust into relationships of trust and
trustworthiness" (p. 30). The definition of peace adopted by Olivier Urbain from
Johan Galtung in the same edited collection implies the necessity of trust: "the
capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, creativity and nonviolence" (Urbain,
2008, p. 4). If peacebuilding is to get off the ground and progress, the parties
involved must harness and build what little trust they have to collaborate in conflict
transformation.
Working more at the level of the individual, and outside contexts of war,
psychologist Erik Erikson posits a particular kind of trust as a fundamental building
block of psychological development. According to Erikson, all individuals
negotiate, with varying degrees of success, eight "psychological crises" (Erikson,
1962, pp. 118-120), developing central dispositions as a result. 'Basic trust' or
3Some such scholars may be criticised for a narrow, or neoliberal view of wellbeing. For Harriss, "missing
out" is primarily missing out on opportunities for business deals. Putnam nuances this to a degree,
emphasizing happiness in his discussions of what it is to "prosper," but his view of well-being remains
universalizing and largely a priori.
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'original optimism' is a disposition of security, or the absence of anxiety, in basic

biological and social functions primarily developed in early childhood (Erikson,
1963 [1950], p. 247). Importantly, this disposition is what permits further
psychological development of a sense of self or identity, it is necessary for
participation in broader life, and its absence is often the root of pathological
conditions. On this account, effective individual engagement in social life requires
us to develop trust.
In his early work on urban blues musicians, ethnomusicologist Charles Keil applied
Erikson's theory to explain what he saw as "The Identity Problem" among African
Americans in 1960s USA, and to project a potential transformation of long-standing
racialised violence through an emergent musical movement:
[…] the problem of self-hatred, the lack of self-esteem − the lack of self, for
that matter; these form the pervasive and frightening theme, and the variation
on it is a deep-seated distrust of others − black as well as white (Keil, 1967,
p. 165).
Keil recognised this problem was clearly caused by the centuries of racialised
violences and relative state abandonment that African Americans have faced. He
saw a burgeoning soul movement, manifested in what he called the ‘sacrificial
rituals’ of ‘committed’ urban blues concerts, as providing a third way between
integrationism and militant separatism, towards pluralist harmony in the USA,
providing African Americans could develop greater trust amongst themselves and
in other Americans. He even suggested such an African-American identity could be
a model for all people in the USA in future.4 Keil's case suggests that while all
music making requires some kind of initial trusting (in his case, 'commitment' to
the events), some forms can help build trust in places where it is most needed.
CONCEPTUALISING TRUST
Trust is not only an issue of racialised dynamics within highly segregated countries.
Issues of trust are humanly universal insofar as all cultural groups do something we
can, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, describe as trusting or distrusting, though
culturally local conceptions and forms of trusting differ. The dynamics of trusting
reach from the hyper-local to the global and cut across all categories of
identification, places and times of human interaction. Academics from a variety of
disciplines have understood trust in myriad conflicting ways, which do not
constitute a unified field of study. In this section I do not attempt an exhaustive
survey, but rather consider the answers that different scholars and cultural groups
would offer to five central questions.
WHAT IS TRUST NOT?
In his work on modernity the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990) contributes to a
clearer understanding of trust by distinguishing it from related phenomena of faith,
confidence and knowledge. He posits a spectrum at the extremes of which are
(completely blind) faith and (highly informed) confidence, with trust between, or
4Alarmingly, sociologist Sandra Smith's ethnographic monograph on race and trust shows the future Keil
plotted for African Americans is still far from being realised, and that a central factor in the social
disadvantages correlated with being African American, is still pervasive distrust (Smith, 2007; see also
Keil, 1991 [1967] foreword). Furthermore, recent political developments suggest black people in the USA
often have good reason to be highly distrusting of much of the non-black population. Elsewhere in the
Americas, Katherine Hagedorn in Cuba and Christopher Dennis in Colombia report deep-seated,
pervasive, and enduring distrust of black or Afro-Latin Americans by non-blacks (Hagedorn, 2001; Dennis,
2012).
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somehow linking, the two (pp. 29, 34). Trust necessarily involves contingency and
having insufficient grounds to say we know, or are confident of, how the trustee
will act. Modernity is characterised in part by a shift in the typical objects of trust
from known people towards abstract expert systems (which involves faith in the
correctness of the system and confidence in the experts who form our points of
contact with it). Importantly, Giddens also contends that the polar opposite of trust
is not simply distrust or suspicion of a particular person, group, or system,5 but
rather, a profound anxiety or dread inhering in an inability to trust anyone or
anything (pp. 36, 99-100).
Anthropologist and dance scholar Julie Taylor (1998) offers an immersive
evocation of such profound anxiety in relation to the aftermath of Argentine state
terror, her own personal trauma, and the tango dance scene of Buenos Aires.
Adopting an elegant concept of violence as exclusion, also employed to great effect
by Louise Meintjes (2003), Taylor portrays terror as absolute exclusion, with no
recourse to expert systems, networks, or individual relationships of support.6 Tango
provides some degree of respite from residual anxiety, but its dynamics of
vulnerability and relying remain taxing, especially given their highly gendered
nature. The dancing couple is generally male-bodied, female-bodied and men
perform absolute control (Taylor, 1998, pp. 10-11, 39), whereas women are
expected to entregarse (give themselves over to the lead of their dance partner).7
Taylor, who grew up in the USA and suffered traumatic childhood abuse, found
this particularly difficult. Women retain some independence, however, maintaining
their eje (centre of balance and turning point), and adorning steps with subtle foot
movements. Good dancing involves somatic or embodied knowledge, and not
thinking about the steps as they are executed and varied. However, it can also
provide mental space for restorative or troubling reflection beyond the present
moment.
In dance and writing, Taylor's most disconcerting reflections involve the common
attribution of guilt to victims of state disappearances, which 'disappears' the
violence itself: "Algo habrán hecho. They must have done something. They must
have been mixed up in something" (p. 94, my italics). By implying the victim was
untrustworthy, survivors attempted to impose some logic on the rather arbitrary
disappearances, superstitiously building faith that not being 'mixed up in something'
might guarantee their safety. Many of my interlocutors in Colombia negotiate a
similar existential terror or deep anxiety on a daily basis because of historic and
ongoing violence committed with impunity. One family I work with has been
particularly active in promoting tambora − a musical practice involving a non-
contact couple dance, responsorial song and cyclical, non-virtuosic percussion
(Carbó, 2003a; 2003b; 2005) − in part to combat these phenomena.8 A family
member summarised their situation succinctly while commenting on the attempted
murder of her husband and the event's later denial by police and local legal officials:
There was never any justice. I still see the man [who did it] in town
sometimes. He passes right by the house. When I see him it gives me (she
5 Sociologist Carol A. Heimer (2001) would agree and shows how strategies that involve distrusting (such
as insisting on a contract over less formal agreements) can be the beginnings of trusting relationships (p.
78).
6 Despite its elegance I do not believe this definition is sufficient. Including people in activities that do them
harm can also constitute violence.

7 For further analysis see Savigliano (1995).
8 Martina Camargo is the best known proponent of presentational and recorded forms of tambora:
https://www.facebook.com/martina.camargo/videos/10214887494516029/,
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paused) all sorts of emotions. So who can one trust? Only oneself (personal
communication 2015).
Figure 1: Fauner (centre) and other celebrants (including author) dancing and
playing tambora during Christmas celebrations in San Martín de Loba, Bolívar,
Colombia, 2014 (photo by Lina Zambrano).
Besides faith, confidence, knowledge and existential anxiety, another thing trust is
not, according to many scholars, is interaction in which the would-be trustee's
behaviour is determined, especially when the would-be truster is in control. Political
scientist Russell Hardin (2001) offers an extreme example where it strikes him as
illogical to talk of trust: "I am confident that you will do what I want only because
a gun is pointed at your head" (p. 4). However, no human coercion can ever be
completely deterministic, and analysis of culturally different concepts of trust show
that some social groups are willing to include high degrees of coercion within acts
or relationships they count as trusting (Ensminger, 2001; Ianni, 1974). In northern
Colombia I noticed a split between those people who sided with Hardin and those
who accepted coercion as part of trust. This has implications for scholars and
activists working to understand and support peacebuilding processes. While trust
may typically be a contributor to peace, we must surely keep an eye on coercion,
even within some forms of trusting.
HOW ACTIVE IS TRUST(ING)?
When I was carrying out fieldwork with Fauner Salas, I would often jump on the
back of his motorbike to accompany him on his regular visits to people living in las
casitas. He was typically greeted with a warm embrace and an invitation to join
residents for a while: "Adela-a-ante. Sientate, con confianza!" Difficult to translate,
"con confianza" here comprises a declaration of trust, including the sentiment that
the speaker trusts the listener (so you have no need to be shy or concerned), and that
the listener should have confidence in their trusting relationship (because we are
friends). The residents of las casitas had come to trust Fauner and his companions
not to do them any harm, and to enter their homes without taking any of their
possessions (or organs!). But did this trust inhere in the act of inviting Fauner in, or
did it remain between visits? More generally, is trust something we do, an act (like
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riding a bike), or something that just is, a state (like being happy)? Scholars closely
aligned with Erikson and Giddens generally tend towards stative conceptions. For
instance, Heimer (2001) frames trust as a willingness to accept vulnerability (pp.
43-45),9 and sociologists J. D. Lewis and A. J. Weigart (1985) call trust "a deep
assumption underlying social order" (p. 455). Politics scholar Russell Hardin (2001)
goes so far as to say that it is a mistake to think "trust is a matter of acting" (p. 11).
Economists, business scholars, and laboratory psychologists generally focus more
on people's acts of trust. Management scholars Robert Gibbons, David M. Messick
and Roderick M. Kramer treat trusting as choosing (Gibbons, 2001), or "making
the decision [to act] as if the other person or persons will abide by ordinary ethical
rules that are involved in the situation" (Messick and Kramer, 2001, p. 91, italics in
original).10 This allows analysts to apply rational choice theory, or game theory to
test or model social behaviour in relation to supposedly rational individual decision
taking processes.11 I am sceptical about the sweeping conclusions scholars often
draw from laboratory experiments as they seem to show less about genuine
everyday practices of trusting among diverse populations than they do about the
particular research subjects − often predominantly white, male, cosmopolitan,
middle-class, students of business, psychology, or sociology, who are sometimes
even motivated by cash prizes (Kollock, 1994) − and how they play games.
I think it may be impossible to resolve the dilemma. While inviting someone into
your home is an act of trust, it also makes sense to say that your trust in them may
perdure between visits. We need analyses that go beyond the simple binary. Social
psychologist Toshio Yamagishi (2001) considers trusting a form of ‘social
intelligence’ and writes of ‘practices’ of trusting (pp. 121, 124), arguing that there
is a mutually reinforcing connection between the ability to predict correctly other
people's actions and practice in actually placing your trust in others.12 Economist
and sociologist respectively, Michael Bacharach and Diego Gambetta emphasise
active aspects of trusting, as a choice, within a nuanced framework (Bacharach and
Gambetta, 2001; Gambetta, 2009).13 They also stress that one generally trusts
another to carry out ‘future’ actions. Ethnographic accounts, such as that of UK
gangs by criminal justice scholar James Densley (2012), tend to recognise more
clearly the processual nature of trusting beyond the laboratory, namely that
"encounters involving trust are typically embedded in a series of interactions and
based upon expectancies of individual behaviour rooted in the past" (p. 17). Thus,
following the work of scholars like Stuart Hall (1996) and Zygmund Bauman
9 Although she states that "trust is dynamic" (p. 43), she maintains that it is possible to employ actions
comprising "trusting strategies" and entrust a thing or task to someone, while simultaneously not trusting
that person (p. 45). She thereby maintains a basically stative view of trust per se.
10 Importantly, on this definition, trusting a person does not necessarily involve ‘acting’ in a way that shows
that you trust her, but simply making the decision to act (something might stop you before you act).
11 In this form, game theory involves modelling complex human interaction as a set of games (potentially
repeated) where players make yes or no decisions to maximise their own benefit. The ‘decisions’ at each
point in the game is whether to ‘trust’ another player, and whether to ‘honour’ that ‘decision.’ The ‘rational’
thing to do can be calculated at each stage by induction backwards from potential outcomes. The prisoner
dilemma game is a classic example.
12 However, he seems most concerned to promote a neoliberal ‘emancipation’ theory whereby generalised
trust of others allows people to do without strong social relationships (p. 140). Furthermore, some of his
conclusions stretch normal understandings of what ‘trust’ means, e.g., that it is impossible to trust your
mother if you are sure of her motives (p.144). This puzzle dissolves if we keep trusting relative to particular
tasks and consider both motives and capabilities of trustees. While there is a plethora of tasks that I am
confident my mum would be both willing and able to achieve (and hence ‘trust’ would not apply), whether
or not I would trust her to sing lead vocals in an important concert is a genuine question. While she may be
willing to carry out this task, she would be the first to admit she is not highly capable.
13 Compare ‘strategic’ trust in Smith (2007, p. 464).
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(2001) on ‘identity’ (van Meijil, 2008), and Small (1998) on ‘musicking,’ I suggest
we avoid positing a thing called ‘trust’ and instead focus on acts, processes,
relationships and tendencies of trusting.14 This also mirrors recent processual
accounts of ‘empathy’ and ‘violence’ in musicology (Laurence, 2008; McDonald,
2014),
One process that ethnomusicologists often highlight is that of building their own
trusting relationships with interlocutors. Jane Sugarman (1997) focuses on
gendered and gendering dynamics of power and identification in wedding song
within highly insular social groups of Prespa Albanians. Reflexive ethnography
allows her more fully to characterise Prespa tendencies of trusting:
As anglezë ("English people") our presence at any such event was thus highly
unusual, and we were only permitted to attend events hosted by families who
felt they could trust us. Ultimately this trust required months of cultivation on
our part (p. 15, italics in original).
Michael Bakan (1999) describes the long process through which he trained in
virtuosic devotional Balinese belenganjur drumming, resulting in "[…] the precious
achievement of a trusting partnership realised and represented in that playing" (p.
228). He concludes this was likely what his teacher aimed to communicate and
cultivate all along. Because of the widespread and deep dedication among
ethnomusicologists to participation in the musical practices we study, and the
importance to our interlocutors of those musical practices, we are well positioned
to understand the processes through which specific people come to be trusted, or
not, with important tasks.
HOW RATIONAL OR CALCULATING IS TRUSTING?
There is a strong tendency among economists, and increasingly in fields such as
sociology, political science and experimental psychology, to assume that any
processes involved in people trusting one another are rational and involve the
calculation of risk, or a judgement about how likely a potential trustee is to
reciprocate aid in future. Many then adopt game theory to model, test or explain
human behaviour. Gibbons (2001) suggests this "[…] allows them to think like
economists when price theory [to calculate economic value] does not apply" (p.
334). Psychologist Tom R. Tyler (2001) argues such assumptions are "[…] rooted
in a particular conception of what people want from other people" (p. 287), namely
that we are primarily motivated to engage with others socially only insofar as they
can maximise our individual resources through exchange. This description may be
largely true of some people some of the time, especially in highly neo-liberal late
capitalist economic contexts, but fortunately it does not accurately describe all
human interaction, and certainly not all forms of trusting. 15 It may be difficult to
convince neoliberals that the world order they take to be necessary is merely one of
many possible alternatives (Santos, 2008). However, reflecting on the ways people
actually trust one another, it strikes me as patently obvious that alternatives to the
14 María Elisa Pinto García argues for the importance of considering process in her account of musical
reconciliation projects involving ex-combatants from Colombia's civil conflict (Pinto García, 2011).
Somewhat paradoxically, she focuses mostly on product in the form of the song lyrics they composed. I
believe this exposes both the difficulty and importance of extended ethnographic research in this field of
study.
15 Some calculative theories recognise their own limitations (Gibbons 2001) or nuance their claims by
suggesting that trusting involves "shallow processing" based in heuristic thinking and acting, which
requires far less calculation (Messick and Kramer, 2001). However, to consider a broad range of genuine
human behaviour we need a more rounded account.
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purely calculative mode that neoliberals assume to be 'natural' are not only possible,
but actual and normal in a great many people's everyday lives, even within late
capitalist cultural formations.
I agree with scholars who argue trusting is never fully rational or calculative. For
Anthropologist John Aguilar (1984), this is because: "all humans [...] are both
rational and non-rational. The question is not whether we should explain behaviour
either in terms of rationality or nonrationality, but how to do it in terms of both" (p.
6). This echoes the drive of many ethnomusicologists to move beyond a Cartesian
duality of mind and body when analysing musical experience (Kapchan, 2007;
Taylor, 1998; Turino, 2008). Writing within social psychology, Alan Fine and Lori
Holyfield (1996) argue against rationalist accounts of trusting based on information
exchange:
One not only thinks trust, but feels trust. Although [in our case study] trust
depends at first on information judged to be protective, in time it involves
valuing the relationship in which trust is embedded as well as the information
that is acquired (p. 26, italics in original).
For Fine and Holyfield, trusting is never "fully determined or calculating" (p. 26).
Rather, it necessarily involves uncertainty and the impossibility of complete
calculation (Lewis and Weigart, 1985; Yamagishi and Yamagishi, 1994). Again,
ethnographic engagement tends to provide nuance. Anthropologist Jean Ensminger
(2001) argues that not all trusting is rational, but that the trusting practices and
tendencies of the Orma cattle owners with whom she works in North East Kenya
happen to be highly strategic, rational and calculating.
WHO TRUSTS WHOM FOR WHAT?
Who or what, and how many of those 'whos' and 'whats', are involved in trusting? I
assume humans are the agents, and humans or systems the primary objects of
trusting, but how are they related? An example will help illustrate. My fieldwork
involved spending a lot of time with Joche Álvarez, a renowned player and maker
of gaitas, the long duct flutes played mostly in northern Colombia (List, 1983;
Quintana Martínez, 2009; Rojas E., 2009; Ochoa Escobar, 2013). When I asked him
to sign a consent form for my university he did so without reading it, despite my
protests that he should take time to understand it: "There's no problem Ian, I trust
you!" His statement sounded complete: he simply trusts me. Sociological theories
of ‘generalised trust’ often draw broad conclusions from such statements
(Luhmann, 1979; Yamagishi, 2001), but that is never the whole story. For instance,
when Joche and I make music together informally he trusts me to play most
instruments in the format, but for important presentational performances he would
prefer more virtuosic musicians with whom he has developed a close relationship
over many years of playing together.16 He does not trust me unconditionally.
16 For an example of Joche playing gaita, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAB3BdPpSwI.

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Figure 2: Joche Álvarez building gaitas in Cartagena, Bolívar, Colombia 2008

(photo by author).
Hardin (2001), whose example of coercion is mentioned above, poses the question
in terms of relations: is trust a two-part or three-part relation? His answer, while
dogmatic, is borne out by examples. While we may informally talk in absolutes like
Joche, in analysis we ought to recognise that trusting always connects at least two
people and a particular (range of) task(s). Hardin therefore dismisses ‘generalised
trust’ as at best: "a matter of relatively positive expectations of others'
trustworthiness, cooperativeness or helpfulness" (p. 14). To be more specific about
my example then, my friend trusts me in particular to carry out my research and not
to defraud him through use of his signature, and also to play accompanying
instruments in informal contexts, but not to play lead instruments in performances
where there is more at stake.
Many musicologists focus on sonic musical tasks. In her analysis of interaction in
jazz rhythm sections Ingrid Monson (1996) writes about ‘musical trust,’ which we
can now understand as the ways in which musicians trust each other to carry out
musical tasks, in this case sonic, but potentially also choreographic, or broader
activities of musicking. One central task for Monson's jazzers is maintaining a solid
groove against which soloists can play fluidly (p. 28). She pays particular attention
to how musicians resolve mistakes in the act of playing and criticise each other after
performances for their lack of ability or willingness to groove (pp. 157-169). For a
jazz rhythm section there is no external expert system to regulate behaviour, so
musicians must improvise resolutions to any problems that arise (p. 176). In such
situations, co-operation is more important than a pre-ordained structure. These
processes of working together to resolve potential problems can provide musical
interest, elation and (with their iteration) build trust between musicians through
interdependence (pp. 180-1, 184).
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(HOW) CAN WE QUANTIFY TRUSTING?

So far, I have spoken freely about levels of trust being built up, or diminishing,
without explaining how we might go about quantifying such complex human
phenomena. This is an important question if we accept that increasing trust can be
beneficial to peacebuilding. Some attempts at quantitative analysis of trust use
surveys or laboratory experiments, while others attempt to ‘operationalise’ trust by
measuring related factors taken to be indicators. I suggest it is more effective to
document ethnographically the increases or decreases as experienced by our
interlocutors.
Perhaps the least reliable quantitative data comes from surveys involving direct
questioning about one's tendencies of trusting (Bahry, Kosolapov, Kozyreva, and
Wilson, 2005; Stolle, 2001; Yamagishi, 2001). Researchers have little hope of
guaranteeing what participants understand by ‘trust,’ or that their answers reflect
genuine behaviour. Following the thesis of Putnam, the political scientist Dietling
Stolle provides some prima facie impressive evidence about the relative
effectiveness of different kinds of voluntary associations at building trust in the
USA, Germany and Sweden (Stolle, 2001). It would appear to suggest church choirs
are better than bowling clubs for generating in- and out-group trust, and civic
engagement. However, his quantitative data is based on self-reporting in response
to surveys in which some of the questions are highly problematic.17
Surveys based on reported responses to thought experiments fare little better
because they mainly show what people suppose their actions would be in hackneyed
hypothetical situations (Jensen and Petersen, 2011; Purzycki and Arakchaa, 2013;
Wilson and O’Gorman, 2003). As argued above, I am similarly sceptical about
quantitative data extrapolated from ‘trust game’ experiments. All these methods are
especially lacking in rigour when they are applied without detailed consideration of
cultural difference. The best surveys aim to measure factors that are thought to be
indicators of trust and are more easily quantifiable. For example, Tyler (2001)
combines survey data about employees' genuine experiences, their level of
identification with the company and feelings of procedural justice. This kind of
‘operationalization’ of trust, is notable in broader sociological theses such as those
of Putnam (1993), Fukuyama (1996), and Seligman (1997).
Quantification is difficult at best and distortive at worst. However, there are at least
three axes along which people may experience increases or decreases in trusting,
and these may be comprehended through ethnographic engagement: the range of
tasks one trusts another with (Hardin, 2001); the ‘radius’ or number of people one
generally trusts with a range of tasks, which can be as basic as not harming or
humiliating you (Aguilar, 1984; Fukuyama, 1996; Harriss, 2003); and the
‘thickness’ of a trusting relationship as members come to know each other over
time (Messick and Kramer, 2001). Thick relations (typical among close friends) are
not necessarily better than thin (as between well-wishing acquaintances) as the
former can sometimes lead to grouping and out-group enmity, which prevents the
building of broader, peaceful networks of trusting (Putnam, 2002).
Cultural anthropologist Craig T. Palmer (2005) offers a comparative account of
shifting levels of trust amongst Canadian communities in relation to musical
17For instance, "How much do you trust another fellow citizen?" (p. 237). Such questions are open to the
point of vacuous, and in no way control for prejudices about who counts as ‘another citizen,’ which, given
the extent of xenophobia and racism in the US and Europe, is precisely the problem in many instances of
pernicious distrust, suspicion, exclusion and violence.
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practices, which we can consider in terms of thickness and radii of trust.

Interestingly, both cases involve apparently violent musical activities experienced
as a parody of violence or controlled play. Palmer presents mumming in
Newfoundland town celebrations and moshing at metal, punk or rock gigs in
Canada (and the rest of the world) as ritual acts that both require some trust, but
also serve to build in-group trusting relations. In the past, mumming involved a
disguised visit to a neighbour’s house during the twelve days of Christmas, wherein
the visitor behaved in a risqué manner, dancing and roughhousing with the hosts to
the rhythmic accompaniment of spoons. The hosts were expected to remain calm
and guess the mummer's identity (pp. 152-153). This displayed and augmented the
thickness of trusting relationships between community members through the
detection of the visitor and the mutual understanding that such outlandish behaviour
was limited to the play of the celebration. An increase in strangers in Newfoundland
villages led to reduced trust in the disguised mummers, and even fear, as people's
radius of trust decreased relative to the local population. In response, villagers
modified the practices by performing them in public with less ribaldry, or
abandoned the tradition altogether (pp. 159-60, 163), thereby limiting or losing
mumming's capacity for building trust.
Palmer presents moshing, thrashing, or slam dancing as vigorous dancing and
bumping into others at electric guitar band gigs, which may appear to be
uncontrolled violence, but is actually, in most cases, regulated internally by
participants following (normally implicit) rules and a general ethos of solidarity.
Moshers cite this aspect as one of the reasons they enjoy it. Any mosher who knocks
another down, for example, is expected to help them up again.18 As in mumming,
"[…] what separates ritual from actual violence [...] is trust" (p. 158). Palmer reports
a decline in moshing etiquette in Canada since the 1990s that parallels the social
shift in mumming. With increasing numbers of new attendees at gigs, rules were
less consistently followed, and rule-breakers were not effectively ostracised. The
risk of real violence and injury became too great for some people, who no longer
enjoyed the experience, or even stopped participating. Unfortunately, Palmer does
not offer suggestions for reversing such declines in trusting and trust-building
practices.
A DEFINITION OF TRUSTING
With the above questions in mind I propose the following definition of trusting. It
is most closely based on those of James Densley (2012), and Michael Bacharach
and Diego Gambetta (2001):
A person (or group of people) A trusts a person (or group) B to perform a task (or
set of tasks) x if and only if A believes or feels B would do x, at some point A
actually relies on B to do x, and three further conditions hold:
1. x is important to A.
2. A has some indication of B's capacity and willingness to do x, but
not enough to know or be entirely confident B will do it.
3. Not doing x would (at least initially) benefit B in some way (if
only by not having to go to the effort of doing x).
18I remember the Muse lead singer and guitarist Matt Bellamy making this expectation explicit at a
particularly muddy Leeds festival in 2002.
_______________________________________________________
________________________________________
I intend this definition to be sufficiently broad to capture most if not all phenomena
we would normally call ‘trusting’ in English, without being so culturally specific
as to leave out practices that are conceptualised by some cultural groups as trusting
(or a close translation or cognate) even though many English speakers might pre-
reflexively exclude them. The clause about believing, feeling and actually relying
is meant to capture the sense that trusting is both rational and non-rational,
dispositional and agential, counterfactual and actual. I contend that we can best
observe and come to understand the acts, processes, relationships and tendencies of
trusting in a particular social group through deep, extended, ethnographic
engagement.
HARNESSING THE POWER OF MUSIC MAKING TO BUILD TRUST
If we are to employ understandings of trust in scholarship and peacebuilding there
remain questions of a more practical nature. For instance; what kinds of musical
activity are most useful for building forms of trusting conducive to peaceful living
together? What are the mechanisms behind building trust through musical
practices? And, is music-making any better than other activities? In this final
section I briefly suggest some tentative answers from the cases considered above.
Palmer's account seems to show that music involving ritualised, apparently violent,
play can be useful for building trust, but it only seems to work in contexts where
the threat of real violence is minimal, and all participants know each other well. For
Taylor it is the elements of exclusion and domination in tango that recapitulate
anxieties. Small (1998) emphasises the power of musicking to represent ideal social
relations metaphorically, and we might consider how ideals of trusting can be
represented through music.19 In contrast, Thomas Turino (2008), while recognising
the power of music to represent the possible, places greater importance on the actual
socialising that occurs as we participate in musical activities, and its role in building
habits. I suggest the cases above demonstrate that it is in the mechanisms of genuine
social interaction that we will discover musical activities' greatest power to build
trust.
To understand a given musical activity's impact on trust we can ask how many
people it requires a given participant to interact with, whether these are people s/he
knows well, strangers, or representatives of expert systems. We should consider
how far behaviour is governed by rules or expectations, so as to affect his/her sense
that others are willing and able to perform certain tasks. We should also take into
account how the musical rules and expectations relate to those of broader social life
(through a carnivalesque inversion of norms as in mumming, or a powerful
reinforcement of expectations, as in Prespa singing). Rather than presuming music
involves a special kind of trust, we must consider what tasks participants are in fact
trusted with in a given form of music-making (maintaining a groove in jazz, or
realising a ritual of death through belenganjur), what the aims of the musical
activities are, and what their significance is to those taking part and their broader
social groups. Turino's Peircean framework and four fields of music making are a
good start for determining these factors. Finally, we must take into account the
levels, degrees and forms of repetition, or ‘periodicity’ through which participants
19 Laurence applies Small's framework to music and empathy in much this way (2008).
_______________________________________________________
________________________________________
can build trusting relationships and mould their tendencies of trusting (Diaz, 2017;
Solis, 2014; Tenzer, 2006).20
In my own research I develop Turino's approach in conjunction with
Wittgensteinian understandings of rules (Wittgenstein, 2001 [1953]) and Sherry
Ortner's (1996, 2006) concept of ‘serious games’ to analyse two musical styles from
northern Colombia (tambora and gaita) and various social projects that have
developed around them (Middleton, 2018). Though often lumped together as ‘folk’
music, and both frequently taking participatory forms, the different levels of value
placed on virtuosic improvisatory interaction in tambora and gaita encourage quite
different tendencies of trusting regarding thickness. Through detailed case studies
I show ways in which these different tendencies can both help and hinder
peacebuilding efforts. The organisation Fauner and friends worked with used
presentational and participatory forms of tambora and gaita among many other
musical and broader creative and ludic practices. It was exemplary in building a
variety of critical forms of trust, while simultaneously challenging multiple forms
of violence, to promote convivencia. Not all projects were so successful.
CONCLUSION
In sum, literature on peacebuilding, psychology, sociology and (ethno)musicology
indicate that trusting is important for peaceful interaction on individual and group
bases and that music-making both involves and can help build acts, processes,
relationships and positive tendencies of trusting. I have suggested that accounts of
trusting ought to consider answers (from the analyst and her interlocutors) to at least
the five conceptual questions I pose. On my account, trusting is never entirely
rational. It involves perduring beliefs or feelings about the trustee, but also genuine
acts of relying on them for tasks one values, thus making oneself vulnerable to the
relative free will and particular capacities of the trustee(s) while also benefiting
from their cooperation. Existential terror at not being able to trust others often
accompanies experiences of violent conflict. The cases I consider show that music
can be an effective part of peacebuilding insofar as it helps build both trusting
relationships that sustain processes of trusting in the rest of social life and
tendencies of trusting that are conducive to habits of peaceful living together.
Clearly not all music-making will achieve this, but I offer some models of positive
impact.
Far more remains to be done to show how different kinds of music-making involve
and affect trusting. In order to demonstrate clearly the relative merits of different
musical practices for particular applications the categories used to differentiate
kinds of music must be based on participants' aims and genuine social interaction,
rather than outdated divisions or ‘genre’ terms such as ‘folk,’ ‘popular,’ ‘classical,’
or ‘metal.’ Apparently disparate acts like moshing to metal bands and mumming to
the accompaniment of the spoons can turn out to be very similar, at least with regard
to the mechanics of social interaction and their impacts on local tendencies of
trusting, if participants in both cases share aims such as playful community
building. Equally, kinds of music typically classified under the same category can
20Discussing the mechanisms involved in developing trusting relations in her case studies, Monson (1996)
compares jazz to the playing of face-to-face verbal games based in repetition, variation and inversion (pp.
86-90). Turino (2008) makes a similar analogical between participatory music and a ‘pick-up’ game of
softball (p. 35), Palmer (2005) frames mumming as a game. These ways of understanding music open up
useful avenues of comparison between musical activities and games, sports and other activities that are to
some degree autotelic (performed for their own sake) for understanding trust (Csikszentmihaly, 2008; Fine
and Holyfield, 1996; Rabinowitz, 1992).
_______________________________________________________
________________________________________
be almost diametrically opposed in their aims and impacts on trusting.

Ethnomusicologists are well placed to contribute in this area as actively engaged
participants in, and analysts of, music, trusting and peacebuilding, especially when
equipped with effective theoretical tools for understanding musical experience and
helping to apply it to the benefit of the musicians and peacebuilders with whom we
work.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Middleton is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Universidad de los
Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He received his PhD in musicology from the University
of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 2018 and earned master's degrees in musicology
and philosophy from the University of Leeds in his native England. His research
focuses on music and trust in Colombia and is based on extended applied
ethnographic fieldwork with grassroots musical peacebuilding projects. As an active
musician he directed the UIUC salsa ensemble Timbalú and community impact
project Costas. His award-winning composition La culebra bruja was included on
Martina Camargo's 2016 album Paisaje en tambora.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank the many families (musical and otherwise) who made
this research possible. Fieldwork for some of the research presented here was
supported by the Society for Ethnomusicology 21st Century Fellowship, the UIUC
Kilby Fellowship, and the Dorothy S. and Norman E. Whitten Endowment Fund, for
which the author is ever grateful.
This article is published in Open Access and licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-
ND 4.0 licence – full information at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
_______________________________________________________

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Music and Arts in Action | Volume 6 | Issue 2 | 2018

Special Edition – Keywords for Music in Peacebuilding

* Carrera 1 Este No. 18A - 10, Bloque V, Bogotá, Colombia

'original optimism' is a disposition of security, or the absence of anxiety, in basic

harm can also constitute violence.

16 For an example of Joche playing gaita, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAB3BdPpSwI.

Figure 2: Joche Álvarez building gaitas in Cartagena, Bolívar, Colombia 2008

(HOW) CAN WE QUANTIFY TRUSTING?

practices, which we can consider in terms of thickness and radii of trust.

be almost diametrically opposed in their aims and impacts on trusting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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