Advanced research seminar – Project ALICE

Da gestão da confiança: algumas lições para a história

Elísio Macamo (University of Basel)

December 7, 2012, 17h00-19h00

Room 1, CES-Coimbra

Commentators: Catarina Gomes and Julia Suárez-Krabbe


Abstract

In different areas and domains of scientific knowledge production much has been written about “trust”. It was mainly within the field of Economics, articulated with the notion of “social capital,” that great part of what we now know about the relevance of this notion to understand the structure of modern society has constituted itself as authoritative knowledge. The goal of this contribution is to articulate the notion of “trust” with African historical experience, so that we can extract something that Europe can learn from Africa, namely a virtue which is a dimension of “trust” and was analyzed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann: ‘expectation’ (the original German word is “Zuversicht”).

“Expectation” is the general state of trusting in the possibility of something we consider positive to occur, even though we are aware that little can be done to influence the flow of things. Luhmann uses this dimension of “trust” in order to distinguish it from the strict definition of “trust”, that is, on the ability to take risks. The distinction is close to what makes risk and hazard different (the first is a conscious calculation of the probability; the second is the effect to context exposure). Having this discussion as a starting point, this contribution intends to reflect on the important question, at the epistemological level, of the theory of History, which has been one of the greatest challenges in the relationship between Europe and Africa. 


Bio

Elísio Macamo is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel (since October 2009). Previously, he taught development sociology at the University of Bayreuth, where he was a founding member of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. He was born and grew up in Mozambique. He studied in Maputo (Mozambique), Salford and London (England) and Bayreuth (Germany). He holds an MA degree in Translation and Interpreting (Salford), an MA degree in Sociology and Social Policy (University of North London) and a PhD and “Habilitation” in General Sociology (University of Bayreuth). He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies in Lisbon (Portugal), AGORA-Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and a visiting lecturer at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. He regularly offers methodological workshops to Portuguese speaking African doctoral students on behalf of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa).