Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity

by Frank K. Salter (Editor)

Trust is a central feature of relationships within the Mafia, oppressed minorities, kin groups everywhere, among dissidents, nationalist freedom fighters, ethnic tourists, ethnic middlemen, exchange networks of Kalahari Bushmen, and families subjected to Stalinist social control. Each of these types of trust is examined by a leading scholar and compared with the expectations of neo-Darwinian theory, in particular the theories of kin selection and ethnic nepotism. The result is a fascinating, theoretically focused yet empirically eclectic contribution to the overlapping fields of human ethnology, evolutionary psychology, and bio-politics. The common thread uniting these diverse phenomena is a trusting relationship predicated on altruism. Chapters examine the strengths and limits of human trust under various stressers and temptations to defect. By exploring the relationship between kin and ethnic altruism and showing its sensitivity to culture, Risky Transactions recasts the evolutionary approach to ethnicity as a blend of primordial and instrumental factors.

Genres: Evolution

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian academic and researcher at the former Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Andechs, Germany, best known for his writings on ethnicity and ethnic interests. He is a political ethologist, studying political phenomena using the methods and theories of behavioral biology in addition to conventional methods. Those phenomena include hierarchy (Emotions in Command, 1995), indoctrination (Ethnic Conflict and Indoctrination, 1998, edited with I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt), ethnic altruism and conflict (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism, 2002, Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity, 2004 ), and genetic interests (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, 2003).

Reviews

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10 - non-fiction

Mixed quality and relevance of essays, ranging from 3 to 9 on a 10-scale. Most are interesting but three of thirteen are entirely irrelevant to the premise of the book. I'm giving an unreasonably high star rating to offset the sole review of '1' given by an anti-sociobiological constructivist ideologue.

[LP · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rated "1" for inviting a piece from the notoriously unprofessional, self-proclaimed "white advocate" and anti-semitic polemicist, Kevin MacDonald.