ZfE | JSCA 146 (2021) 201–218 © 2021 Dietrich Reimer Verlag Te Spectrum of Mistrust Florian Mühlfried Ilia State University (Georgia)  Abstract: Tis article attempts to open up pathways for ethnographic investigations of social practices based on mistrust. Such practices have only recently come to be taken seriously in the wake of the emergence of a ‘dark anthropology’ that pays particular attention to the social life of the alleged opposites of virtues such as knowledge, connectivity, or trust. Analytically, I distinguish between open and hidden as well as centripetal and centrifugal forms of mistrust. My examples mostly come from the Caucasus, a region said to be saturated by mistrust. In addition to current performances of mistrust, I highlight the history of such performances and their genealogies. Tis also means countering the prevailing ap- proaches to (mis)trust, which mostly foreground mental dispositions (psychology) or rational strategies (economy, political science) and often neglect historical embeddedness. [trust, mistrust, dark anthropology, transition, post-socialism, Caucasus] A Meltdown of Trust Trust, so it seems, is one of the most endangered social resources at the present time. Te 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer documented a dramatic decline in trust globally, not only in politics and the economy, but also in the media and NGOs, a process the pollster summarizes with the trenchant phrase a ‘meltdown of trust’. Since then the so- called elites, defned by income and education, have regained some trust in institutions situated in the so-called mainstream, but the general population largely continues to distrust these. Te resulting condition is one of fundamental political alienation; ac- cording to the Edelman agency, “[o]nly one in fve feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them” (Edelmann Trust Barometer 2017). In the wake of post-truth politics, mistrust has arrived at the heart of Western democracies. If there is one thing that Trump voters, yellow vests, anti-Islamists and Brexiteers have in common, it is distrust in the ‘establishment’. From a liberal perspec- tive, the quest of the day seems to be to restore ordinary citizens’ trust in recognized forms of governance and expertise. Book titles such as Living in an Age of Mistrust: An Interdisciplinary Study of Declining Trust and How to Get it Back (Yeo and Green eds. 2017) not only express the (perceived) omnipresence of mistrust today, but also the longing for trust to be regained. In a similar vein, Francis Fukuyama (1995) previously argued that the vanishing of trust in the USA was hampering the continuation of the