Abstract
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Take Belfast. Two strangers meet and a guessing game starts immediately. The first thing you think is, “Is this person a Catholic or a Protestant?” … It’s a kind of self preservation technique. If it fails, and if your luck is really out, you could end up being killed.
—Review of MacLaverty (1995) by Philip Marchand (1995)
Thinking depends upon institutions.... Classifications, logical operations, and guiding metaphors are given to the individual by society.
—Mary Douglas (1986, p. 10)
In the beginning, however, there were no words. Language seems to have appeared in evolution only after humans and species before them had become adept at generating and categorizing actions and at creating and categorizing mental representations of objects, events, and relations.
—Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio (1992, p. 89)
This chapter is reprinted from Frank K. Salter (Ed.) Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity (chapter 6). New York: Berghahn Books, 2002, with the kind permission from Berghahn Books.
This chapter is a revised version of a paper first presented at the Werner Reimers Foundation Symposium on “Risky Transactions: Kinship, Ethnicity, and Trust,” Bad Homburg, Germany, 23–25 September 1996. See also Acknowledgements.
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Acknowledgements
The paper was also presented at the Canadian Law and Economics Association John M. Olin Annual Conference on Law and Economics, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, 27–28 September 1996. I would like to thank Dr. Frank Salter and Dr. Stefan Voigt for comments that were helpful in revising this paper.
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Landa, J.T. (2016). Cognitive and Classificatory Foundations of Trust and Informal Institutions: A New and Expanded Theory of Ethnic Trading Networks. In: Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54019-6_8
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