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Paper short abstract

Drawing on long-term fieldwork among lottery players, small-scale gamblers, and cryptocurrency traders, it shows how mistrust toward the state, financial institutions, and expert knowledge does not necessarily lead to social withdrawal or nihilism.

Paper long abstract

I examine mistrust as a productive social force through ethnographic research on speculative economic practices in Turkey during periods of prolonged economic crisis. Rather than approaching mistrust as the erosion or absence of trust in institutions, I analyse how mistrust becomes an everyday orientation through which people navigate uncertainty, evaluate authority, and imagine alternative futures. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among lottery players, small-scale gamblers, and cryptocurrency traders, it shows how mistrust toward the state, financial institutions, and expert knowledge does not necessarily lead to social withdrawal or nihilism. Instead, it generates speculative socialities grounded in calculation, moral judgement, and collective interpretation. Participants neither fully reject nor fully endorse official systems of value and regulation. They engage them ambivalently, playing with rules, probabilities, and promises while remaining acutely aware of their fragility and potential deception. I argue that this form of mistrust is not simply critical or destructive, but methodologically generative. It produces shared repertoires of reasoning about luck, risk, fairness, and responsibility, enabling people to act in conditions where certainty is unattainable and authority is contested. At the same time, such mistrust can intensify social differentiation, reinforcing distinctions between those perceived as savvy, cautious, or exposed to loss. By situating mistrust within speculative practices rather than institutional breakdown alone, the paper contributes to debates on mistrust as a structuring principle of social life. It suggests that mistrust operates as a mode of relating that both sustains critique and opens new, if uneven, possibilities for collective life in a polarised world.