Giving may well usurp development to become the humanitarian ethos of our time.
From earthquakes to tsunamis, from AIDS to hunger, our moral horizon is increasingly global. Televised images of catastrophes around the world make it difficult to ignore remote suffering as distinct from one’s immediate concerns. All disasters, in an important sense, are global, and as such, our attention is drawn, justifiably, to the victims of misfortune. Yet the story often fails to include the other side of the equation—those who want to help the victims: poor students sending money for those in need, activists struggling to help the injured, wealthy philanthropists seeking to make a difference. The subtle shades of humanitarian efforts—differentiated by varied imperatives, impulses, and systems of obligation and assistance—remain less visible. Alongside the heroic efforts of professional aid workers and the dramatic suffering of disaster victims are those who provide care inaudibly, without recognition and without status.
For Mauss, the gift involves social contracts and reciprocity; every gift demands a “return.”
Most scholars of economic development, philanthropy, and humanitarianism would agree that development, charity, and humanitarianism are each distinct forms of aid. The efforts of the philanthropist, for instance, contrast with those of professional aid workers who adamantly assert, “We don’t do charity.” Yet all of these are linked together through basic concept of the gift—connecting those who are excluded from resources with those who are willing and able to actively engage. Contemporary practices of helping others are part of a larger universe of giving marked by notions of global citizenship and relations of social obligation that entail rights and entitlements, and sacred conceptions of religious donation, all situated against a backdrop of the global economy of giving.
In the context of simple gifts (rather than humanitarian aid), different cultural codes define giving. In New Delhi, for example, it is considered rude to open a gift in front of the giver and there is no Hindi word for “thank-you.” During my fieldwork, my mother-in-law (who is Indian) expressed her motherly love by making tea for me as I sat at my desk and typed up field notes after a day of interviews. Each time she brought me tea, I would say, without thinking, “Thank-you.” How nice it was to have someone bring me tea! However, my appreciation was a source of confusion for her because thanks are not commonly expressed in India. Soon she was bringing me tea and saying “thank-you” to me as she set the tea on my desk. After a year in Delhi, I began to see the depth of this mistranslation: saying “thank-you” in the Indian context threatens to turn social relationships into transactions, which obliterates the possibility of social obligation.
In 1950 French sociologist Marcel Mauss published his classic work, The Gift. For Mauss, the gift involves social contracts and reciprocity; every gift demands a “return,” and in this manner gift exchange is, by nature, reciprocal. Giving manifests social solidarity, for it is through the exchange of gifts that individuals are hierarchically connected to a larger society. However, scholarship on giving in traditional settings within north India has challenged Mauss’s assumption of the reciprocal nature of giving. While Mauss’s concept of the gift offers a basis for relations of social obligation, Indian ideas of dān are precisely the opposite. Mauss’s concept requires a return, whereas dān is a gift that is not reciprocated. Dān is a liberating mechanism that releases the giver of incumbent social obligation and eventually frees the giver of the constraints of the material world.
Back in the early 1990s, as the Indian government liberalized its economy, national wealth climbed and the country began aiming to configure itself as a global superpower and a benefactor in the geopolitics of aid. This period threw into stark relief the nation’s existing poverty and during this time issues of inequality and social welfare entered a transitional period. By 2000, the Charities Aid Foundation documented that India had close to one million voluntary organizations registered as trusts, societies, trade unions, or charitable companies. It also had the largest number of voluntary organizations in Asia. It was in this context that Indians and expatriates alike found themselves compelled to engage with the urgency of social welfare. While some of this engagement was formally registered—through the work of NGOs and other accounted-for types of charity—much of it was spontaneous and undocumented, and often religiously motivated.
In this we begin see how economic development is currently being met by an older form of helping: philanthropy, which is taking on a new valence with the emergence of technologies, such as the Internet, that facilitate a gift going to a needy stranger across the globe. And it is not just the Internet that signals such a shift. Some scholars go as far as advocating direct cash transfers to the poor, bypassing NGOs and government institutions altogether. Cell phones in rural Bangladesh make it possible for women to benefit from microenterprise programs; airplanes take volunteers to remote sites in times of disaster—all responding to the new urgency of the gift. Humanitarianism is a form of the gift; although not a right, it may be considered a duty or righteous action. Perhaps humanitarianism and philanthropy—the gift of an individual to a cause—have become the new development; perhaps giving is the humanitarian ethos of our time.
This article was adapted from Erica Bornstein’s Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi.
Erica Bornstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe and, most recently, Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi.
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