Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Development

Humanitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:00:56 +0000

Bosnians waiting at a UN food distribution point in the town Ilijaš, in 1996. Picture by AMN M. Andrea

University of Bristol, Arizona State University

Initially published 18 Oct 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25humanitarianism

Abstract:

Humanitarianism can be broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It manifests not only through discrete acts of helping, but also through a set of practices, norms, laws, and forms of government. The urgency of humanitarian causes is regularly invoked to justify the large-scale mobilisation of people and resources. They provide anthropologists with a critical site for studying the structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations.

This entry explores four main areas of anthropological scholarship on humanitarianism. First, anthropologists have examined the political implications of the humanitarian management of suffering populations, with its emphasis on fostering physical survival. Second, they have developed critiques of humanitarian ethics, particularly in relation to how lives are valued differently within Western humanitarianism, and the political and moral weight carried by the word ‘humanitarian’. Third, anthropologists have interrogated the concept of crisis, with a focus on how local communities are transformed by the routine presence of humanitarians in protracted conflicts or disasters. Finally, they have explored non-Western humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action.

As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, it is likely that climate-induced displacement crises will only grow more common and prolonged. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

Introduction

In the public imagination, the term ‘humanitarian’ invokes a concern for human suffering and a motivation to alleviate it in some form. It gestures to an altruism borne of the recognition of a shared humanity with distant others. One need only think of humanitarian appeals launched on TV, social media, or billboards to see how representations of the suffering of others might inspire an urge to act (Boltanski 2004), be it through donations, volunteering, or public support for governmental action. These sentiments can mobilise people and resources on a large scale in response to disruptive events with devastating human impacts, such as armed conflicts and disasters. Given the scope and reach of humanitarian deployments, it is vital to understand their inner workings and their unintended consequences. This is particularly important because the concept of humanitarianism can be used by different actors for different purposes and in different contexts, ranging from calls for emergency assistance in the aftermath of earthquakes to justifications for military interventions with the purported aim of saving lives. As a contested concept with multiple meanings and uses, humanitarianism offers an especially rich and productive site of research for anthropology.

One of the enduring origin stories of humanitarianism dates its creation to the establishment of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant in response to the suffering he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. In its early years, the Red Cross primarily provided medical assistance to soldiers wounded in battle, though the organisation would later expand its scope to include civilians affected by war and disasters. Today, the sector is represented by United Nations (UN) agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), Oxfam, Save the Children, among others. The Red Cross has also grown into a more complex institution, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) being a private entity under Swiss law, while national Red Cross Societies such as the British Red Cross or the Syrian Arab Red Crescent function as appendices of the states where they are based. Each of these organisations has different mandates and modes of operation, but they generally share an emphasis on prioritising urgent needs through specialised life-sustaining aid, including medical care, shelter, and food assistance. It is important to note, however, that these organisations comprise a highly institutionalised and largely Western mould of humanitarianism, originating and headquartered in Global North countries, whereas there are other forms of humanitarian aid espoused by religious, community, and grassroots actors both within and outside the West that are not encompassed by the formal Western aid system (Brković 2023).

Early scholarly critiques of Western humanitarianism highlighted how humanitarian actors took ‘war as a fact’, in the sense that they sought to remedy not the root causes of war but the suffering that resulted from it. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross in its foundational tenets acknowledged the persistence of war in modern life, and sought to collaborate with all parties to conflict—including states and non-state armed groups—to humanise its conduct and minimise the suffering it caused (Kennedy 2004, 267). Such a narrow focus on suffering, however, failed to consider how aid could fuel the conditions for further conflict. Numerous examples exist from conflict zones across the world where aid has been diverted by armed groups to sustain the fighting, or fomented violence and resentment between different groups, or used to recruit new soldiers from refugee camps and settlements. In particular, the figure of the ‘refugee-warrior’ benefiting from aid poses a moral and political conundrum for aid workers working to provide humanitarian sanctuaries in the midst of war (Terry 2002).

Scholars have also criticised humanitarianism for its historical complicity with Western colonialism and imperialism, and for the continued instrumentalisation of aid to serve the geopolitical and national security interests of donor countries in the Global North (Barnett 2011; Donini 2012). Governments throughout the twentieth century have justified military actions on humanitarian grounds, from India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 to NATO air strikes in Kosovo in 1999 (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). While these actions have not necessarily involved the explicit cooperation of humanitarian INGOs, the United States’ long war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2021 co-opted aid organisations into counter-insurgency programs aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ among local communities through developmental aid and reconstruction efforts (Williamson 2011). While this entry primarily focuses on the values and practices of aid actors rather than states, we discuss the growing entanglement between humanitarianism and development and its implications for the independence of aid organisations from geopolitical agendas.

Anthropology has contributed to these debates by questioning the foundational notion that humanitarianism is an inherently altruistic enterprise, and by interrogating the power relations that underpin the humanitarian endeavour. Anthropologists have asked: what does it mean to help ‘suffering others’? Who is being helped and how are their lives valued? Who is providing assistance and what motivates them? The discipline helps answer these questions through sustained ethnographic inquiries into the everyday operations of humanitarian organisations, and the social, political, and ethical implications of the humanitarian drive to help. In particular, it points to a structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations. The anthropological approach to humanitarianism as ‘an ethos, a cluster of sentiments, a set of laws, a moral imperative to intervene, and a form of government’ (Ticktin 2014, 274) captures this tension.

Other anthropologists have challenged the predominant focus of scholarship on Western institutionalised forms of humanitarianism, and have pushed for a broader understanding of the concept that encapsulates grassroots mutual aid initiatives led and implemented by vulnerable people themselves (Brković 2020). After all, impacted populations are often ‘first responders’ to crises through mutual aid networks involving community, religious, and local organisations, blurring the boundaries between the ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’ of aid (Fechter 2023). Large-scale responses organised by UN agencies, INGOs, and foreign governments arrive later as a crisis garners international attention, displacing local interpretations of humanitarian giving with professional guidelines and principles.

Biopolitics and the management of populations

The gradual institutionalisation of Western humanitarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when ideas about the state’s responsibility to care for its citizens assumed growing legitimacy (Glasman 2020). Anthropological studies of humanitarianism are therefore profoundly influenced by the concept of ‘biopolitics’, which refers to governmental techniques and procedures that aim ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’ (Foucault 1998, 138). Biopolitics encompasses a range of practices and institutions established to regulate the health, reproduction, and sexuality of the biological body based on hierarchical ideas about normality and deviance. Humanitarian actors can be thought of as exercising a form of biopolitics in contexts where state actors are either absent or incapable of safeguarding life (Fassin 2007b; Pandolfi 2003; Redfield 2005; Ticktin 2014).

Much of the anthropological writing on this area has analysed the biopolitical logics and rationales espoused by humanitarian INGOs in the management of populations they purport to help. MSF, for example, enacts a ‘minimal biopolitics’ (Redfield 2013, 18) as they temporarily administer to lives perceived to be in immediate danger—providing medical assistance to endangered populations in conflict zones and ceasing operations once they deem the crisis is over. The INGO’s decision-making on the deployment and withdrawal of personnel is based on assessments of the magnitude of life-threatening needs, such as medical care or child nutrition, and critics have noted instances when MSF waited for the crisis to grow more aggravated before establishing a field mission (Redfield 2013). This focus on temporary solutions prioritises immediate survival but does little to ensure the long-term dignity and empowerment of vulnerable people.

Another key site for the exertion of humanitarian biopolitics is the refugee camp. The refugee camp represents a ‘biopolitical figure par excellence’ (Fassin 2010a, 81), where bodies are contained, disciplined, and sustained towards a potentially indefinite future. An early ethnographic study of Burundian refugees in Tanzania described the representation of refugees in public and policy discourse as a form of ‘bare humanity’, a living body presumed to have lost all its cultural and identitarian inheritances (Malkki 1995, 11). This work presaged later critiques of humanitarian action that centred on what form of life is possible in refugee camps. Drawing from the concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998)—which denotes a form of persecuted humanity reduced to its basic biological existence—anthropologists argued that refugee camps are zones of exception that sustain people only at the level of physical survival and prevent them from realising their full biographical selves as social and political beings (Agier 2011; Diken and Laustsen 2006; Hanafi and Long 2010; McConnachie 2016). Such framings of refugees as ‘bare life’ presupposed an ethnically homogenous nation-state as the ‘natural order of things’, from which refugees were excluded as demographically threatening outsiders (Malkki 1995).

In recent years, anthropologists have questioned the notion that refugees are merely passive subjects of humanitarian management, or that refugee camps are little more than temporary way-stations without a lived history of their own. A growing body of ethnographic work on camps has pointed to the political agency, heterogeneous identities, place-making practices, and transgenerational memory of refugees living in long-term camps. Palestinian camps in particular have fostered a robust national liberation movement, which imbues everyday spaces with intense political significance (Allan 2014; Gabiam 2016; Peteet 2005). Similarly, Burundian Hutus living in Tanzanian camps during the 1980s developed new expressions of Hutu identity anchored in shared narratives of victimisation and memories of violent displacement. In their case, the camp represented a locus of ‘purity’ that protected Hutu identity from contamination through assimilation (Malkki 1995). In other words, refugee camps over time become invested with a ‘politics of living’ (Feldman 2018), revealing how refugees not only survive, but strive, thrive, and contest their devaluation as ‘bare life’.

Beneficiaries of aid also reshape the terms of their humanitarian protection. For example, as the French government tightened its immigration policies in the early 2000s, it introduced a humanitarian exception for undocumented immigrants with life-threatening illnesses that could not access adequate medical treatment in their country of origin. Facing stricter bureaucratic requirements and longer wait times, many immigrants translated their narratives of suffering into medical categories, or even deliberately infected themselves in order to qualify for medical asylum, thereby leveraging the diseased body as an object of humanitarian concern (Ticktin 2006; 2011). Paradoxically, their survival depended on their very exposure to vulnerability (Ticktin 2006). ‘Bare life’ in these instances is not associated with passive victimhood, but points to the myriad ways in which migrants wield their biological vulnerability as a form of capital. Taken together, this literature on humanitarian biopolitics reveals that international aid wields enormous managerial power over the subjects it governs while being actively contested and appropriated by those subjects as well.

Humanitarian ethics

In 1965, the Red Cross established seven fundamental principles governing humanitarian practices—humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality—which have since found widespread adoption across the aid sector (International Committee of the Red Cross 2015). Taken together, these principles embody a form of secular morality committed to the sacred but material value of all life (Redfield 2012a). Furthermore, humanitarian morality serves as a governing framework that extends beyond formal humanitarian institutions and may be invoked by state and non-state actors alike. Didier Fassin (2007a) calls this a form of ‘humanitarian government’. Concerns around the formulation of ethical objectives and processes in governmental affairs has garnered keen interest from anthropologists studying the intersections between life, health, and suffering (Daniel 1996; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003). One of the core challenges they raise pertains to the ethical ideal of humanity that underpins humanitarian action. During the early years of the Iraq War, for instance, a worsening security outlook compelled MSF to terminate its operations in the country, evacuate its staff, and leave behind vulnerable populations unassisted (Fassin 2010b). Humanitarians thus produced a ‘politics of life’ by establishing a hierarchy of humanity between the lives deemed worthy of saving and those left to perish (Fassin 2007b; 2012).

This hierarchy also manifests among aid workers themselves. Ethnographies of humanitarian diplomacy have revealed how local aid workers skilfully leverage their identities to negotiate humanitarian access in places torn apart by ethnic strife (James 2022; Pottier 2006). However, even as they are uniquely positioned to deliver aid in areas inhospitable to international staff, local aid workers also face greater risks to their own safety and more limited prospects for career progression within the organisations that employ them. Transnational border regimes permit humanitarian staff from the Global North to travel more easily between countries, usually along geographical circuits established by colonial history (Redfield 2012b). Meanwhile, aid workers hired locally by INGOs from the Global South frequently do not have the option to evacuate if their lives are endangered, or receive the same standard of international care should they fall ill (Benton Forthcoming).

In the context of the Syrian Civil War, for example, restrictions on the entry of foreign nationals into the country placed the responsibility of providing humanitarian assistance entirely onto Syrian aid workers. While shouldering the risk of navigating an active warzone, these local humanitarian teams were nevertheless managed by INGOs with offices in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, with major policy decisions being taken by senior leadership predominantly from the Global North (Fradejas‐García 2019). Even within the humanitarian sector, therefore, human lives are valued differently according to their race, gender, nationality, and other markers of social difference (Firoz and Lima 2024). The ‘politics of life’ maintains hierarchies between not only aid workers and refugees, but between different categories of aid workers as well.

At an institutional level, the ethical principle of neutrality dictates that humanitarian actors must not take sides in hostilities in order to secure trust by all parties involved and maintain access to vulnerable populations. While a neutral stance appears to position humanitarians ‘beyond politics’, anthropologists point out that this claim to neutrality is also a tactical one, as aid workers regularly engage in political negotiations with warring parties behind closed doors (Redfield 2012a; Malkki 2015, 174). Rather than simply retreating from politics, neutrality is deployed as a political strategy toward political actors, constituting ‘an impossible or negative form of politics’ (Redfield 2010a). Such paradoxes in humanitarian logics represent what Fassin calls ‘aporias’, which, ‘contrary to contradictions, are not a matter of organisational dysfunction but rather of the dysfunction intrinsic to their very functioning’ (2010c, 50). These aporias have been constitutive of Western humanitarianism from its very inception, and at the same time remain insurmountable for the success of its mandate.

Another question related to humanitarian ethics is the political weight carried by the attribution of the term ‘humanitarian’. Humanitarianism is an unstable concept and claims to being humanitarian have to be maintained through constant ‘ethical labour’, which can be described as ‘an ethical practice that join[s] concern for others with care of the self’ (Feldman 2007; cited in Brada 2016). For example, in an HIV clinic in Botswana where American healthcare staff worked alongside with national staff, the former’s claim to be ‘humanitarian’ engendered a sense of ‘unquestionable technical and moral superiority’ that disregarded the ethical commitments and expertise of their Motswana counterparts (Brada 2016, 757).

Even for beneficiaries of aid, the ethical claim to humanitarian relief carries important political connotations. Palestinians have resisted for decades the framing of aid they receive from the UN as ‘development’—broadly construed as the long-term improvement of human life—and insisted on a humanitarian narrative that highlights the transience of their status as refugees (Gabiam 2012). Here, the appeal to humanitarian aid is not only pitched as a global right, but rather, amplifies the urgency of their predicament. Like the immigrants who leverage their biological vulnerability, Palestinians leverage their status as humanitarian subjects to demand a political solution that guarantees their right to return to their lands.

Finally, it is worth noting that anthropological critiques of humanitarian ethics do not dismiss the ethical commitments of individual aid workers, but rather, address the systems and structures within which they perform their ethical labour. In her ethnography of the Finnish Red Cross, Malkki (2015) questions the tendency of critics to trivialise small gestures of humanitarian care, such as making toys or weaving blankets, as being insufficient for real structural transformation. Rather than simply equating the ‘real’ with the grand ambitions of geopolitics, she calls for scholars to take the sentimental practices of humanitarians seriously as a form of ‘imaginative politics’ that is rooted in culturally specific modes of helping. Such an analytical orientation resonates closely with how anthropologists describe the mandate for an anthropological approach to morality and the social good, which requires attending ‘to the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing their ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually create’ (Robbins 2013, 457). In other words, anthropology does not adopt a moralising or normative stance on humanitarian action itself, but rather, empirically traces what moral commitments mean to aid workers themselves and how they are practiced, challenged, and transformed during humanitarian emergencies.

The politics of ‘crisis’

The large-scale mobilisation of humanitarian interventions relies on the naming of specific sites as ‘emergencies’ or ‘crises’. The label of crisis evokes the sense of a temporary interruption in social order, an ‘unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy’ that will eventually be succeeded by the return to normalcy (Calhoun 2013, 30). The declaration of crisis produces a temporality of urgency that demands immediate action, and cultivates moral clarity for humanitarian actors to intervene (Redfield 2013; Calhoun 2004; Roitman 2014). However, by virtue of this logic of naming, situations that remain ‘on the verge of crisis’ or in ‘states of permanent emergency’ are sometimes confounded with the ‘ordinary’—a non-site for humanitarianism—leaving aid organisations in a state of ethical uncertainty, constantly renegotiating the terms of their engagement (Redfield 2010b; Pandolfi 2010). Ethnographies that address the categorisation of crisis situations, and the potentially novel sites and modes of operation that emerge from this exercise, are therefore especially useful for uncovering the ‘complexities, limits and boundaries’ of humanitarianism as it responds to new challenges (Ticktin 2014, 283).

There are many areas of protracted conflict or displacement where humanitarian actors have been at work for decades. Anthropologists have analysed these contexts to inquire how crises are experienced and understood by the populations impacted by them, in some cases over multiple generations. Haiti is one such context. The country has seen waves of civil unrest, authoritarian rule, and gang violence since the 1990s, coupled with disasters such as the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic in its aftermath, and more recently the disintegration of the country’s state apparatus. Haiti was often dubbed a ‘Republic of NGOs’, characterising the prolonged administration of life during this period by aid organisations, with international funding being channelled mainly to humanitarian and development actors rather than the country’s own government (Schuller 2017). As aid came to encompass all aspects of daily living, the presence and logics of humanitarian care became banal (Beckett 2019). Anthropologists make a similar point about the decades-long displacement of Palestinians, for whom crisis is a ‘condition of life’ and whose everyday survival hinges upon their claims on humanitarian rights (Feldman 2012). In such contexts, everyday life is saturated with layers of crises past and present, such that the very idea of crisis becomes ordinary. Put differently, crisis becomes ‘an atmosphere – the often invisible outer layer of life that surrounds us, envelops us, and comes to be taken for granted or even ignored’ (Beckett 2020, 79).

Narratives of crisis can also be rendered useful to neoliberal governing strategies. We might look at the recent shift among aid organisations towards an auditorial approach to aid: instead of engaging directly with vulnerable communities during a crisis, the ICRC has pivoted to tutoring state actors or armed groups on monitoring threats and violations through the collection of data, the production of indicators, and the use of risk management tools (Billaud 2020; Lima 2022). In Rio de Janeiro, for example, a humanitarian programme created by ICRC trained healthcare workers on how to promote their own safety while also protecting their patients from the risk of gun violence, since local police did not operate effectively in territories controlled by drug-trafficking gangs (Lima 2022).

Aid organisations have similarly adopted a ‘managerial orientation’ that frames refugees as an economic burden for host states and advocates strategies to mitigate the burden through international cooperation (Calhoun 2013, 41). For Global South countries where the large majority of the world’s displaced population resides, such strategies also offer unique economic opportunities. Under the auspices of building refugee resilience and self-reliance, UN agencies have negotiated livelihood rights for refugees in exchange for exploiting their labour to benefit the developmental agendas of host states (Easton-Calabria and Omata 2018; Skran and Easton-Calabria 2020). For instance, the Jordan Compact launched in 2016 committed the host government to providing vocational training, the formalisation of Syrian businesses, and the provisioning of temporary work permits for Syrian refugees in designated labour sectors, in exchange for US $1.7 billion in international assistance and trade concessions for Jordanian exports to Europe (Lenner and Turner 2019). This approach was formalised in 2018 into the Global Compact on Refugees between donors and aid organisations, providing a blueprint for future humanitarian responses to mass displacement.

Humanitarian crises are thus used by states to advance the frontiers of what scholars have called ‘disaster capitalism’, forcing open new territories and economic sectors to capital accumulation (Gunewardana and Schuller 2008; Klein 2007; Swamy 2021). At the same time, the promise of development is designed to incentivise refugee integration in the Global South and prevent their onward migration to the Global North. This multi-pronged approach to aid, often referred to as the ‘humanitarian–development nexus’ (Lie 2020; Strand 2020) or in some cases the ‘humanitarian–development–security’ nexus (Riggan and Poole 2024), anchors the legitimacy of humanitarian efforts to the national interests of host states and the security agendas of donor states, which many scholars and practitioners consider a betrayal of core humanitarian values such as neutrality and independence.

De-centring Western humanitarianism

Recent anthropological scholarship has attempted to de-centre the analytical focus on Western institutionalised humanitarianism by turning its attention to humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action. The principles guiding these alternative forms of humanitarianism can differ markedly from the Red Cross principles espoused by international organisations, and are often more consonant with cultural notions of mutual aid and communal solidarity found among grassroots networks that emerge in response to emergencies. To understand these ‘vernacular humanitarianisms’, anthropologists propose to interrogate ‘what people in a certain place understand as ‘human’, ‘humanity’, or ‘humanitarian’, and then to build an analysis from there’ (Brković 2023, 9).

Displaced communities in Myanmar, for example, routinely alternate between the positions of aid provider and aid recipient depending on their circumstances: those who are helped might shift to helping others once they are settled (Fechter and May 2024). Similarly, Greek humanitarians helping migrants (solidarians) during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean actively refused the labels of ‘volunteer’, ‘beneficiaries’, or ‘services’ when describing their motivations, insisting instead on a principle of solidarity based on horizontal, non-hierarchal relations (Rozakou 2017). These cases of Myanmar and Greece are not uncommon, and highlight the value of letting in-depth ethnographic research inform our understanding of how people invest the concepts of humanitarianism and humanity with meaning (Brković 2023).

We may alternatively examine how states and civil society in the non-Western world mobilise aid for distant others by drawing on different articulations of suffering, rights, and humanity (Osanloo and Robinson 2024). Anthropologists have drawn our attention to an older genealogy of humanitarian care rooted in the Hindu concept of dān, which refers to the sacred virtue of charity considered essential for spiritual liberation in Hinduism (Bornstein 2012). Whereas the anthropology of humanitarianism often separates religious philanthropy from professional humanitarianism, the shared symbolism of the ‘gift’ binds both institutionalised redistribution and individual acts of giving to shifting notions of citizenship and the entitlements it affords. Similarly, the concept of zakat undergirding Islamic humanitarianism is seen by its adherents not as a voluntary virtue but as a form of ‘financial worship’ that purifies both the giver and the receiver (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003). While this pillar of Islam may have functioned as an early system of social security, anthropologists note that it has diminished in modern Islamic states from a public welfare institution into a private, voluntary practice of piety.

The idea of humanitarian duty as synonymous with service to God continues to survive at other scales of civil society. The distribution of free meals near a mosque in Cairo, for instance, was primarily motivated not by a formalised commitment to alleviate human suffering but by khidma, a sense of service ‘directed by’ and ‘at God’ (Mittermaier 2024, 256). In Northern Pakistan, humanitarian action is often motivated by jazba, an ‘emotional impulse’ or ‘spirit to get the unlikely done’ and to leave behind a material legacy of concrete, transformative projects (Mostowlansky 2020, 251). These specific orientations notwithstanding, the broader geopolitical logics of Islamic humanitarianism can still at times echo its Western counterparts: Turkish humanitarians, operating in Islamic Africa south of the Sahara, draw on the heritage of a shared religion but nevertheless frame themselves as heirs to an Ottoman civilisation that protects its less fortunate Black African neighbours. The racialised and colonial underpinnings of ‘white’ Turkish humanitarianism here reproduce the historical associations between Western humanitarianism and the European colonial project (Güner 2023).

Conclusion

As prospects for life on earth deteriorate with climate change, it is likely that climate-induced displacement will only grow more protracted and routine for the world’s most vulnerable communities. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, as a new array of actors mobilise humanitarian logics to pursue their own agendas. New spaces may be reframed as sites for humanitarian intervention, such as cities affected by urban violence (Lima 2022), while existing sites and instruments such as refugee camps may continue to proliferate. To deal with these emerging challenges, humanitarians are innovating with new technologies, including drones, biometrics, digital currencies, artificial intelligence, blockchains, and algorithmic data management. Anthropologists tend to remain sceptical of such limited, technical solutions to humanitarian needs, and often warn against the sector’s deepening reliance on proprietary tools—often developed in partnership with Big Tech companies—that rely on extractive data collection practices with minimal safeguards for refugee privacy, rights, and freedoms (Ajana 2013; Firoz 2024; Iazzolino 2021; Scott-Smith 2016; Tazzioli 2019).

In 2025, international humanitarianism faces one of the largest financial crises in its history. Following the abrupt withdrawal of support from the world’s largest humanitarian donor, the United States, donors across Europe also implemented major reductions in their aid budgets. Humanitarian organisations have warned of disastrous consequences for food security, primary healthcare, disaster relief, educational access, poverty alleviation, and refugee protection across the globe. In particular, the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent shockwaves through the sector, interrupting operational partnerships and supply chains. At the same time, the complicity of Western states with Israel’s genocide in Gaza has also undermined the framework of international law that enshrine humanitarian rights and obligations. As another genocide rages on in Sudan, it is more difficult than ever to imagine a sustainable future for survivors of humanitarian crises. In a future marked by resource scarcity, ecological collapse, warfare, and militarised borders, when the protections once afforded by citizenship are waning and the moral appeal of our shared humanity is endangered by the resurgence of authoritarianism, humanitarianism will continue to offer anthropologists a vital terrain of inquiry to understand how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a research associate in anthropology at the University of Bristol, and was previously Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. His work has featured in American Anthropologist, Humanity, and Focaal. Pedro has also previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Rd, Bristol BS8 1TH.

Malay Firoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He currently serves as director of ASU's Global Human Rights Hub and has previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Firoz’s work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Humanity, Migration and Society, among others, and has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Malay Firoz, Faculty Administration Building S171, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Mail Code 3051, Glendale, AZ 85306-4908, USA. malay.firoz@asu.edu. ORCiD: 0000-0002-1323-1946.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Cash transfers

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 04:36:20 +0000

Demoh Contel (left) receives a cash transfer payment from Patrick Lamboi (far right) and David A. Kargbo (center left), who work for Splash in Freetown, Sierra Leone on June 21, 2015. Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank

Martin Fotta Mario Schmidt

Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22cashtransfer

Abstract:

Cash transfers—direct regular and non-contributory payments to eligible individuals—are one of the most discussed, celebrated, and contested social assistance innovations of the twenty-first century. They have helped alleviate poverty and provide quick relief during economic crises such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are heralded for improving the position of women, increasing community resilience, making development aid interventions more efficient, and achieving a more just distribution of wealth. This entry outlines the history of cash transfers and discusses some of their key features. It shows that cash transfers’ variability and ultimate indeterminacy allows scholars, practitioners, and recipients alike to approach them in a multitude of ways. Cash transfers can be used to mould recipients into neoliberal subjects; they can be seen as vehicles to revolutionise the global capitalist economy; and they may be considered as reparations for historical injustices. The entry focuses on three distinctly anthropological approaches applied to the study of cash transfers: Their infrastructures, the human relations that they presuppose and forge, and questions as to what kind of transaction they really are. It shows that cash transfer programmes rely on, transform, and build infrastructures such as digital payment technologies. They also impact gender relations, state-citizens relations and local power relations, and affect the lives of marginalised social groups. Lastly, cash transfers encounter already-existing transactional orders, types of exchange, and categorisations of money which shape their local interpretations. In these and other ways, cash transfers reveal contradictions of an increasingly financialised global capitalist economy that depends on particular infrastructures, bureaucratised state power, patriarchy, and specific understandings of what an economic transaction is. The entry concludes with a call for further, ethnographically nuanced studies of cash transfers.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, scholars, politicians, development aid practitioners, and increasingly also the general public have come to see the regular provision of relatively small sums to eligible recipients as one of the most promising social assistance and welfare state innovations. Cash transfers (CTs), also known as social (assistance) transfers or social (assistance) payments, are promoted for their potential to reduce poverty, revolutionise the relation between citizens and states, change gender hierarchies and household dynamics, streamline inefficient development aid interventions, and cushion the economic effects of ecological and other crises. Echoing these sentiments, a statement released by several UN agencies in 2018 described ‘cash-based assistance as one of the most significant reforms in humanitarian assistance in recent years’ (OCHA et al. 2018).

When advocating in favour of CT programmes, proponents point to experiences with and insights from existing governmental programmes and small-scale interventions. An article published in the New York Times, for instance, presents the activities of the NGO GiveDirectly that distributes unconditional cash transfers to, among other populations, Western Kenya’s rural poor as a potential blueprint for handling a global economy characterised by increasing unemployment, technological revolution, and an unequal distribution of economic assets. In this and similar accounts, CTs appear straightforward and ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (Star & Griesemer 1989, 393).

With 95,000 CT-related publications in different languages in 2021 alone (Gentilini 2022, 7), CT programmes are also possibly the most studied of all social programmes. Research protocols have been built into them and experts continuously evaluate their impact, especially when they are framed as experiments (Howard 2022). Governments, NGOs, and inter-governmental organisations frequently publish reports about individual programmes or analyses comparing several of them, usually confirming CTs’ success in reaching the stated goals or suggesting improvements. Indeed, through research, evaluation, and reporting funded by multilateral agencies or Silicon Valley’s tech sector, CTs gain persuasiveness as a global, rather than local, technocratic policy innovation (Peck & Theodore 2015).

Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other academics have also been intrigued by CTs. They have assessed claims made as to their efficacy, identified their shortcomings and contradictions, or deconstructed their ideological underpinnings. Along with human geographers, social and cultural anthropologists have demonstrated the power of long-term ethnographic research to generate insights into the workings of state and development CT policies. They have shown how local contexts mould these seemingly objective and technocratic interventions, described their unintended effects, and nuanced some of the claims made in favour of CT policies. Equipped with methods such as multi-sited ethnography, anthropologists have revealed why CTs are exemplary ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer 1989), able to jump across scales and geographical borders.

This entry does not provide an exhaustive overview of CT programmes and policies or assess their reformist potential. Rather, it draws on three distinctly anthropological conceptual repertoires—infrastructures, relations, and transactions—to capture the diverse ways CTs operate on the ground and reshape social relationships. Each section provides ethnographic examples that highlight the major insights anthropologists have contributed to a refined understanding of CTs and illustrates diverse ways in which ethnography reveals how these programmes that firmly belong to the contemporary global development repertoire interact with local contexts and shape social relationships.

Cash transfers: A preliminary classification

The COVID-19 pandemic revived the appeal of CT policies. Over 2020 and 2021, in ‘the largest scale-up in history’, three-quarters of all countries across the world expanded or adapted existing CT programmes, or created new ones, as a way to protect livelihoods in the context of increasing economic meltdown (Gentilini 2022). CTs—of different scope, generosity, and duration—represented one-third of total COVID-related social protection programmes and reached 1.36 billion individuals. Put otherwise: one out of six people received at least one CT payment during this period. Two years later, giving cash to people remains widely presented as a tool of pandemic recovery in the face of slow economic growth. Debates, however, continue on what these policies should look like. To some, the pandemic has strengthened the case for a universal basic income (UBI)—regular unconditional payments to all citizens. Others see CTs as a replacement of lost income or maintain that they should only target certain vulnerable population groups. Still others propose to tie these transfers to specific conditions that recipients must fulfil or suggest connecting them with diverse financial services, such as insurance and credit. Despite these differences, the basics of CT programmes are often framed as similar across contexts which allows commentators to characterise CTs as a ‘traveling model’ (Olivier de Sardan 2018), or a form of ‘fast policy’ (Peck & Theodore 2015)—a set of globally-circulating ‘ideas that work’. The appeal of CTs lies in part in their ability to be standardised and implemented across various settings with the help of infrastructural inventions. Anthropological approaches to such debates tend to highlight that CTs are not only technical but also moral and political. The development and character of CT programmes are shaped by who, where, and when they are implemented.

The history of CTs’ adoption and their development is reflected in both their character and geographic distribution. Following the failure of 1980s structural adjustment policies across Latin America and their detrimental consequences on social protection and people’s livelihoods, many of the region’s governments adopted conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs). Mexico’s Progresa (later reformed as Oportunidades, today Prospera) was among the first and became a prototype for other similar programmes. The goal of Latin American programmes was not only to alleviate poverty or improve food security, but also to break intergenerational poverty cycles and to ensure socioeconomic development. This was to be achieved through ‘investment in human capital’, by making cash transfers dependent on beneficiaries’ fulfilment of conditionalities, or ‘co-responsibilities’, such as attending compulsory workshops, participating in public works, or ensuring that children attend school.

The wealth of evaluations attesting that CCT programmes have positive social or economic impacts then led to their promotion by the World Bank, various national governments, and international development agencies. But CCTs’ implementation in countries with lower administrative capacities proved challenging. As a consequence, biometric and digital solutions became increasingly intertwined with these programmes. Moreover, a series of randomised control trials showed that conditionalities do not play a significant role in achieving their desired effects (e.g., Banerjee & Duflo 2011, 155). For these reasons, programmes adopted especially in countries of sub-Saharan Africa are often unconditional (UCTs), or impose only ‘soft’ conditions (e.g., awareness-raising seminars). Unlike in Latin America where CCTs are government-run, in sub-Saharan Africa small as well as large NGOs also implement highly localized UCT programmes which can be quickly evaluated in line with the current trend for evidence-based aid interventions (Scarlato; d’Agostino 2016; Simpson 2018).

Today, CT programmes exist in countries as varied as Lebanon, Indonesia, Ecuador, Finland, and Tanzania. They deliver physical banknotes, e-money, mobile money, debit cards, or value vouchers to eligible beneficiaries. Programmes can be further distinguished according to other dimensions: 1) their organising and financing entities (e.g. governments, NGOs, UN agencies); 2) their eligibility criteria (e.g. are they universal, means-tested or aimed at specific categories); 3) their modality (e.g. are they unconditional or conditional, and in what ways and to what degree); 4) the sums they transfer (e.g. do they provide people with a minimum income to cover basic needs or are they restricted to providing minor income supplements); 5) their regularity (e.g. lump sums versus regular payments); 6) their policy goals (e.g. do they aim to alleviate poverty, provide humanitarian crisis relief, or stimulate the economy); 7) their modes of legitimation (e.g., do they appeal to citizens’ rights, universal rights, or are they a form of reparations).

Given this diversity, there is a danger of asserting a ‘common identity’ across programmes and their correspondence to some overarching model. The immense variability and mutability of CTs further raises questions about the value of comparing, for instance, a state-led programme targeting millions of people that is conditional (Mexico) or unconditional (South Africa), with a project run by a Western NGO that facilitates direct digital money transfers from individual donors in rich countries to a few dozen recipients in Sierra Leone. At the same time, their complexity and the possibility of combining various elements make CTs easily adaptable to local circumstances and appealing from various political viewpoints. CTs can therefore be legitimised by different theories, narratives, and agendas. For instance, CCTs often try to exert Foucauldian bio-political control over people, aimed at moulding citizens’ daily lives or even affecting their reproductive strategies (e.g. Smith-Oka, 2013). Proponents of UCTs, on the other hand, frequently emphasise individuals’ ability to behave in economically rational ways, arguing that anyone can be trusted to use money wisely (Haushofer; Shapiro 2016). While citizenship-based interventions have the potential to raise xenophobic tendencies, means-tested CTs, which scrutinise people’s financial states to determine their eligibility, can reinforce middle-class sentiments about the ‘lazy poor’ (Jeske 2020). Taking a closer look at CTs from an anthropological angle reveals, however, that these interventions are far from simple and easily scalable or replicable. Their implementation depends on local infrastructures and is shaped by social relations and values.

Cash transfer infrastructures

The base mechanism of CT programmes is straightforward and already captured in the name: transferring cash. However, any regular and predictable movement of money depends on other exchanges. Information on the eligibility of beneficiaries must be delivered in specific intervals, targeting and registering recipients requires identity checks, and local agents have to ensure that beneficiaries meet programme conditions set by developers in the state capital or abroad. Moreover, cash needs to be deposited, stored, and withdrawn somewhere. The infrastructures enabling such varied movements of cash, information, ideas, and people across space and time are central. The dependence of CT programmes on functioning infrastructures became salient when, in a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries attempted to ‘scale-up’ their social assistance programmes to deliver aid quickly (World Bank 2020). Given lockdowns and social distancing measures, this had to be done preferably without physical contact. Countries relied on already existing databases or pushed new and innovative digital solutions for registration. The government of Togo, for instance, utilised a biometric voter registration database updated in February 2020 to identify and contact payment beneficiaries. Guatemala’s government, on the other hand, determined eligible households according to electricity consumption levels, and provided emergency cash to those consuming less than 200 kilowatt hours per month or lacking electric connection completely (Grosh et al. 2022, 232). In expanding CT programmes to cover new categories of populations, governments thus relied on existing infrastructural systems, sometimes giving rise to new and heterogenous infrastructural assemblages.

In light of these experiences, there have been calls to strengthen, expand, or outright build money ‘delivery systems’ and to use alternative data sources and digital delivery technology (e.g. mobile phones) (World Bank 2020). The social sciences provide a critical view of this fascination with databases and other infrastructural techno-fixes. As part of this, the anthropological theorisation of infrastructures has become particularly useful (Larkin 2013), as it helps describe the nature of such infrastructural systems and the processes that go into their construction. It makes visible that CT infrastructures are not mere technical solutions. Rather, they are hybrid networks that consist of diverse elements that are: technological, such as bank cards, bank accounts, mobile money wallets; administrative, as they depend on laws and existing databases; social, since money transfers rely on the identities and relations of recipients, local politicians, bureaucrats, and social workers; and material, since they might require physical offices of governments or NGOs, or other places with computers to register recipients. Such CT infrastructures undergird the circulation of cash, information, and people, organise territories and populations, create an often-invisible environment for other interactions, and shape individual behaviour. Understanding diverse political and social effects of CT infrastructures therefore requires conducting ethnographic fieldwork across different levels, including in governmental centres or at meetings of transnational organisations, and considering the work of technicians and bureaucrats of various kinds (e.g. Dapuez 2016).

The role of infrastructure becomes particularly visible during the process of targeting and registering eligible individuals. Large state-run CT programmes, in particular, often face the problem of how to be implemented in rural areas and to deliver aid across large geographical distances (Donovan 2015a). One standard solution has been to create a sort of ‘human infrastructure’, a network of local intermediaries or consultants who report to others, such as district state officers or local NGO branches, and organise intermediaries from among recipients. Such a chain of intermediaries is central to mediating across scales by, for instance, translating and standardising information on persons’ poverty into a language that can be processed by a programme’s bureaucracy or database. Local managers often work in the context of under-invested social services and welfare state roll back. As a consequence, they might resort to imposing additional conditions on recipients. For example, in the context of the Peruvian CCT programme Juntos, Tara Cookson found that local managers and health and school staff require recipients to engage in ‘voluntary’ work, such as cooking for the school lunch programme or registering participants (Cookson 2018). Geographical distance and meagreness of the built infrastructure might be resolved by temporal exploitation: recipients may be expected to walk large distances, to be able to wait for long hours or even days, and to have time for other activities demanded by the intervention. Maria Elisa Balen (2018) provides an empathetic analysis of the centrality of queues in the context of the CCT programme Familias en Acción in Colombia. Beneficiaries queued up to have their identity verified by a clerk who also checked on the computer how much money they would receive. Receiving a slip of paper, recipients queued up again to receive their money from another bank functionary. Potential beneficiaries were also forced to queue up at schools (to receive attendance certificates of their children), in hospitals (to receive compulsory medical checks), and at programme registration offices. Many came from far away and were expected to queue in front of banks and registration offices for hours and even for days in the scorching heat, sometimes only to find out that due to computer failure they could not submit their documentation.

CT programmes’ infrastructures are expected to be value-neutral and standardised, to provide aid more effectively, reduce bureaucracy, bypass politics, avoid fraud and create a more direct link between donors and recipients (e.g Donovan 2015b). Technological innovations are promoted as a way to overcome problems related to infrastructural and administrative inadequacy. CT ‘techno-politics’ frequently imagines a lean state or lean aid organisation that heavily rely on technology to deliver services even when administrative and institutional capacities are limited (Ferguson 2015), thereby promising to depoliticise poverty and development. The possibilities of ‘digital payment ecosystems’ such as payment and loan apps, electronic money transfer, and mobile money wallets have further bolstered this core promise.

While biometric enrolment or electronic payments often improve the situation for recipients, however, the fetishization of biometric, digital, and electronic solutions often obscures their continued dependence on human labour, and hides the fact that technology is often unable to do justice to bodies that do not fit the required norm. As shown by Natasha Thandiwe Vally, for instance, fingerprints worn out by manual labour could not be recognized in a South African social grant programme (2016, 972). Despite the appeal that technological solutions possess in development circles, donors, recipients, technocrats, and local administrators alike might resist power entrenchment that comes through digital control and the accompanying rollback of service delivery. As shown by Ruth Castel-Branco, for instance, local leaders in Mozambique circumvented a complex digital selection method by introducing a rotating system that assured everyone would benefit from the state’s Productive Social Action Programme. In this case, however, the techno-politics of ‘non-politics’ had consequences beyond distribution. In contrast to the estimation of the World Bank, the introduction of a hybrid payment system relying on digital money transfers in urban centres and cash transfers in rural areas actually increased the costs of the CT programme (Castel-Branco 2021).

Like other infrastructural systems, CT infrastructures become most visible in their failure: when people cannot access their money, when money is deducted wrongly, or when benefits are cancelled. Increasingly these issues arise because of the uncontrollability of how registries are used or combined with other datasets. In Guatemala, for instance, the names and addresses of recipients of the state’s CCT programme Mi Familia Progresa were published online in 2010 after a two-year long legal battle. Fuelled by a discourse demanding more government transparency, this conflict shows how CT programmes are influenced by wider debates about the use of digital data. In this case, the publication of recipients’ personal information solidified a dichotomy differentiating between taxpaying citizens possessing the right to scrutinise and audit the government, and welfare beneficiaries who were turned into ‘legitimate objects of public scrutiny’ (Dotson 2014, 351), a bifurcation that simultaneously reinforced the exclusion of Indigenous communities from national citizenship.

Creating registries and digitalising information on individuals also enables states or other entities to transfer this data, for instance, to financial institutions which then attempt to capitalise on the regularity and surety of transfers. Thus, welfare programmes were central to India’s project of financial inclusion and push for a cashless society (Kar 2020). While politically transferring cash from the central government through banks was justified as a means to stop corruption and ‘leakages’ (as governmental funds would make their way to the poor) as well as to encourage saving, developing adequate infrastructure was only appealing for banks when they could produce debt and further income in the form of fees, overdrafts, and loans. In one of the most paradigmatic cases, the South African Social Security Agency hired the private company Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to register over 15 million beneficiaries and open bank accounts for around 10 million recipients. Several other subsidiaries of CPS’s parent company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, then used the gathered data to approach recipients to sell them loans, insurances, and other services (Torkelson 2020; 2021). Bundling CTs with loans in this way might lead to deductions and cancellations of cash transfers of which people might not or only partially be aware. In all these ways, CTs’ involvement and dependency on ‘fintech’ experiments and infrastructures turn welfare into a collateral (i.e. a sum against which debt can be issued) which can enable new forms of capitalist accumulation by dispossession to emerge (Lavinas 2018).

Cash transfers and social relationships

Cash transfers are an aspect of contemporary regimes of distribution and redistribution, and as such they reconfigure sociality (Bähre 2011). Anthropological research on CT programmes has traced these ‘rearticulations’ of social life (Fotta & Balen 2019) through examining the ways in which CTs shape relationships of dependency and power, of race and class, within households, or in local politics. Of particular prominence has been a focus on how CT programmes affect gender relations and women’s lives. Issues of gender have been especially pronounced in the case of CCTs in Latin America, where women serve as prime conduits of social policies and of development interventions (e.g. Molyneux 2006; Tabbush 2010). Although evaluations show the overall improvement of women’s position and decision-making powers thanks to CTs, feminist critiques argue that sex-disaggregated data must be complemented by a more thorough analysis of gender impacts (Cookson 2018, 33). Since women are normally the recipients and are responsible for fulfilling the conditionalities and for enhancing the ‘human capital’ of their children, CT programmes might lead to an increase of women’s responsibilities, weaken their social position within communities, and reinforce patriarchal ideals (Dygart 2016; Schmook et al. 2019).

Even when a CT programme does not explicitly target women, local gender relations, moral economies, and divisions of care labour play a role in how they are perceived and legitimised. In sub-Saharan Africa, actors invariably interpret who is included in a programme through gendered ideologies regarding work, dependency, deservingness, or agency (Jeske 2020; Ferguson 2015, 17). In a study based upon interviews and participant fieldwork with young unemployed men in South Africa, Hannah Dawson and Liz Fouksman, for instance, observed that the inclusion of young able-bodied men into CT programmes was viewed with ambivalence. In the eyes of many respondents, giving money unconditionally to young able-bodied men threatened to corrupt them and to turn them into lazy beneficiaries. Instead, young unemployed men were expected to be able to provide for themselves and others and, consequently, preferred that the ‘government provide jobs, skills training or free tertiary education’ (Dawson & Fouksman 2020, 234).

At the core of anthropological analyses of gender impacts are tensions between the declared ideals behind CT programmes—of fostering people’s empowerment, social justice, rational financial planning, and inclusive citizenship—and the programmes’ contradictory and unintended consequences. These tensions are frequently analysed in the context of broader changes in economy and governance. In Uruguay, the ‘risk reduction’ and poverty alleviation governance by an ‘enabling’, rather than a welfare, state was framed as stimulating ‘self-help’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘civic participation’ (Corboz 2013). These qualities were built into the governmental CCT programme PANES, which was implemented in 2005 and lasted for 34 months. Women who could draw support from extended families, particularly from other female kin, often profited from the programme and managed to invest the money in productive activities such as reconstructing houses and starting small businesses. Many also used the money to get out of abusive relationships. Yet, in the case of single mothers living in urban squatter settlements, outcomes were different. Unable to leave their houses and children unattended due to increasing crime, but depending on cash from PANES, many felt forced to remain in abusive relationships. Instead of allowing these women to become more autonomous, the CT programme solidified problematic relationships as women depended on ‘bad men’ in order to be able to search for employment or participate in workfare activities required by the programme without leaving their children unattended. Ethnographies thus help reveal that effects of a CT programme on women’s autonomy and position within households vary and are mediated by household income levels, local gender ideologies, and patterns of labour control (Morton 2018; Radel et al. 2017).

Another strand of anthropological analysis focuses on how programmes reshape local politics (Castellanos & Erazo 2021; Eiró & Koster 2019). New power dynamics, inequalities, and hierarchies emerge from the very structure of CT programmes, particularly CCTs, as they give some people power to police the behaviour of others and to influence their enrolment. In some Mexican villages, for instance, Prospera created new affective and financial links between the state and (female) beneficiaries, but it also gave rise to new forms of power relations. Local programme mediators and monitors from among beneficiaries could demand other beneficiaries to provide them with unofficial additional labour, such as participating in community works. These new power relations undermined already existing forms of communal organising and cooperation, and ultimately led to a fragmentation of community belonging (Crucifix and Morvant-Roux 2019).

Even when a programme is NGO-run and unconditional, field officers and intermediaries take interest in monitoring the behaviour of the poor. Street-level bureaucrats organising a CT programme in an informal settlement in Kenya, for example, constantly attempted to make proper behaviour of recipients visible and to hide what they considered improper activities, even when such supervising work was not part of their official role. In this instance, bureaucratic activity did not just reflect changing power dynamics, but it also represented an ethical form of care (Neumark 2020) in a context of unequal and asymmetric relationships between foreign donors and local recipients. Conscious of the importance of programme evaluations, street-level bureaucrats tried to ensure that recipients used the money in exemplary fashion. A related theme that repeatedly emerges in ethnographies of CTs relates to the ways agents responsible for implementing and translating programmes into local practice, who are often middle-class professionals, see themselves as responsible for teaching the beneficiaries. They may feel the need to educate them about the value of hard work, entrepreneurship, and self-help, as well as distinct ideas about the state, modernity, and development. Such teaching can be done through mobilisation, mentoring and public works, and it frequently targets older persons and women (Ansell 2014; Green 2021).

When additional ‘shadow’ conditions are imposed upon female beneficiaries by intermediary actors, this can exacerbate power inequalities. One example for this is the CCT programme Juntos, which started operating in highland Peru in 2005 and is oriented exclusively at poor rural households (Cookson 2018). Gaps in its implementation and underfunded infrastructure were not, as discussed above, the only reasons that led local programme managers to impose additional conditions. Local managers were also guided by good intentions and their preconceptions about women beneficiaries and their skills. Just like official co-responsibilities designed in the capital by urban middle-class professionals, the ‘shadow’ conditions imposed here revealed existing doubts about women’s capacities to be ‘responsible’ mothers while simultaneously hiding the extent and character of their care work.

Such ‘making of good mothers’ (Piccoli and Gillespie 2018), whether through official or shadow CT conditions, is often racialised. Oportunidades enabled the Mexican state to intervene in reproductive and mothering practices of indigenous women (Smith-Oka 2013). In the name of empowerment, the aim of the programme was to turn women into ‘good mothers’ by making them participate in medical checks, educational consultations, activities, lectures, and so on. By merging concerns regarding population management (including ideas about family planning, reproductive behaviour, and mothering) and national development, the programme can be seen as a continuation of early twentieth-century attempts to convert Indigenous peoples into modern mestizo Mexicans who follow Western health, education, and family practices.

Despite the appeal of CTs as an ‘idea that works’, transferring and translating CT programmes thus invariably leads to friction with local cultural models, forms of sociability, and economic ideologies. It is also mediated by recipients’ previous experiences with development and welfare programmes (Murray & Cabaña 2019). Though this might sound like a truism for anthropologists, actors implementing CT programmes tend to underestimate or ignore local contexts, which often leads to what Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Picolli (2018, 4) aptly call the ‘revenge of contexts’ giving rise to local mutations, forms of ‘corruption’, circumventions, and adaptations. CT programmes are thus not simply assimilated into people’s realities in ways imagined by planners, but are influenced by local politics, discourses, and narratives.

The very design of many programmes, in other words, reflects context-dependent ideas about human nature (e.g. in their use of behavioural nudges) and the ways in which these can be utilised to shape the future through, for instance, increasing education rates, stimulating investment, or otherwise aiding development. Such mechanisms generative of appropriate futures can, however, come into conflict with popular ideas. Andrés Dapuez (2019), who conducted research with economists from the Inter-American Development Bank and other policy makers as well as beneficiaries in Indigenous villages in Yucatán, describes tensions over what kind of futures these programmes are meant to generate. While for policy designers and for the Mexican middle classes it was important to transfer appropriate amounts of cash that would result in a decrease of the fertility rate and generate economic value through accumulation of ‘human capital’, to beneficiaries these goals appeared to undermine sociability and, more dramatically, were viewed as a drain of bodily vitality.

It is therefore important that any claims about or criticisms of the effects of CT programmes—both of which tend to argue through generalisations—are ethnographically nuanced and related to other social processes. In northeast Brazil, for example, the state’s CCT programme Bolsa Família did not only alleviate poverty, but, as UBI proponents have often suggested (e.g. Graeber 2018), also led to the decommodification of labour through increasing people’s autonomy from wage labour and making space for economic activities outside the labour market. It enabled beneficiaries to decline work in precarious and exploitative sectors and try to become self-employed as small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs (Morton 2019). Ethnographic research thus has the potential to reveal different autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-constraining effects of CTs, which emerge in the process of their assimilation into local ideologies and practices related to community belonging, the responsibilities of men and women, or wealth creation.

Cash transfers and the meanings of exchange

Anthropology has a rich history of recognising different modes of transferring wealth between people according to how the transfer takes place (i.e. its modality), which objects are being exchanged, and how the transactional partners relate. Going back to Marcel Mauss’ The gift (2016) and Karl Polanyi’s distinction between reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange (1957), anthropologists have, time and again, debated how people exchange goods, money, or favours, and how these exchanges are embedded in and reflect wider transactional logics, politics, and cultures (e.g., Bloch & Parry 1989). As recently argued by Anthony Pickles (2022), anthropology, however, has one-sidedly focused on reciprocal transactions at the expense of ‘one-way economic transfers’ (Hunt 2005) such as charity, gambling, inheritance, theft, and CTs. Drawing on and expanding this disciplinary tradition, anthropologists have interpreted the transactional logic of CTs in various ways and thereby revealed that often-contradictory views of CTs can be held in parallel in a single CT programme. CTs may be perceived as simple techno-fixes, or as reparations for past misdeeds, as baits into neoliberal or even satanic debt bondage (Schmidt 2022), as gifts from the state, as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019), as income replacement, as a way to move away from a wage labour system, or as tools to buy political favours.

The discussion surrounding means-tested unconditional ‘social transfers’ and ‘grants’ in the Southern Africa region—especially South Africa, but also Namibia and Botswana—are particularly revealing. Most famously, in Give a man a fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution (2015), James Ferguson reflects on the region’s experiences with these programmes to outline a ‘new politics of distribution’. Ferguson follows Mauss by understanding the whole society, rather than just workers, to be involved in producing value (Mauss 2016). Based on this, he argues that a mere membership in a society should make people eligible for unconditional ‘basic income grants’. Ferguson frames UCTs as ‘rightful shares’ in a nation’s wealth and explicitly challenges the contributory understandings of social assistance and century-old assumptions about money being the fruit of an actor’s (wage) labour (Ferguson & Li 2018, Fouksman 2020).

Erin Torkelson (2021) has argued that Ferguson’s analysis does not consider the existence of ‘racial capitalism’. In South Africa, cash grants were turned into collateral for debts and financial companies predated on social grant recipients. This effectively undermined CTs’ efficacy and continued the dispossession and indebtedness of poor black South Africans who remained in particularly vulnerable and economically disadvantaged positions. For Jonathan DeVore (2019), even unconditional basic income grant schemes are merely ameliorative and do not give people control over their means of life. Elise Klein and Liz Fouksman (2022) argue for the need to recognise contextual differences with regard to who benefited from a society’s wealth in the past and to take into account that CT programmes often ignore underlying (post)colonial power relations. They therefore consider it fruitful to reframe UCTs as a form of reparations that pay for historical injustices such as settler colonialism, slavery, and other forms of capitalist racism, the effects of which continue to structure contemporary societies.

The meaning of CTs as transactions is profoundly shaped by how recipients perceive their characteristics, such as their pay-out rhythms, legal groundings, or the ways in which the monetary values of transfers are established. Uncertainty about the CTs’ modality or their origins causes their meanings to oscillate drastically. Gregory Duff Morton (2014) shows what is at stake at this interpretational interface. Because Brazil’s CT programme Bolsa Família (2003-21), like most CT programmes, was conceived as a social programme or intervention of limited durability and legitimacy, merely aimed at addressing pressing problems and not as a (universal) social right, recipients ended up viewing it as a gift from the government, president, or local politicians (also Eiró & Koster 2019; cf. Diz 2019). The ‘gift’ of Bolsa Familia, however, remained unstable, because there were no guarantees that it would continue or what its future value would be, even though it was reciprocated by the counter-gift of beneficiaries’ co-responsibilities. This dynamic fostered only an incomplete sense of citizenship against the background of an unpredictable state and made it impossible for recipients to imagine the programme’s future. Consequently, when the sums were increased it led to a panic as this was interpreted by beneficiaries as a sign of its imminent cancellation.

While CCTs are generally framed as an exchange, whereby money is dependent on people’s behaviour which therefore needs to be monitored, UCTs are, from the perspective of most emitting entities, understood simply as one-way, non-reciprocal transfers of money. As external and often locally unheard-of transactional interventions that are ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007), they are prime examples for indeterminate transfers that lend themselves to be reintegrated into locally predominant understandings of money and transactional logics by recipients, politicians, or scholars. Even UCTs are thus far from innocent and simple ‘techno-fixes’, or mere ‘social interventions’, as the main development aid discourse suggests by highlighting their easy-to-implement nature. Instead, their local transactional interpretations can be surprising. In rural Niger, the smooth implementation of an NGO UCT programme was obstructed by complex political patronage relations and social networks characterised by antagonism and potential conflicts (Olivier de Sardan and Hamani 2018). When women received cash, for instance, they immediately handed it over to their husbands, i.e., their ‘providers’, and recipients sometimes decided to pool their UCTs, redistributing them according to local notions of deservingness and need. In these and other ways, UCTs were immediately integrated into local and frequently more encompassing notions and networks of exchange and redistribution.

Along similar lines, cash provided by the US-American NGO GiveDirectly was interpreted in contradictory ways by local actors in Homa Bay County, Western Kenya (Schmidt 2022). Most surprisingly, roughly 50% of the eligible population rejected the benefit of US$1,100 paid out in three instalments. Many of those who rejected the payments argued that they were part of a satanic barter trade whereby a sinister cult group would later demand the sacrifice of a child. Some of those who accepted the CTs framed the programme, which was actually a one-time intervention, as an on-going gift relation between themselves and individual anonymous donors in the US. According to these recipients, the continuity of the gift relation depended on the fulfilment of specific conditions such as a renovation of their houses, which they thought US donors expected of them due to the fact that they felt they were partly chosen because of the condition of their houses. Several politicians, on the other hand, attempted to channel the UCTs into their own political campaigns, thereby (re)politicising the transfer as part of local networks of political patronage—a move that for the NGO would have represented a clear case of corruption.

As anthropologists have long argued, money is far more complex than the orthodox understanding of it as the prime medium of exchange and store of value suggests (Maurer 2006; Zelizer 2017). CT programmes differ not only with regard to the question if money is distributed via new digital technologies (such as the Kenyan mobile money wallet M-Pesa), via banking accounts, or in the form of banknotes. Actors also ascribe a plurality of meanings to money that comes from CT programmes and contrast it with other forms of money. CT money is used in a myriad of different ways as a consequence of its entanglement with social practices, moral hierarchies, and political narratives (Wilkis 2018; Green 2021). ‘Money from above’ as Guaraní in the Argentine Chaco have called CTs (Diz 2019) thus acquires a different meaning compared to money earned in the form of salaries or as a result of one’s entrepreneurial activity. Neither being earned through wage labour nor business activity, Agustin Diz’s Argentinian interlocutors described ‘money from above’ also as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019). Along similar lines, money from CT programmes as well as the recipients themselves are often marked as morally suspicious and beneficiaries are asked to justify their deservingness and prove that they act in accordance with both local and international moral standards (DuBois 2021)

Towards a sceptical anthropology of cash transfers

Cash transfers have come a long way since their first implementation in the early 1990s. Fuelled by recent developments in digital payments and their scaling up during the COVID-19 pandemic, they will likely remain a go-to social policy in the near future. It is therefore appropriate to ask if CTs should become the cornerstone of a ‘new regime of distribution’ as argued by, among others, James Ferguson (2015), or if we should be more sceptical about CT programme’s multiple promises. On the surface, and in contrast to structural adjustment reforms or calls for increasing austerity, CT programmes—especially in the form of UCT or UBI programmes—satisfy a demand for a more just distribution of wealth and align with Mauss’ call that ‘the rich must return - freely and also necessarily - to considering themselves as kinds of treasurers for their fellow citizens’ (2016, 181).

A closer look at both the narrative about CTs and their implementation suggests, however, that they might fall short of such a promise. The ways in which they hide the role of intermediary actors downplays the collective nature of economic value creation (Mauss 1985) and threatens to produce new forms of control by the state or other institutions with access to proprietary data. CTs are also often accompanied by a deterioration of social services, thereby putting more pressure on individuals and their close kin. As is often the case with such projects, detailed ethnographic observation risks producing some disillusionment, despite the fact that CTs have undoubtedly helped millions. Yet, without engaging in anthropological fieldwork that connect CTs to their historical and social context, we are left with evaluating promises and assessments produced by the global network of NGOs, think tanks, fintech companies, as well as international institutions who tend to have vested interests in the matter, and who have neither the time, methodological qualifications, nor the will to study in-depth how CTs change peoples’ lives.

Being conscious of the fact that, within the assemblage of market-friendly approaches to development and social assistance, critical evaluations are continuously turned into consulting advice to design better products and interventions (Schuster and Kar 2021, 392), we consider it irresponsible not to conclude without explicitly mentioning a few applied insights into CTs gained through our reading of ethnographies on the subject. Firstly, payments should not be bundled up with other political measures or technological instruments if these are not necessary for the distribution of cash. Imposing conditionalities and introducing new tools of financialisation have frequently given rise to unforeseen and harmful power relations or have reproduced existing inequalities. Secondly, a fascination with ‘non-politics’ and ‘technological solutions’ hides the extent to which CT infrastructures risk being used by government or non-governmental actors in ways that threaten to undermine their positive impacts. New digital and financial infrastructures, for example, can be used for surveillance or to draw people into debt. Thirdly, when poverty thresholds and amounts transferred are set too low, programmes fail to have transformative effects. It is often slightly better-off recipients, and not the extremely poor, who manage to use the money creatively and productively, since these recipients are not forced to spend all of it on basic necessities. Fourthly, it is impossible to predict and control local meanings of CT programmes. Because their source and durability are often questioned and because even the most digitised programmes depend on some sort of intermediaries, both CCTs and UCTs can lead to the emergence of unforeseen ‘shadow’ conditions and be drawn into local power relations. Lastly, presenting the Global South as a ‘laboratory’ for a series of ‘experiments’ in order to provide arguments for testing fintech products or for justifying the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs about UBI is problematic and should be abandoned (Hoffmann 2020). CTs can have dramatic positive effects. Rather than treating them as simple top-down or experimental ‘interventions’, however, they should be implemented as a ‘social right’ and be backed up by democratic consensus.

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Tabbush, C. 2010. “Latin American women's protection after adjustment: A feminist critique of conditional cash transfers in Chile and Argentina.” Oxford Development Studies 38, no. 4: 437–59.

Torkelson, E. 2020. “Collateral damages: Cash transfer and debt transfer in South Africa.” World Development 126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104711.

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Note on contributors

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is a co-editor, with Maria Elisa Balen, of Money from the government in Latin America: Conditional cash transfer programs and rural lives (Routledge, 2018). His current work on resilience through cash transfers is part of the Systems of resilience project (‘Systemic Risk Institute’, Project NPO No. LX22NPO5101).

Dr Martin Fotta, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Florenci 3,110 00 Prague, Czechia. Fotta@eu.cas.cz. orcid.org/0000-0002-3037-317X

Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). He has published on a wide range of topics in distinguished academic journals such as Africa, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Journal of Cultural Economy. Currently, he is finalising a manuscript exploring the economic and social challenges of men who migrated to Nairobi from rural Western Kenya tentatively entitled, “Under pressure in high-rise Nairobi: Migrants, masculinity and expectations of success in an African capital”.

Dr Mario Schmidt, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). Advokatenweg 36 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany. marioatschmidt@gmail.com.

Note on license

The license for this text has been changed from our usual Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY NC 4.0) to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Charité

Felix Stein — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 18:35:27 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 17 Aug 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18charite

Abstract:

Cet article aborde la charité comme un terme «étique» qui facilite la comparaison entre des traditions différentes. Les bases théoriques en ont été posées par deux grands anthropologues au début du XXe siècle: Marcel Mauss, dont L’essai sur le don a suscité des interprétations très variées sur le thème de l’échange et de la réciprocité; et Edvard Westermarck, chez lequel, derrière les préjugés sur une hiérarchie des «races», on peut discerner quelques idées durables au sujet de la relation entre charité et religion. Le simple avis selon lequel tout don charitable est simplement une avance sur des bénéfices à percevoir ultérieurement (dans ce monde ou dans l’au-delà) doit être nuancé par le fait que la «mutualité» est un aspect de la coexistence humaine complémentaire à la réciprocité.

Vers la fin du XXe siècle, certains anthropologues ont jeté un regard critique sur les agences d’aide occidentales. Mais la réflexion sur la charité a été en grande partie laissée aux historiens. Une fois l’intérêt anthropologique pour la charité retombé, ce sont d’abord les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien, puis l’Islam qui l’ont ravivé et ont stimulé le processus de «déprovincialisation» de l’opinion courante selon laquelle la charité est un monopole de la tradition euro-américaine. Si les anthropologues sociaux ont étudié de nombreuses autres manifestations de la charité, nous prêterons ici une attention particulière aux prescriptions coraniques relatives aux bonnes œuvres et aux différentes manières par lesquelles elles ont renforcé la formation d’organisations caritatives islamiques, dont l’efficacité pratique et potentielle a été compromise par une réaction vraisemblablement excessive aux attaques du 11 septembre 2001 contre les États-Unis.

Les anthropologues ont contribué à la critique de l’humanitarisme en tant qu’idéologie et nous donnons ici des exemples de projets de recherche de terrain productifs qui en ont tiré parti. Enfin, une synthèse d’aide méthodologique holistique pourra être utile afin de structurer l’étude de la charité et il est rappelé que la nature problématique de la charité que les anthropologues tentent de résoudre aujourd’hui a été soulevée par l’auteur de la Bhagavad Gita, plusieurs siècles avant notre ère.

Introduction

Le terme «charité»^[1] désigne l’aumône et l’offrande volontaire, mais il possède aussi des connotations d’amour spirituel, la première vertu chrétienne. Il a été utilisé dans certaines versions de la Bible pour traduire, via le latin caritas, le terme grec du Nouveau Testament, agapè. Certains défenseurs du Christianisme, par exemple dans la Catholic Encyclopedia, confondent les deux sens de ce terme. Dans l’Angleterre élisabéthaine, «charité» acquiert aussi une définition juridique restrictive qui reste essentielle dans le droit britannique et américain. Une distinction est souvent opérée dans les langues européennes entre «charité» et «philanthropie». Pour les Grecs de l’Antiquité, la «philanthropie» était «l’amour du principe d’humanité». Mais elle s’est confondue, pendant le siècle des Lumières, avec l’idée de bienfait public dépouillé de connotation religieuse et, aujourd’hui, elle est particulièrement associée à la générosité des riches et au patronage de la culture savante (et, plus récemment, à la promesse de financement du développement d’une grande partie des pays du Sud).

Jusqu’à présent, toutes les tentatives d’étude comparative de notre sujet se sont dispensées de cette distinction entre charité et philanthropie, notamment du fait qu’il n’existe pas de parallèle dans les langues majeures non européennes, comme l’arabe ou le hindi. Un autre terme largement utilisé, «l’action humanitaire» pose problème, parce que le mot «humanitaire» peut être couramment interprété comme englobant toutes formes d’action philanthropique ou altruiste; mais l’humanitarisme en tant que mouvement peut être défini comme une idéologie qui remonte au XIXe siècle (Davies 2012). (Plus précisément, le droit humanitaire international est l’ensemble des mesures visant à limiter les effets d’un conflit armé, et n’entre pas dans le cadre de cet article.) Si nous recherchons un point de comparaison, c’est-à-dire un terme «étique», par opposition aux catégories dépendant d’un ancrage culturel (ou «émiques»), alors le terme de «bonnes œuvres» est tout à fait convenable; mais dans cet article, le terme de «charité» sera utilisé au sens inclusif.

Fondements théoriques

Deux géants de l’anthropologie ont posé les bases, au début du XXe siècle, de notre compréhension théorique de la charité. Le premier est Marcel Mauss, dans son essai sur la réciprocité et la solidarité sociale, Essai sur le don (2016 [1925]^[2]). L’argument de Mauss selon lequel le principe d’échange touche tous les aspects de la vie sociale, dans une «atmosphère du don, de l’obligation et de la liberté mêlées» (2016: 177), a stimulé un débat productif mais parfois confus (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). L’autre pionnier, peut-être moins largement reconnu en la matière, était Edvard Westermarck. Il adhérait aux idées victoriennes sur l’existence d’une hiérarchie entre les «races» civilisées et sauvages, mais sa comparaison globale des traditions de charité (1909), toujours impressionnante à ce jour, explique comment l’aide mutuelle est couramment influencée par des motifs égoïstes et, de façon plus surprenante, comment la charité dans toutes les «religions supérieures» est associée au sacrifice.

On peut se demander pourquoi l’anthropologie socio-culturelle n’a pas tiré parti des points de vue de Mauss et de Westermarck sur la charité avant le dernier quart du siècle. L’explication vient peut-être du fait que la plupart des anthropologues se sont positionnés politiquement sur un spectre situé entre un réformisme social qui dénigrait la charité comme une solution tentant de soigner les symptômes plutôt que le mal, légitimant les privilèges des riches, et un marxisme rigoureux, fermement opposé à la charité, frein à l’inévitable révolution prolétarienne. Mais la conséquence du rejet de la charité privée est le placement de tout le pouvoir entre les mains de l’État. L’hostilité pure et simple envers la charité, complément aux droits acquis par le paiement de l’impôt, est beaucoup moins fréquemment exprimée par les sociologues aujourd’hui, notamment du fait de la prévalence des accords de partenariat entre les organisations caritatives et les gouvernements. De plus, le rôle de la charité privée pour compenser le recul de l’État-providence, avec les conséquences particulièrement désastreuses que cela entraîne dans les anciens pays communistes comme la Russie (Caldwell, 2016), est un thème fréquent dans les travaux de recherche récents.

Le commentaire de Jonathan Parry sur l’Essai sur le don de Mauss (1986) a provoqué trente ans de débat académique sur ce texte. L’argument quelque peu provocateur de Parry consistait à présenter le don pur ou gratuit, associé aux religions de salut (renoncement volontaire à des ressources sans rien attendre en retour) comme une sorte de complément dialectique à la marchandisation des biens qui domine les sociétés industrielles occidentales. Peu après, Mary Douglas (1990), sans faire aucune référence à Parry dans son introduction à une traduction en anglais de l’Essai sur le don, dénigrait la notion même de don gratuit. Pour ce qui nous concerne aujourd’hui, nous pouvons extraire deux suggestions liées de l’essai de Mauss.

D’abord, lorsqu’un don ne peut pas être réciproque, le donateur bénéficie d’un crédit moral, mais le bénéficiaire s’en trouve offensé. D’où la réputation de «froideur» souvent attribuée à la charité organisée en Europe depuis le XIXe siècle, notamment lorsqu’elle évite les relations en face-à-face entre donateurs et bénéficiaires. Les réformateurs sociaux ont cherché à la remplacer par l’État-providence. L’ethnographie indienne révèle une interprétation du don charitable particulièrement sinistre: les dons non réciproques faits aux prêtres et aux renonçants peuvent porter malheur et transmettre ce mauvais sort du donateur au bénéficiaire si de soigneuses précautions ne sont pas prises.

Ensuite, un «don gratuit» ne peut admettre aucune dimension de réciprocité. Lorsque je fais un don, je dois le faire de façon à ce que personne (moi y compris) n’y voie aucun aspect transactionnel ou ne s’attende à ce que j’en sois récompensé, dans ce monde ou dans «l’économie céleste» de l’au-delà. Bien que ce paradoxe soit marquant dans les trois religions abrahamiques, c’est en Inde qu’il est le plus élaboré. La Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, voir aussi Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distingue la «charité en signe de bonté» (le don sans rien attendre en retour), la «charité en signe de passion» (avec intention de récompense, ou le don à contrecœur) et la «charité en signe de noirceur» (un don effectué au mauvais moment ou au mauvais endroit, à un bénéficiaire indigne ou avec mépris). James Laidlaw décrit comment, dans la secte Shvetambar («vêtus de blanc») du jaïnisme indien, lorsque les renonçants célibataires itinérants font l’aumône de nourriture auprès des familles laïques, ils affichent une «indifférence revêche» plutôt que leur gratitude ou leur appréciation, le but étant de ne pas créer de relation sociale et d’atteindre une perfection spirituelle éternelle (Laidlaw 2000: 632). D’après Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), le bénévolat islamique des femmes des classes moyennes et supérieures auprès des pauvres dans une ville d’Anatolie centrale, poursuit un objectif exactement contraire: renforcer la solidarité par le contact physique et la «transformation éthique» du donateur, afin que les hiérarchies de classe soient atténuées. La monographie d’Erica Bornstein basée sur son travail de terrain à Delhi montre en quoi les croyances et pratiques regroupées dans un «hindouisme» moderne interagissent avec les traditions séculières, bouddhistes, islamiques et chrétiennes, pour former un paysage caritatif diversifié, à la fois au plan international et en Inde (Bornstein 2012).

Les interprétations de Mauss sont compliquées par le fait qu’il considérait tous les dons comme impliquant métaphoriquement un sacrifice: lorsque je fais un don, je donne une part de moi-même. Westermarck soulignait pour sa part que, dans les enseignements chrétien et juif, l’aumône venait remplacer les offrandes sacrificielles à Dieu. La charité en général est habituellement saluée comme une expression d’empathie ou, à l’inverse, dénigrée comme apaisant la conscience des donateurs et maintenant le statu quo. Mais Westermarck suggère une troisième voie dans la façon de la concevoir: il l’envisage comme un acte de dévotion. Les prières adressées par les bénéficiaires sont, dans les traditions abrahamiques, une manière d’offrir en retour (le revers étant les malédictions murmurées par ceux qui sont injustement traités). Ilana Silber affirme que de subtils «échos» des idéologies et pratiques sacrificielles perdurent au fil du temps, comme le commandement chrétien selon lequel le don charitable est un moyen pour les fidèles d’imiter le don de Dieu que constitue le sacrifice de Jésus (Silber 2000: 305, 310). Elle affirme que trois types de don religieux doivent être distingués dans l’Ancien Testament: les dons à Dieu, ceux aux représentants religieux et ceux aux nécessiteux. La doctrine chrétienne de la diakonia, ou service, insiste toutefois sur le fait que tout acte au profit des affamés, des assoiffés, des sans-abri, des démunis, des malades ou des prisonniers équivaut à rendre le même service à Dieu (Mathieu 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, dans un article sur le bénévolat islamique en Égypte (2014) suivant Fassin (2012), associe étroitement la tradition chrétienne et post-chrétienne de la charité avec la compassion, contrairement à l’obéissance religieuse qu’elle avait observée dans la pratique de certains de ses interlocuteurs musulmans du Caire. Mais l’histoire des institutions caritatives, parmi les nombreuses institutions et dénominations chrétiennes, est si variée qu’il existe un risque de généralisation abusive au sujet de leurs motivations, qui incluent la renonciation, l’abnégation et l’expiation, ainsi que la compassion.

Dans la droite ligne d’une tendance générale des sciences sociales à reconnaître la porosité de la distinction entre le religieux et le «séculier», un caractère «quasi-religieux» peut être attribué à certaines des agences humanitaires et de développement séculières les plus performantes (Barnett et Stein 2012), dans la mesure où elles sont guidées par des principes moraux fortement internalisés, un respect pour leurs fondateurs charismatiques et un engagement pour le monde dans son ensemble. Philip Fountain, motivé par son étude ethnographique auprès du Mennonite Central Committee, une agence de développement chrétienne d’Amérique du Nord, s’est intéressé à ce problème conceptuel, en partant de la réflexion selon laquelle tout développement, qu’il soit marqué comme religieux ou non, est peut-être inévitablement prosélyte en ce qu’il cherche à modifier les pratiques sociales d’autrui (Fountain 2015).

Réciprocité et mutualité

Des études ethnographiques suggèrent que l’analyse de la charité limitée aux équations de l’offre et de la récompense est peut-être trop monodimensionnelle. Elles nous renvoient aux débats anthropologiques non résolus sur la relation entre réciprocité et mutualité et sur la nature de l’altruisme.

Mittermaier, dans un autre article (2013), en se basant sur son travail de terrain en Égypte en 2011-2012, met une économie de la grâce (baraka), qui insiste sur la générosité, en contraste avec une économie de la récompense (thawab) qui vise à s’assurer une place au paradis: ce dernier modèle, selon elle, a été accentué par la marche du capitalisme dans les sociétés arabes. Emanuel Schaeublin, dans son étude de l’aumône à Naplouse en Cisjordanie palestinienne (2016) avance, suite à un article riche mais difficile à saisir de Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), que pour ses interlocuteurs musulmans, la richesse est l’expression d’une abondante générosité divine (en arabe, rizq) et qu’avec Dieu, il ne peut pas y avoir de réciprocité. Mittermaier comme Schaeublin dans leurs ethnographies fines nous renvoient à la théologie islamique et s’abstiennent de toute comparaison «étique». Mais en avançant la primauté du don, ils nous indiquent un nexus de concepts qu’on pourrait qualifier de contre-sujet en musique, complémentaire au thème de la réciprocité. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) a proposé le concept de grâce non seulement comme fondement du christianisme, mais aussi comme un terme «étique» associé à l’idée de charité: «La grâce est toujours quelque chose de plus, au-dessus de "ce qui compte", de ce qui est obligatoire ou prévisible».

Meyer Fortes affirmait (2004 [1969]: 231-2) que la parenté trouve ses racines dans un principe de «concorde» («amity») ou «d’altruisme prescriptif», qui s’étend au-delà de la famille dans des domaines plus larges. Pour James Woodburn (1998), spécialiste des sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs, la réciprocité n’est pas universelle à tous les groupes humains: les Hadza de Tanzanie ne comprennent pas le concept de générosité ou de charité car ils sont profondément et fermement engagés dans le partage égalitaire. David Maybury-Lewis cite un ancien du peuple Gabra, des nomades du nord du Kenya: «Même le lait de nos propres animaux ne nous appartient pas. Nous devons le donner à ceux qui en ont besoin, parce qu’un homme pauvre est une honte pour nous tous» (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, d’après le travail de terrain d’Aneesa Kassam).

Les anthropologues sociaux s’intéressent aux valeurs ou principes conduisant à l’altruisme. Les biologistes, à l’inverse, classent un comportement comme altruiste dans la mesure où il réduit le succès de reproduction d’un organisme A en augmentant celui d’un organisme B. Le paradoxe de l’altruisme, l’une des plus grandes énigmes de l’évolution, a été exprimé pour la première fois par Darwin dans ses réflexions sur l’existence d’insectes stériles, et a suscité une vaste littérature scientifique (largement évitée par les anthropologues sociaux). Marshall Sahlins, cependant, s’appuyant sur les travaux du psychologue cognitif et développemental Michael Tomasello, déduit que «l’intentionnalité partagée» ou intersubjectivité est une capacité à la mutualité propre à l’être humain, non discernable chez les primates non humains (Sahlins 2001, Tomasello 2009). Dans la mesure où la science post-darwinienne a détrôné pratiquement tout autre indicateur présumé d’unicité humaine flagrante, le débat semble rester ouvert. La biographie d’un excentrique génie, George R. Price (1922-75), collègue du célèbre sociobiologiste W.D. Hamilton), explique comment il a tenté de démontrer mathématiquement qu’un comportement ostensiblement altruiste respecte en fait une échelle précisément calibrée d’intérêt personnel dépendant du degré de proximité entre le bienfaiteur et le bénéficiaire (Harman 2010).

Pour le primatologue Frans de Waal, cependant, l’altruisme humain n’est pas un problème théorique. N’en déplaise à Tomasello, il fait remonter son évolution au moment où les femelles mammifères ont commencé à nourrir leurs petits. L’empathie est associée à la libération de l’hormone ocytocine: de Waal et ses collaborateurs ont même émis le postulat que les humains et les campagnols des prairies ont en commun les mécanismes biologiques du comportement de consolation (Burkett et al. 2016). Parce que l’ocytocine nous fait nous sentir bien, la distinction entre le soin des autres et l’amour-propre, de ce point de vue, s’évanouit.

Étude de la charité avant 2000

Au cours des années 1970 et 1980, l’essor des organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) (terme non satisfaisant qui pourtant perdure) a progressivement provoqué une vague de projets d’étude dans lesquels les anthropologues ont joué un rôle significatif. L’ouvrage Imposing aid (1986) de Barbara Harrell-Bond a marqué un tournant: il s’agit d’une monographie iconoclaste sur le travail des agences d’aide internationale, basée sur son travail de terrain avec les réfugiés ougandais dans le sud du Soudan. Les institutions occidentales étaient de plus en plus dépendantes des financements gouvernementaux et soumises à la pression du respect des politiques étrangères des gouvernements; leurs idéaux caritatifs élevés les avaient largement immunisées contre la critique. Elle leur reprochait notamment le fait qu’elles ne s’efforçaient pas de donner aux «victimes» les moyens de prendre le contrôle de leur propre vie. Les critiques d’Alex de Waal (1989) étaient elles aussi très dures à l’encontre de la réponse des organisations de secours à la famine dans la Corne de l’Afrique, qui évitaient le dialogue avec les pauvres des régions rurales qu’elles étaient censées servir; quelques années plus tard, il s’attaqua à la complaisance reproduite par ce qu’il appelait «l’Internationale humanitaire». Parmi les autres ouvrages marquants d’anthropologie publiés à la même époque, on trouve The anti-politics machine de James Ferguson (1990), qui expose l’incapacité des bureaucraties de l’aide à fournir de véritables avancées aux supposés bénéficiaires du «développement».

Certains publications se sont concentrées sur l’élément marketing du travail des agences d’aide internationale, et sur le processus par lequel les catastrophes sont «érigées» en produits consommables par un oligopole d’organisations médiatiques à des fins de publicité et de collecte de fonds caritatives, afin qu’aux représentations de la souffrance de la périphérie du globe réponde constamment un flux d’aide (p. ex. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). Mais la réflexion sur la charité en elle-même a été largement absente de la littérature de recherche florissante sur le développement et l’aide humanitaire. Les historiens ont comblé cette lacune: Paul Veyne sur la munificence des particuliers de la période gréco-romaine env. 300 av. J.-C. (1990 [1976]); Frank Prochaska sur la «philanthropie des pauvres envers les pauvres» en Grande-Bretagne et la «générosité royale» qui permet à la monarchie britannique de rester crédible (1988); et nombre des contributeurs au premier recueil d’essais comparatifs sur la charité à paraître (Ilchman et al., 1998), dont aucun des vingt-deux auteurs n’est anthropologue.

Il apparaît que le stimulus qui a conduit les anthropologues à réfléchir sur la charité est venu des traditions non chrétiennes, avant qu’ils commencent à se tourner vers ses manifestations chrétiennes et séculières. Cela reste cohérent avec le retard plus général de l’anthropologie à étudier le christianisme, à l’exception de l’Afrique (comme l’affirmait Cannell 2006: 1-14). Parmi les quelques exceptions trouvées avant la fin du siècle dernier, on peut citer un essai de Claudia Fonseca (1986) basé sur son travail de terrain dans un petit centre caritatif à Paris qui distribuait gratuitement des vêtements aux sans-abri. Elle y décrit le «pacte implicite» de bienveillance et de politesse établi entre certaines dames bénévoles et leurs «clients», et la transition entre l’ancienne aspiration chrétienne à gagner sa place au paradis par la charité et l’objectif plus moderne de réinsertion des pauvres dans la vie active. L’étude d’Erica Bornstein sur les ONG protestantes transnationales au Zimbabwe a rapidement rattrapé le retard et elle fut le premier chercheur sur les organisations caritatives à suivre le «traffic in meaning», la contradiction entre les attentes d’un donateur transnational individuel et les réactions des bénéficiaires finals (en l’occurrence, par l’intermédiaire du programme international de parrainage d’enfants World Vision) (Bornstein 2005).

Décentrage de la charité via l’Islam

Les réflexions susmentionnées de Jonathan Parry sur le «don gratuit» ont été inspirées par les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien; et Katherine A. Bowie a publié un premier article sur la charité bouddhiste dans le nord de la Thaïlande, qualifiant le paradigme prévalant de «gain de mérite» bouddhiste en insistant sur la stratification des classes (1998). Mais le principal élan vers la déprovincialisation des hypothèses «occidentales» au sujet de la charité en tant que monopole euro-américain est venu de l’étude du monde musulman et de son abondant héritage de commandements religieux à la générosité, ainsi que de ses institutions caritatives. Une fois encore, les historiens ont été en première ligne (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (éd.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

Christian Décobert, historien de l’Islam ancien, a eu l’originalité de faire le lien entre le terme coranique clé de zakat (aumône obligatoire comme la dîme hébraïque, et l’un des cinq «piliers» de l’Islam) et la théorisation de la pureté de Mary Douglas (son premier ouvrage Purity and danger de 1966,^[3] plutôt que son travail ultérieur sur la Bible), le terme zakat ayant des origines communes avec l’hébreu-araméen zakut, qui a des connotations de pureté, de rectitude et d’épanouissement, mais pas d’aumône (Décobert 1991: 198ss). Il existe aussi un chevauchement sémantique clair entre l’idée d’aumône et celle de rectitude via le mot ṣadaqa (aumône volontaire). Décobert a aussi tiré des conclusions (1991: 196) sur l’autoreprésentation et les systèmes de parenté des premières sociétés musulmanes à partir des règles établies dans le Coran à propos de la distribution de la zakat, et leur huit catégories de bénéficiaires possibles (Coran 9.60), et il a proposé un lien avec la tradition agricole d’offrande des prémices à Dieu, ouvrant ainsi des possibilités d’étude comparative qui restent à explorer plus avant (Benthall 1999, Benthall et Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

Le lien entre le don à Dieu et le don aux nécessiteux ne s’est jamais distendu dans le monde musulman où les sacrifices d’animaux sont encore couramment pratiqués, la viande étant donnée aux pauvres (bien que dans les pays industrialisés il s’agisse souvent de viande en conserve importées commercialement des élevages de moutons néo-zélandais). Dans le Coran, les sacrifices majeurs de chameaux et de bétail retenus dans l’Islam sont représentés non seulement comme des cérémonies, mais aussi comme des moyens pratiques de nourrir les personnes dans le besoin. Les sacrifices comme la zakat sont associés à la prière et à l’affirmation de l’unicité de Dieu et de l’Islam. La pratique de la zakat a connu de nombreuses variations au cours de l’histoire de l’Islam, allant d’un contrôle total par les gouvernements, jusqu’aux dons informels par des connaissances privées pendant le mois saint du Ramadan, avec de nombreux cas intermédiaires. Mais le domaine discursif auquel elle appartient reste une réalité pour les musulmans pratiquants.

L’étude des traditions caritatives de l’Islam est particulièrement intéressante pour deux raisons. La première est que, dans pratiquement tous les pays, on trouve soit des donateurs soit des bénéficiaires musulmans, soit les deux, ce qui révèle des pratiques religieuses aussi variées que dans le monde chrétien. Ceci revêt une importance pratique en matière de politiques d’aide et de développement.

La deuxième raison est plus intellectuelle, mettant en question la prétention européenne à un universalisme séculier. D’autres traditions de charité et d’humanitarisme ont été largement ignorées. Toutes les traditions religieuses incluent des commandements de «bonnes œuvres» et on peut penser à l’essence de la charité comme à un acte physique, comme le bon Samaritain tendant la main à un voyageur en détresse ou, dans la tradition islamique, même sourire à un voisin. Mais il existe des différences subtiles. La charité chrétienne, associée à l’agapè, ne se confond pas exactement avec le champ lexical islamique, qui inclut zakat, ṣadaqa et waqf (la fondation caritative islamique). Les règles de distribution de la zakat ont attiré l’attention des érudits de l’Islam et peuvent être considérées historiquement comme ayant posé les principes d’un proto-Trésor public. Elles ont, par exemple, été interprétées comme autorisant le financement du djihad militaire. Mais le soutien aux pauvres est aujourd’hui couramment considéré comme la priorité de la zakat, voire son objet exclusif, et elle est devenue un outil de financement extrêmement efficace pour les organisations caritatives islamiques contemporaines, qui ont notamment actualisé l’insistance du Coran sur les droits des enfants orphelins.

Les auteurs d’une analyse rétrospective remarquablement approfondie d’un épisode de famine et de l’inadaptation de la réponse internationale, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collectives failures, 2011-12, en arrivent à la conclusion suivante:

«Depuis la fin des années 1990, il est devenu à la mode dans la communauté de l’aide humanitaire occidentale de promouvoir les droits et d’écarter la charité en tant que solution paternaliste et avilissante. Les acteurs non occidentaux (notamment islamiques) replacent la question de la charité et de l’action volontaire au centre de l’action humanitaire, au moins en termes d’intentions» (Maxwell et Majid 2016: 196).

Ces auteurs ont été impressionnés par leur observation de la solidarité du personnel humanitaire islamique avec la communauté touchée. Les anthropologues peuvent bien convenir qu'attendre de ceux qui souffrent de la famine qu'ils comptent sur l'application de leurs droits alors qu'ils ne bénéficient d'aucun cadre juridique, n'est rien de plus qu'un trope rhétorique.

Les études basées sur des données ethnographiques de la charité islamique sunnite se sont multipliées ces dernières années. Comme les études sur les sociétés arabes menées par Mittermaier et Schaeublin (auxquelles on peut ajouter celles de Harmsen en 2008, Roy en 2011, Atia en 2013, Challand en 2014 et Juul Petersen en 2015), un ensemble de travaux sur l’Afrique de l’Ouest a émergé (Kaag en 2007, de Bruijn et van Dijk en 2009, LeBlanc et Gosselin en 2016). Les centres d’intérêt de ces études reflètent la croissance des ONG islamiques, qui remonte aux années 1980, en partie dans le sillage de la croissance des ONG en général, et en partie en conséquence de la «résurgence islamique», un effort international pour rétablir les valeurs et les pratiques islamiques. L’un des sujets qui a des implications pratiques est la question de la «proximité culturelle»: dans quelle mesure une organisation confessionnelle peut-elle améliorer son efficacité par un accès privilégié aux bénéficiaires de l’aide qui partagent les mêmes traditions religieuses (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? La réponse à cette question est globalement positive si l’on considère le travail des agences d’aide chrétiennes parmi les populations chrétiennes en Afrique et en Amérique latine. Mais ce qui aurait pu être une augmentation constante de l’acceptation et de l’influence des organisations caritatives islamiques dans le monde a été sérieusement compromis par l’ombre qui plane sur elles: les allégations persistantes d’implication dans des activités «terroristes». Une certaine responsabilité limitée des organisations caritatives du Golfe dans les années qui ont précédé le 11 septembre 2001 ne peut pas être niée, mais l’une des racines du problème remonte à la détermination des puissances occidentales à soutenir les moudjahidin pendant la guerre entre l’Union soviétique et l’Afghanistan dans les années 1980, quand l’aide humanitaire était ouvertement mêlée au soutien militaire des États-Unis à travers l’Arabie saoudite et le Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-18). En conséquence de quoi, de nombreuses ONG islamiques ont été blacklistées par le gouvernement américain, qui a une grande influence mondiale, ou obligées de fermer, et même celles qui présentaient un dossier irréprochable ont dû faire face à des obstacles juridiques et financiers. Malgré la publication d’avis contraires, la domination des experts du «contre-terrorisme» aux États-Unis reste forte, et ils semblent souvent (ainsi que raisonnent Schaeublin en 2008, James en 2010, 2011, de Goede en 2012, Benthall en 2016) s’attendre au pire de la part des donateurs caritatifs musulmans. Des présomptions défavorables sont aussi diffusées sur tous les musulmans «pas à leur place», ces volontaires exprimant une solidarité musulmane transnationale qui voyagent dans des régions lointaines et troublées (Li en 2010, Kassem en 2010-11).

À l’inverse, au Royaume-Uni, une autorité régulatrice ouverte aux organisations caritatives des diasporas de toutes sortes, la Charity Commission, a encouragé le développement du secteur caritatif islamique qui a établi des relations de coopération fructueuses avec l’establishment dans le domaine de l’aide, notamment en adoptant le principe de non-discrimination en raison de la religion. Le seul autre pays dans lequel les organisations caritatives islamiques se développent vigoureusement avec relativement peu d’intervention politique est l’Indonésie, qui a une longue tradition d’institutions d’assistance sociale confessionnelles (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). Organisation islamique majeure, la Muhammadiyah, fondée en 1912 à Yogyakarta, avait adopté explicitement le principe de non-discrimination dans ses œuvres caritatives. Mais elle est devenue plus religieusement exclusive pendant la période de libération du régime néerlandais, et son engagement à l’inclusivité n’a pas encore été formellement réaffirmé (Fauzia 2017).

Dans son ethnographie aux nombreuses facettes sur les musulmans Hui en Chine, Matthew S. Erie explore en quoi les principes islamiques traditionnels du don charitable sont négociés dans une sorte de «compétition de valeur» avec les pratiques de don dominantes des Han et avec les anxiétés sécuritaires du parti-État officiellement athée (Erie 2016). Le terme désignant le don volontaire musulman, nietie, est dérivé du terme coranique niyyah, intention ou motivation, sans distinction en chinois entre l’objet du don et l’acte de don. Conformément à la pratique Taoïste, mais contrairement au commandement coranique selon lequel le don charitable confère un mérite supplémentaire lorsqu’il est effectué en toute discrétion, les dons individuels et familiaux du nietie sont affichés nommément sur les murs des mosquées. Des collectes de nietie sont organisées pour les secours soutenus par le gouvernement après les tremblements de terre (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Le débat au sein du monde islamique sur l’éthique du don charitable s’est notamment concentré sur les règles de la zakat. Le point de vue traditionnel de la plupart des oulémas était que seuls des musulmans pouvaient en être les bénéficiaires. Libérées de cette restriction, certaines organisations caritatives islamiques ont pu faire cause commune avec les principales ONG séculières et chrétiennes. Cette différence d’interprétation des règles de la zakat, comme d’autres (telles que la mesure dans laquelle elles autorisent le prosélytisme) peuvent être vues comme intégrant des concepts qui sont au cœur des débats actuels plus larges au sein de l’Islam aujourd’hui (Benthall 2016: 18). Elles ont aussi un certain rapport avec la réflexion anthropologique sur la charité en général, dans la mesure où l’Islam, avec son histoire missionnaire et expansionniste, présente un universalisme alternatif à celui souvent pris pour acquis du Christianisme et de son héritier, l’universalisme séculier post-Lumières.

La critique de l’humanitarisme

L’étude de la charité par les anthropologues sociaux du monde entier s’est étendue ces dernières années. Ils ne s’intéressent pas tous aux mêmes questions. Par exemple, la monographie de C. Julia Huang sur le mouvement d’assistance sociale internationale Tzu Chi (fondé par une modeste nonne bouddhiste taïwanaise, la vénérable Cheng Yen – née en 1937 – et qui compte aujourd’hui des millions de sympathisants) est principalement axée sur le thème wébérien du charisme et de sa bureaucratisation (Huang 2009). Ce modèle peut notamment être applicable aux institutions caritatives de toute sorte lorsqu’elles s’étendent, du fait qu’elles sont chargées de valeurs morales fortes tout en étant obligées d’entrer en concurrence comme des entreprises. L’engagement séculaire spécifique des organisations caritatives chrétiennes dans les soins aux personnes atteintes de la lèpre (et plus récemment, dans la lutte contre leur stigmatisation) a attiré l’attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). Mais ces approches semblent marginales par rapport à la tendance actuelle d’analyse des agences humanitaires.

Les professionnels des secours et du développement (parfois affublés du sobriquet de «citoyens d’Aideland») contestent souvent le fait que leur action ait quoi que ce soit à voir avec la charité. Leur position pourrait bien être un exemple de déformation professionnelle. Des initiatives multinationales ambitieuses ont appelé l’entreprise humanitaire à passer de la motivation charitable à une motivation poussée par l’impératif de «solidarité mondiale» (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). Mais ce concept noble est confronté à l’évidence des inégalités internationales flagrantes, au mieux légèrement atténuées par l’action humanitaire, et manque de soutien dans la tradition usuelle. Les récents travaux des anthropologues et autres se sont ralliés à interroger l’idéologie de l’humanitarisme (p. ex. Bornstein at Redfield (éds) 2010).

Le concept de «raison humanitaire» exprimé par Didier Fassin a eu une large influence (Fassin 2011). Il entend par là une idéologique omniprésente dans le monde, moralement intouchable. En la confrontant, il cherche à faire se chevaucher les deux sens normalement contradictoires de l’idéologie: d’un côté un voile insidieux masquant des intérêts économiques brutaux (comme dans les travaux de Karl Marx) et, de l’autre côté, un système culturel qui donne un sens aux relations sociales (comme dans les travaux de Clifford Geertz). Renforcé par une ethnographie rigoureuse (il a une formation de médecin et a été vice-président de Médecins Sans Frontières) son argument selon lequel l’humanitarisme est une forme de gouvernance occidentale, dépendant de l’existence illusoire d’une «communauté internationale», apparaît comme une application de la science sociale dans toute sa splendeur. Sans aucun doute (et Fassin s’inscrit dans la droite ligne de la critique beaucoup plus ancienne de la «charité»), l’humanitarisme présente des aspects nettement conservateurs et peut même déshumaniser, en réduisant les survivants à la «vie nue» ce qu’Agamben (1995) a diagnostiqué, par exemple dans de nombreux camps de réfugiés (Agier 2014). L’ethnographie remarquable de Peter Redfield sur Médecins Sans Frontières s’appuie sur la critique d’Agamben et de Fassin tout en détaillant les réussites uniques de cette agence et en la reconnaissant comme l’une des ONG les plus autocritiques (Redfield 2013), même s’il remet par ailleurs en question l’argument excentrique de MSF selon lequel elle n’est pas une organisation «caritative», malgré le succès de ses collectes de fonds publiques (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

Entre les mains d’analystes en chambre, une approche revenant sur le concept de «biopouvoir» de Foucault (la subjugation des corps et le contrôle des populations) peut être exagérée, notamment lorsque la brutalité de nombreux régimes non occidentaux aussi bien que occidentaux est sous-estimée. Mais la critique de la «gouvernance humanitaire» a animé de nombreuses publications fondées sur l’ethnographie et portant sur la charité. Les occupants des camps de réfugiés (estimés à environ six millions de personnes en 2014 et dont le nombre a rapidement augmenté depuis) peuvent être considérés comme des objets de charité (même lorsque les administrateurs sont des agences gouvernementales ou internationales) dans la mesure ou leurs droits en tant que citoyens sont suspendus dans des espaces qui sont «hors limites» et régis par des règlements spéciaux (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson dresse le portrait intense, quoique impressionniste, des conséquences d’un tremblement de terre majeur dans l’État du Gujarat, en Inde, en 2001: dégradation du tissu social avec la complicité d’organisations philanthropiques de toute sorte (le pire exemple étant celui d’une école pour orphelins montée par un pédophile britannique). Simpson innove en y incluant des organisations indiennes locales et de la diaspora du Gujarat, de sorte que les organisations caritatives qu’il critique ne sont pas seulement celles d’origine occidentale (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari a publié son ouvrage complet sur la crise des migrants en Méditerranée (2015) juste avant qu’elle n’atteigne son point d’ébullition. Même si Albahari est sensible à tous les autres aspects de la crise après une décennie de recherches, c’est son travail bénévole en 2005 dans un centre de demandeurs d’asile dans une petite ville côtière du talon de la botte italienne qui confère à son livre toute son autorité. Albahari y montre comment une myriade d’organisations caritatives religieuses et séculières, soi-disant indépendantes, ont assumé de facto un rôle de gendarme. Sa monographie soutient l’argument selon lequel les critiques les plus approfondies des efforts caritatifs restent aujourd’hui celles renforcées par l’observation participante, comme dans les premiers travaux d’Harrell-Bond et Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnostique un «besoin» chez les professionnels de la Croix Rouge finlandaise qui ont servi à l’étranger: ils sont frustrés par la routine de la vie de classe moyenne, rendue plus difficile à supporter par les longs hivers, et recherchent une sorte d’épanouissement personnel qu’ils ne peuvent pas obtenir chez eux. Les anthropologues de l’hémisphère Nord reconnaîtront peut-être ce sentiment.

Un modèle holistique

L’école germano-néerlandaise d’anthropologie présente un modèle méthodologique dans lequel l’étude des initiatives caritatives peut être insérée. Ce modèle s’appuie sur un concept étendu de sécurité sociale, décrit par Franz et Keebet von Benda-Beckman comme la «dimension de l’organisation sociale s’agissant de tous les aspects de sécurité non considérés comme dépendant exclusivement de la responsabilité individuelle» (Thelan et al. 2009). L’un des mérites de cette démarche méthodologique est qu’elle prête totalement attention aux points de vue des bénéficiaires de la charité et à la question de l’évaluation de son efficacité. Cinq «couches» de description sont identifiées: les notions idéologiques et culturelles de risque et de soin; la prise en charge institutionnelle, basée sur des droits clairement définis; les relations sociales existant entre les fournisseurs et les bénéficiaires; les actions concrètes telles que l’assistance de personne à personne, et le transfert de ressources; et enfin, les conséquences des interventions pour les fournisseurs comme pour les bénéficiaires. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applique cette méthode dans un article sur le changement des réponses caritatives face à l’effondrement des structures étatiques en ex-Yougoslavie. Dans la ville croate ethniquement mixte de Knin en 2001, au lendemain de la guerre serbo-croate, la branche locale de l’organisation catholique Caritas a lancé une campagne caritative émouvante pour les «Croates affamés» de la ville, adoptant ce que Leutloff-Grandits appelle une «politique offensive d’ingénierie ethnique» par d’autres moyens. Une préférence a été affichée pour les Croates nouvellement arrivés de Bosnie, causant un ressentiment à la fois parmi les catholiques croates et les orthodoxes serbes de retour. Parmi les quelques publications détaillées qui prennent en compte toutes les «couches» de l’analyse émise par les von Benda-Beckman (même si elles ne se rangent pas à leurs suggestions), on peut distinguer Famine in Somalia (2016) de Maxwell et Majid et Crimes of peace (2015) d’Albahari, toutes deux déjà mentionnées.

Conclusion: du progrès dans la charité?

Au cours de la parenthèse de la moitié du XXe siècle susmentionnée, entre les écrits de Mauss et Westermarck et les contributions innovantes d’Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal et Parry, un anthropologue a fait figure d’exception en portant un intérêt soutenu au thème de la charité: R.R. Marett. Il écrit ainsi: «le vrai progrès est le progrès de la charité, toutes les autres avancées lui étant secondaires» (Marett 1935: 40). Il considérait les soins maternels comme la source première de la charité (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Même si son style peut sembler sentimental aux lecteurs d’aujourd’hui, il peut être considéré comme annonciateur de Fortes sur la concorde et Frans de Waal sur l’ocytocine. Cependant, une réflexion sur la charité ne peut ignorer la présence de la réciprocité qui plane et menace toujours la pureté du don gratuit. La Bhagavad Gita reconnaissait ce dilemme moral il y a plus de deux millénaires.

La phrase de Marett sur le progrès résonne aujourd’hui et nous invite à nous questionner sur ce que nous devrions considérer comme le progrès. Depuis les années 1960, un mouvement informe connu sous le nom de «responsabilité sociale d’entreprise» peut être considéré comme une variante moderne de la charité, et ses manifestations font l’objet d’une attention ethnographique, par exemple en Afrique du Sud (Rajak 2011) et en Arabie saoudite (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Parmi les innovations plus récentes méritant d’être étudiées, on peut citer l’apparition de cabinets de consultants qui donnent aux jeunes héritiers des conseils sur la meilleure façon de devenir des donateurs philanthropes.

Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui fut qualifié avec condescendance «d’anthropologie appliquée» semble aujourd’hui reprendre de la vigueur au sein de la discipline. Les opportunités sont nombreuses pour les anthropologues de s’appuyer sur les travaux précédents en matière de charité d’une façon à la fois utile sur le plan pratique et sophistiquée sur le plan théorique, à un moment où la demande de don volontaire et de bénévolat est plus importante que jamais.

Notes de l’auteur

Cet article utilise du matériel déjà publié par l’auteur dans trois autres articles de synthèse: ‘Charity’ dans Fassin, D. (éd.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, dans MacGinty R. & J.H. Peterson (éds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ dans Callan H. (éd.) 2018. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Je présente mes remerciements aux éditeurs pour les opportunités de réflexion qu’ils m’ont données. Cet article doit beaucoup à Felix Stein comme éditeur de mise en service, et à deux examinateurs anonymes.

Bibliographie

Les publications qui sont possiblement les plus utiles comme lecture introductoire sont marquées avec un astérisque.

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Auteur

Jonathan Benthall est chercheur honoraire affilié au département d’anthropologie du University College London et directeur émérite de l’Institut Royal d’Anthropologie de Grande-Bretagne. Son livre le plus récent s’appelle Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com

[1] Cet article est une traduction de l’original intitulé “Charity” (Benthall 2017)

[2] Traduction anglaise, The Gift. Texte original français en version numérique: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html

[3] Traduction française: De la souillure: Essai sur les notions de pollution et de tabou (Paris: Maspéro, 1971).

Charity

Felix Stein — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 16:34:20 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 22 Dec 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17charity

Abstract:

This entry considers charity as an ‘etic’ term that facilitates comparison between different traditions. Theoretical foundations were laid by two great anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century: Marcel Mauss, whose The gift has elicited a wealth of varied interpretations on the theme of exchange and reciprocity; and Edvard Westermarck, behind whose dated assumptions about a hierarchy of ‘races’ we may discern some lasting insights into the relationship between charity and religion. The simple view that all charitable giving is merely a down payment on benefits to be received later (in this world or in the hereafter) has to be qualified by evidence of ‘mutuality’ as an aspect of human coexistence complementary to reciprocity.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, some anthropologists turned a critical eye on the work of Western aid agencies. But it was largely left to historians to reflect on charity per se. After the cooling of anthropological interest in charity, it was first the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent and then Islam that reignited it and stimulated the process of ‘deprovincialising’ the common assumption that charity is a monopoly of the Euro-American tradition. Though social anthropologists have studied many other manifestations of charity, detailed attention is given here to the Qur’anic prescriptions relating to good works and to the ways in which they have empowered the formation of organised Islamic charities, whose practical and potential efficacy has been thwarted by an arguably excessive political reaction since the 11^th September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Anthropologists have contributed to the critique of humanitarianism as an ideology, and examples are given here of productive field-based research projects that have drawn on this critique. Finally, a holistic methodological aid is summarised which may be helpful in structuring research on charity, and it is recalled that the problematic nature of charity which anthropologists try to resolve today was noticed by the author of the Bhagavad Gita some centuries before the contemporary era.

Introduction

The word ‘charity’ in English refers to almsgiving and freewill offerings, but it also has connotations of spiritual love, the highest Christian virtue. It was used in some Bibles to translate, via the Latin caritas, the Greek New Testament word agapē. Some Christian apologists, for instance in the Catholic Encyclopedia, conflate the two senses of the word. In Elizabethan England, ‘charity’ also acquired a restrictive legal definition that is still an essential part of British and American law. A distinction is often made in European languages between ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’. For the ancient Greeks, ‘philanthropy’ was ‘love of the principle of humanity’. But it became fused, during the century of the Enlightenment, with the idea of public benefactions shorn of religious connotations, and today it has come to be associated particularly with the munificence of the rich, and patronage of high culture (also more recently with the promise of funding for development in much of the Global South).

All attempts so far to study our subject comparatively have dispensed with the charity/philanthropy distinction, one good reason being that it has no parallels in major non-European languages such as Arabic or Hindi. Another widely used term, ‘humanitarian action’, is problematic because the word ‘humanitarian’ can be taken colloquially to encompass all forms of philanthropic or altruistic action; but humanitarianism as a movement can be defined as an ideology traceable back to the nineteenth century (Davies 2012). (More tightly, International Humanitarian Law is the body of measures intended to limit the effects of armed conflict, and is outside the scope of this entry). If we look for a comparative, i.e. ‘etic’ term, as opposed to the above culturally embedded or ‘emic’ categories, then ‘good works’ is as serviceable as any; but in this entry, the term ‘charity’ will be used in an inclusive sense.

Theoretical foundations

Two giants of anthropology laid the foundations, at the beginning of the twentieth century, for our discipline’s theoretical understanding of charity. Foremost has been Marcel Mauss’s essay on reciprocity and social solidarity, The gift (2016 [1925]). Mauss’s claim that the principle of exchange penetrates every aspect of social life, in the ‘atmosphere of the gift …, of obligation and of liberty mixed together’ (2016: 177), has stimulated productive but sometimes confusing debate (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). The other pioneer, though less widely remembered in this field, was Edvard Westermarck. He adhered to Victorian assumptions about a hierarchy of savage and civilised ‘races’, but his global comparison of charitable traditions (1909), still impressive today, explains how mutual aid is commonly influenced by egoistic motives, and, more arrestingly, how charity in all the ‘higher religions’ has been associated with sacrifice.

It may be asked why social-cultural anthropology failed to build on Mauss’s and Westermarck’s insights on charity until the last quarter of the century. The explanation may be that most anthropologists positioned themselves politically on a spectrum between a social reformism that disparaged charity as addressing symptoms rather than causes, legitimating the privileges of the rich, and strict Marxism, firmly opposed to charity as a brake on the inevitable proletarian revolution. But the consequence of rejecting private charity is to place all power in the hands of the state. Out-and-out hostility to charity, as an adjunct to entitlements paid for by taxation, is much less frequently expressed by social researchers today, especially because of the prevalence of partnership arrangements between charitable organizations and governments. Moreover, a frequent theme in recent research literature is the role of private charity in compensating for the retreat of the welfare state, most damagingly in former communist countries such as Russia (Caldwell 2016).

Jonathan Parry’s commentary on Mauss’s The gift (1986) sparked three decades of academic debate about this text. Parry’s somewhat provocative argument was that the pure or free gift, associated with salvation religions – a voluntary surrender of resources without expectation of return – is a kind of dialectical complement to the commodification of goods that dominates Western industrial societies. Shortly afterwards, Mary Douglas (1990), making no reference to Parry in her introduction to an English translation of The gift, deprecated the very notion of a free gift. For our present purpose, we may extract two linked suggestions from Mauss’s essay.

First, when a gift cannot be reciprocated, moral credit accrues to the donor but the recipient suffers a wound. Hence the reputation for ‘coldness’ that organised charity in Europe has often acquired since the nineteenth century, especially when it evacuates face-to-face relationships between donors and recipients. Social reformers sought to replace it with the welfare state. Some Indian ethnography reveals an interpretation of charitable giving as especially sinister: unreciprocated gifts made to priests and renouncers can bring misfortune that migrates from donor to recipient unless careful precautions are taken.

Second, a ‘free’ gift cannot admit any dimension of reciprocity. When I make a gift, I must do so in such a way as to deny to others – and indeed, to myself – that it has a transactional aspect or that I will be rewarded, whether in this world or in the ‘celestial economy’ of the hereafter. Though this paradox is salient in all the three Abrahamic religions, it is in India that it is worked through with most sophistication. The Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, see also Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distinguishes ‘charity in the mode of goodness’ (given with no expectation of reward) from ‘charity in the mode of passion’ (with intent of recompense, or given grudgingly) and ‘charity in the mode of darkness’ (given at the wrong place or time, to an unworthy recipient, or with disrespect). James Laidlaw describes how in the Shvetambar (‘white-clad’) sect of Indian Jainism, when itinerant celibate renouncers collect food in alms bowls from lay families, they show ‘surly indifference’ rather than showing thanks or appreciation – their aim being not to create social relations but to achieve a timeless spiritual perfection (Laidlaw 2000: 632). According to Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), Islamic volunteering by middle and upper class women to assist poor people in a city in central Anatolia aims at exactly the opposite: enhancing solidarity through bodily contact, and ‘ethical transformation’ of the giver, so that class hierarchies are mitigated. Erica Bornstein’s monograph based on fieldwork in Delhi shows how the beliefs and practices aggregated as modern ‘Hinduism’ interact with Buddhist, Islamic, Christian and secular traditions to form a diversified charitable landscape, both international and intra-Indian (Bornstein 2012).

Interpretations of Mauss are complicated by the fact that he saw all gifts as metaphorically entailing sacrifice: when I make a gift, I give a part of myself. Westermarck stressed that in both Jewish and Christian teaching, almsgiving came to replace sacrificial offerings to God. Charity in general is habitually either praised as an expression of empathy or else depreciated as appeasing the conscience of donors and maintaining the status quo, but Westermarck suggests a third way of conceiving it: as an act of devotion. The prayers offered by beneficiaries are, in the Abrahamic traditions, one way in which they can offer a return – the obverse being curses uttered by those who are unjustly treated. Ilana Silber has argued that subtle ‘echoes’ of sacrificial ideologies and practices still reverberate across long stretches of time, as in the Christian injunction that charitable giving is one way for the faithful to emulate God’s free gift of Jesus’s self-sacrifice (Silber 305, 310). She argues for the need to distinguish three kinds of religious giving in the Hebrew Testament: gifts to the gods, to religious officials, and to the needy. The Christian doctrine of diakonīa or service, however, insists that anything done to benefit the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick or imprisoned is equivalent to performing the same service for God (Matthew 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, in an article on Islamic voluntarism in Egypt (2014) following Fassin (2012), strongly associates the Christian and post-Christian tradition of charity with compassion, as opposed to religious dutifulness such as she observed in the practice of some of her Cairene Muslim interlocutors. But the history of charitable institutions across all Christian denominations and institutions is so varied that there is a danger here of over-generalization about their motivations, which include renunciation, self-denial and expiation, as well as compassion.

In keeping with a general trend in the social sciences towards recognising the porosity of the distinction between the religious and the ‘secular’, a ‘quasi-religious’ character may be attributed to some of the most successful secular humanitarian and development agencies (Barnett & Stein 2012), inasmuch as they are empowered by strongly internalised moral principles, reverence for charismatic founders, and an engagement with the world as a whole. Philip Fountain, stimulated by his ethnographic research with the Mennonite Central Committee, a North American Christian development agency, has pursued this conceptual problem, starting from the reflection that maybe ‘all development, whether labelled religious or otherwise, is incurably proselytizing’ in that it sets out to rework the social practices of others (Fountain 2015).

Reciprocity versus mutuality

Some ethnographic studies suggest that analysis of charity confined to equations of offerings and rewards may be too one-dimensional; and they point us to unresolved anthropological debates about the relationship between reciprocity and mutuality, and the nature of altruism.

Mittermaier, in another article (2013), draws a contrast, based on her fieldwork in Egypt in 2011–12, between an economy of blessing (baraka), which stresses generosity, and an economy of recompense (thawāb) aimed at securing a place in paradise: the latter model, according to her, has been accentuated by the march of capitalism in Arab societies. Emanuel Schaeublin, in his study of almsgiving in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank (2016), argues, following a rich but elusive article by Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), that for his Muslim interlocutors wealth is an expression of abundant divine provision (in Arabic, rizq), and with God there can be no reciprocity. Both Mittermaier and Schaeublin in their fine-grained ethnographies refer us to Islamic theology and abstain from ‘etic’ comparison. But in arguing for the primacy of giving they point us to a nexus of concepts that may be thought of as like a countersubject in music, complementary to the theme of reciprocity. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) proposed the concept of grace not only as fundamental to Christianity but also as an ‘etic’ term associated with the idea of charity: ‘Grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts”, what is obligatory or predictable’.

Meyer Fortes argued ([1969] 2004, 231-2) that kinship is rooted in a principle of ‘amity’ or ‘prescriptive altruism’, which is extended outside the family into wider domains. For James Woodburn (1998), an authority on hunter-gatherer societies, reciprocity is not universal to all human groups: the Hadza of Tanzania would not understand the concept of generosity or charity, being profoundly and assertively committed to egalitarian sharing. David Maybury-Lewis quotes from an elder of the Gabra people, pastoral nomads in northern Kenya: ‘Even the milk from our own animals does not belong to us. We must give to those who need it, for a poor man shames us all’ (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, based on fieldwork by Aneesa Kassam).

Social anthropologists are concerned with values or principles conducing to altruism. Biologists, by contrast, categorise behaviour as altruistic insofar as it decreases the reproductive success of organism A while increasing that of organism B. The paradox of altruism, one of evolution’s greatest riddles, was first articulated by Darwin in his reflections on the existence of sterile insects, and has elicited a vast scientific literature – largely bypassed by social anthropologists. Marshall Sahlins, however, drawing on the work of the developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, deduces that ‘shared intentionality’ or intersubjectivity is a uniquely human capacity for mutuality, not discernable among non-human primates (Sahlins 2011, Tomasello 2009). Inasmuch as post-Darwinian science has dethroned almost every other presumed indicator of stark human uniqueness, the debate should be assumed to be still open. The biography of an eccentric genius, George R. Price (1922–75, a colleague of the more famous sociobiologist W. D. Hamilton), explains how he set out to prove mathematically that ostensibly altruistic behaviour actually conforms to a precisely calibrated scale of self-interest depending on the benefactor’s degree of relatedness to the beneficiary (Harman 2010). For the primatologist Frans de Waal, however, human altruism is not a theoretical problem. Pace Tomasello, he sees it as having evolved when female mammals began to nurture their young. Empathy is associated with the release of the hormone oxytocin: de Waal and his co-workers have even postulated that biological mechanisms for consolation behaviour are conserved between prairie voles and humans (Burkett et al. 2016). Because oxytocin makes us feel good, the sharp line between care for others and self-love, according to this view, falls away.

Research on charity pre-2000

During the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – an unsatisfactory term which has nonetheless stuck – gradually provoked a spate of research projects in which anthropologists played a significant role. Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing aid (1986) was a landmark: an iconoclastic monograph on the work of international aid agencies, based on her fieldwork with Ugandan refugees in southern Sudan. Western institutions were increasingly dependent on government funding and pressured to comply with government foreign policies; their high charitable ideals had largely immunised them from criticism. She faulted them specially for failing to make the effort to empower ‘victims’ to take control of their own lives. Equally hard-hitting was Alex de Waal’s criticism (1989) of relief organizations’ response to famine in the Horn of Africa, which avoided dialogue with the rural poor whom they were supposed to serve; a few years later he attacked the self-reproducing complacency of what he called the ‘Humanitarian International’. Among other influential books by anthropologists published at about the same time was James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine (1990), which exposed the failure of aid bureaucracies to deliver real benefits to the supposed beneficiaries of ‘development’.

Some publications focussed on the element of marketing in the work of overseas aid agencies, and on the process whereby disasters are ‘constructed’ as consumables via an oligopoly of media organizations for the purpose of campaigning and charitable fundraising, so that the flow of representations of suffering from the global periphery is continuously reciprocated by aid flows (e.g. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). But reflection on charity per se was largely absent from the burgeoning research literature on development and disaster relief. Historians made up for this gap: Paul Veyne on munificence by private individuals in the Greco-Roman period from c. 300 BC ([1976] 1990); Frank Prochaska on the ‘philanthropy of the poor to the poor’ in Britain, and the ‘royal bounty’ that enables the modern British monarchy to remain credible (1988); many of the contributors to the first collection of comparative essays on charity to be published (Ilchman et al., 1998), with not a single anthropologist among its twenty-two authors.

It appears that the stimulus for anthropologists to reflect on charity came from non-Christian traditions, before they began to turn to its Christian and secular manifestations. This would be in keeping with anthropology’s more general tardiness in studying Christianity, except in Africa (as argued by Cannell 2006: 1-14). Among the few exceptions to be found before the end of the last century is an essay by Claudia Fonseca (1986) based on her fieldwork in a small charitable centre in Paris that distributed free clothing to down-and-outs. She describes the ‘implicit pact’ of goodwill and politeness established between some of the lady volunteers and their ‘clients’, and the transition between the older Christian aspiration of gaining a path to paradise through charity and the more modern aim of reinserting poor people into the workforce. Erica Bornstein’s study of transnational Protestant NGOs in Zimbabwe made up quickly for lost ground, and she was the first researcher on charities to follow through the ‘traffic in meaning’ arising at cross purposes between the expectations of an individual transnational donor and the reactions of eventual recipients – in this case through World Vision’s global child sponsorship programme (Bornstein 2005).

Decentring of charity via Islam

Jonathan Parry’s aforementioned reflections on the ‘free gift’ were inspired by the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent; and Katherine A. Bowie published an early article on Buddhist charity in northern Thailand, qualifying the prevailing paradigm of Buddhist merit-making with her stress on class stratification (1998). But the main impetus towards deprovincialising ‘Western’ assumptions about charity as a Euro-American monopoly came from studying the Muslim world and its abundant legacy of religious injunctions to generosity, as well as actual charitable institutions. Again, historians have been well to the fore (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (ed.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

One historian of early Islam, Christian Décobert, had the originality to make a connection between the key Qur’anic term zakat – mandatory almsgiving, like the Hebraic tithe, and one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam – and Mary Douglas’s theorising on purity (her early Purity and danger (1966) rather than her later work on the Bible). For zakat has common origins with the Hebrew-Aramaic zakut, which had connotations of purity, rectitude and thriving, but not of almsgiving (Décobert 1991: 198ff). There is also a clear semantic overlap between the idea of alms and that of rectitude via the word ṣadaqa (voluntary almsgiving). Décobert also drew inferences (1991: 196) about the self-representation and kinship systems of early Muslim societies from the rules laid down in the Qur’an about the distribution of zakat, with their eight categories of eligible beneficiaries (Qur’an 9.60), and he proposed a link with the agricultural tradition of offering firstfruits to God, thus opening up opportunities for comparative study which have yet to be fully explored (Benthall 1999, Benthall & Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

The connection between giving to God and giving to the needy has never slackened throughout the Muslim world, in many parts whereof animal sacrifice is still routinely practised, with the meat given to the poor (though in industrialised countries it is as likely today to be canned meat imported commercially from New Zealand sheep farms). In the Qur’an, the major sacrifices of camels and cattle that were retained in Islam are represented as not only ceremonies but also a practical means of feeding the needy. Both sacrifice and zakat are associated with prayer and with affirming the oneness of God and Islam. The practice of zakat has undergone many variations during the history of Islam – ranging between, on the one hand, complete control by governments, and, on the other, informal gifts through private connections during the holy month of Ramadan, with many intermediate cases. But the discursive field to which it belongs remains a reality for devout Muslims.

Studying Islamic charitable traditions is of particular interest for two reasons. First, in almost all countries there are either Muslim donors or Muslim recipients or both – revealing as much variety of religious practices as may be found within Christendom. This is of practical importance for aid and development policies.

The second reason is more intellectual, calling into question European claims to secular universalism. Other traditions of charity and humanitarianism were generally disregarded. All religious traditions embody injunctions to ‘good works’, and we may think of the essence of charity as a bodily act, such as reaching out with a hand like the Good Samaritan to a traveller in distress, or, in the Islamic tradition, even smiling at a neighbour. But there are subtle differences. Christian charity, with its association with agapē, does not overlap exactly with the Islamic lexical field, which includes zakat, ṣadaqa and waqf (the Islamic charitable foundation). The rules for the distribution of zakat have been given much attention by Islamic scholars, and may be seen historically as having set out the principles of a proto-state treasury. They have, for instance, been interpreted as authorising finance for military jihad. But support for the poor is usually today regarded as zakat’s primary or even exclusive purpose, and it has been turned into a highly effective fundraising tool by contemporary Islamic charities, especially in actualising the Qur’an’s insistence on the rights of orphaned children.

The authors of a remarkably thorough retrospective analysis of a famine and the inadequate global response to it, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collective failures, 2011–12, conclude:

‘Since the late 1990s, it has become fashionable in the Western humanitarian aid community to promote rights, and to dismiss charity as paternalistic and demeaning. Non-Western actors – particularly Islamic actors – put the issues of charity and of voluntary action squarely back in the centre of humanitarian action, at least in terms of intentions’ (Maxwell & Majid 2016: 196).

These authors were impressed by their observation of Islamic aid workers’ ‘solidarity with the affected community’. Anthropologists may well concur that it is no more than a rhetorical trope to expect those suffering from famine to rely on their rights when they have no juridical entitlements.

Ethnographically grounded research on Sunni Islamic charity has accelerated in recent years. As well as studies on Arab societies by Mittermaier and Schaeublin – to which may be added Harmsen 2008, Roy 2011, Atia 2013, Challand 2014, and Juul Petersen 2015 – a body of work on West Africa has emerged (Kaag 2007, de Bruijn & van Dijk 2009, LeBlanc & Gosselin 2016). Research interest has reflected the growth of Islamic NGOs, which took off in the 1980s partly in line with the growth of NGOs in general, and partly as a result of the ‘Islamic resurgence’ – the worldwide endeavour to re-establish Islamic values and practices. One topic with practical implications is the question of ‘cultural proximity’: to what extent can an international faith-based organization improve its effectiveness through privileged access to aid recipients who share the same religious tradition (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? The answer to the question is mainly positive when we consider the work of Christian aid agencies among Christian populations in Africa and Latin America. But what could otherwise have been a steady increase in the acceptance and influence of Islamic charities worldwide has been seriously compromised by a shadow hanging over it: persistent allegations of implication in ‘terrorist’ activities. Some limited culpability on the part of Gulf-based charities in the years leading up to 11^th September 2001 cannot be denied, but one root of the problem goes back to the determination of the Western powers to back the mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan war of the 1980s, when humanitarian aid was blatantly mixed with military support by the USA through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-8). The outcome is that many Islamic NGOs have been blacklisted by the US Government with its global reach, or forced to close down, and even those with an impeccable record have had to face legal and financial obstacles. The dominance of ‘counter-terrorist’ experts in the USA remains strong despite the publication of contrary views, and often seems (as argued by Schaeublin 2008, James 2010–11, de Goede 2012, Benthall 2016) to assume the worst of Muslim charitable donors. Adverse presumptions are also disseminated about all ‘Muslims out of place’, volunteers expressing transnational Muslim solidarity who travel in distant and troubled regions (Li 2010, Kassem 2010–11).

By contrast, in the United Kingdom a government regulator sympathetic to diaspora charities of all kinds, the Charity Commission, has encouraged the growth of an Islamic charity sector that has established fruitful cooperative relations with the mainstream aid establishment – especially by embracing the principle of non-discrimination with regard to religion. The only other country where Islamic charities can be said to flourish vigorously with relatively little political intervention is Indonesia, which has a long tradition of faith-based welfare institutions (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). A major Islamic organization, the Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta, came to adopt explicitly the principle of non-discrimination in its charitable works. But it became more religiously exclusive during the period of liberation from Dutch rule, and the commitment to inclusivity has not yet been formally reaffirmed (Fauzia 2017).

In his many-faceted ethnography of Hui Muslims in China, Matthew S. Erie explores how traditional Islamic principles of charitable giving are negotiated in a kind of ‘value competition’ with mainstream Han Chinese gift practices and with the security anxieties of the officially atheist Party-State (Erie 2016). The term for Muslim voluntary giving, nietie, is derived from the Qur’anic term niyyah, intent or motivation, without distinction in Chinese between the thing given and the act of giving. In conformity with Daoist practice, but contrary to the Qur’anic injunction that charitable giving gains extra merit when it is given discreetly, individual and family donations of nietie are posted on walls in mosques by name. Collections of nietie are organised for government-sponsored relief aid after earthquakes (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Debate within the Islamic world about the ethics of charitable giving has focused especially on the rules of zakat. The traditional view of most ulama was that only Muslims could be beneficiaries. When released from this restriction, Islamic charities have found common cause with the mainstream of secular and Christian NGOs. This and other differences on how to interpret the zakat rules – such as to what extent they authorise proselytism – may be seen as encapsulating concepts that go to the heart of wider current debates within Islam today (Benthall 2016: 18). They also have a bearing on anthropological reflection about charity in general, in that Islam, with its missionary and expansionary history, presents an alternative universalism to the often taken-for-granted universalism of Christianity and its legatee, post-Enlightenment secular universalism.

The critique of humanitarianism

Research by social anthropologists on charity all over the world has expanded in recent years. They are not all interested in the same questions. For instance, C. Julia Huang’s monograph on the international Tzu Chi social welfare movement – founded by an unassuming Taiwanese Buddhist nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen (b. 1937) and now numbering millions of supporters – is primarily concerned with the Weberian theme of charisma and its bureaucratization (Huang 2009). This model may be specially applicable to charitable institutions of every kind as they expand, in that they are empowered by strongly held moral values while also obliged to compete as corporate bodies. The specific centuries-old commitment of Christian charities to the care and healing of leprosy sufferers – and latterly to opposing their stigmatization – has attracted attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). But these approaches seem marginal to the current trend in the analysis of humanitarian agencies.

Practitioners in relief and development – sometimes mocked as citizens of ‘aidland’ – habitually deny that what they are doing has anything to do with charity. This may be an instance of déformation professionnelle. Ambitious multinational initiatives have called for the humanitarian enterprise to change from one driven by charity to one driven by the imperative of ‘global solidarity’ (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). But this high-minded concept is at odds with the actual evidence of gross global inequalities, never more than slightly mitigated by humanitarian action, and it lacks the underpinning of any vernacular tradition. Recent work by anthropologists and others has turned to holding the ideology of humanitarianism up to the light (e.g. Bornstein & Redfield (eds) 2010).

Didier Fassin’s concept of ‘humanitarian reason’ has been widely influential (Fassin 2011). By this he means a globally pervasive, morally untouchable idéologique, in confronting which he seeks to straddle the two normally contradictory senses of ideology: on the one hand, an insidious veil obscuring brutal economic interests (as in the works of Karl Marx), and, on the other hand, a cultural system that makes sense of social relations (as in the works of Clifford Geertz). Complemented by careful ethnography – he was trained as a physician and served as a vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders) – his contention that humanitarianism is a form of Western governance, dependent on the fantasy that an ‘international community’ exists, seems an application of social science at its best. Without doubt – and this follows on from the much older critique of ‘charity’ – humanitarianism has markedly conservative aspects and can even dehumanise, reducing survivors to the ‘bare life’ diagnosed by Agamben (1995) as in many refugee camps (Agier 2014). An impressive ethnography, Peter Redfield’s monograph on MSF, draws on the Agamben–Fassin critique while also recognising and detailing this agency’s unique achievements as one of the most effective and most self-critical NGOs (Redfield 2013), though he has incidentally questioned MSF’s eccentric contention that it is not a ‘charity’ despite its famous successes in public fundraising (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

In the hands of armchair social scientists, an approach dwelling on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ – the subjugation of bodies and control of populations – can be overdone, especially when the brutality of many non-Western as well as Western regimes is underestimated. But the critique of ‘humanitarian governance’ has animated many recent ethnographically grounded publications bearing on charity. The occupants of refugee camps – estimated at about six million persons in 2014, and fast growing in numbers since then – may be seen as objects of charity (even when the administrators are state or interstate agencies) in that their rights of citizenship are suspended in spaces that are ‘off limits’ and governed by special regulations (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson provides a searing, if impressionistic, study of the aftermath of a major earthquake in Guajarat, India, in 2001: a degradation of the social fabric in which philanthropic organizations of all kinds connived – the worst case being a school for boy orphans set up by a British paedophile. Simpson breaks new ground by including coverage of local Indian organizations and Gujarati diasporas, so that the charities that he criticises are not only those of Western origin (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari went to press with his comprehensive book on the Mediterranean migrant crisis (2015) just before it reached boiling point. Though Albahari is sensitive to all other aspects of the crisis after a decade of research, it is his voluntary work in 2005 at a reception centre for asylum seekers in a small coastal town on the heel of Italy that gives his book a first-hand authority. Albahari shows how a myriad of religious and secular charities, nominally independent, assumed a de facto policing role. His monograph supports the contention that the most searching critiques of charitable endeavours are still today those that are fortified by participant observation, as in the earlier work of Harrell-Bond and Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnoses a ‘neediness’ among Finnish Red Cross professional staff who have served abroad: they are frustrated by the routines of middle-class life, made less bearable by the long winters, and look for a kind of personal fulfilment unobtainable at home. Anthropologists from the Global North may recognise the feeling.

A holistic template

The German–Dutch school of anthropology contributes a methodological template into which research on charitable initiatives may be inserted. The template relies on an expanded concept of social security, described by Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckman as ‘the dimension of social organization dealing with the provision of security not considered to be an exclusive matter of individual responsibility’ (Thelan et al. 2009). One merit of this methodological démarche is that it pays full attention to the viewpoints of the recipients of charity and to the question of evaluating efficacy. Five ‘layers’ of description are identified: ideological and cultural notions of risk and caring; institutional provision, based on clearly defined rights; actual social relationships between providers and recipients; concrete actions such as person-to-person assistance, and the transfer of resources; and finally the consequences of interventions for both providers and recipients. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applies this method in an article on changing charitable responses in the face of the breakdown of state structures in former Yugoslavia. In the ethnically mixed Croatian town of Knin in 2001 during the aftermath of the Croat–Serb war, the local branch of the Catholic Caritas organization launched an emotive charity campaign for ‘hungry Croats’ in the town, adopting what Leutloff-Grandits calls a ‘war policy of ethnic engineering’ by other means. Preference was shown to Croatian settlers from Bosnia, causing resentment among both the Catholic Croat and the Orthodox Serb returnees. From the few full-length published studies that do justice to all the ‘layers’ of analysis specified by the von Benda-Beckmans (though independently of their suggestions), we may single out Maxwell and Majid’s Famine in Somalia (2016) and Albahari’s Crimes of peace (2015), both mentioned above.

Conclusion: progress in charity?

During the mid-twentieth century hiatus, noted above, between Mauss’s and Westermarck’s writings and the innovative contributions by Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal, and Parry, one anthropologist was exceptional in taking a sustained interest in the theme of charity: R. R. Marett. He wrote: ‘real progress is progress in charity, all other advance being secondary thereto’ (Marett 1935: 40). He saw maternal nurturing as the fountainhead of charity (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Though his phrasing will strike readers today as sentimental, it might be seen as adumbrating Fortes on amity and Frans de Waal on oxytocin. Yet no reflection on charity can ignore the lurking presence of reciprocity, which always threatens the purity of the free gift. The Bhagavad Gita recognised the moral dilemma over two millennia ago.

Marett’s dictum about progress has resonance today, and it prompts questions as to what should be recognised as progress. Since the 1960s, an amorphous movement known as Corporate Social Responsibility may be seen as one modern variant of charity, and ethnographic attention has been given to its manifestations, for instance in South Africa (Rajak 2011) and Saudi Arabia (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Among more recent innovations deserving of study is the formation of commercial consultancy firms to advise young people who have inherited wealth on how best to become philanthropic donors.

In any case, what used to be condescended to as ‘applied anthropology’ seems to be gathering some strength within the discipline. There are many opportunities for anthropologists to build on previous work relating to charity in ways that are practically useful as well as theoretically sophisticated, at a time of unprecedented demands on voluntary giving and volunteering.

Notes

This entry makes some use of material already published by the author in three other overview articles: ‘Charity’ in Fassin, D. (ed.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, in MacGinty, R. & J.H. Peterson (eds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ in Callan H. (ed.) forthcoming. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Gratitude is due to all these editors for the opportunities they have given for reflection. The present article owes much to Felix Stein as commissioning editor, and to two anonymous referees. Expert copy-editing was provided by Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and Director Emeritus, Royal Anthropological Institute. His most recently published book is Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com