Transnational Giving and Evolving Religious,Ethnic and Political Formations in the Global South

Abstract

Conceptualising giving as a broad category encompassing philanthropy, charity, humanitarian aid and gifts, this Special Issue brings together researchers whose ethnographic and theoretical work examine different forms of transnational giving in the historical and contemporary Global South. In this Issue we contend that the Global South should not be seen as a passive recipient of these transnational welfare-oriented giving but as the site where their full social and religious meanings and moral obligations are actively realised or constructed. Through nuanced ethnographic and multi-sited research across Asia, Africa, and North America, articles in this Issue explore how the transnational scale of operability attaches newer meanings to belonging even as it shapes the subjectivities of actors and communities (givers and receivers) partaking in this process. We explore how gifts travel spatially and histories of transnational giving have contributed to the framing of communal histories, cementing of global connections and the creation of relationships of dependency as well as forging of new transnational solidarities. Moreover, we investigate how transnational giving also inflects the relationship between citizens and the state and (re)shapes national political communities.

Introduction

While gift exchange and other financial flows, including remittances, have been essential themes of study in social sciences, few look at how various forms of charitable and welfare-oriented giving are transforming the meaning of communal and national belonging on a transnational scale. That scale is commonly reserved for policy studies on humanitarian giving, which rarely utilise the techniques of ethnographic research and writing to explore the textures and in-depth understandings of the human relationships engendered by these transfers. Conceptualising giving as a broad category encompassing philanthropy, charity, humanitarian aid, gifts, as well as their social, religious, and moral obligations, this special issue brings together researchers whose ethnographic and theoretical work examine different forms of transnational giving in the historical and contemporary Global South. Taking transnationalism as a starting point and a methodological tool to delineate the politics and practices of giving across time and space (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002; Faist, 2012), this special issue explores how the transnational scale of operability attaches newer meanings to belonging even as it shapes the subjectivities of actors and communities (givers and receivers) partaking in this process (Strathern, 1988).

There is a rich scholarship that has analysed the role of giving in structuring non-western societies in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial contexts, however, without systematically integrating a transnational dimension. Scholars have examined how gifting practices have helped assert the authority of kings (Cohn, 1996), how welfare provision has mattered in nation-building (Watt, 2005), and the multiple ways in which giving has worked to maintain patronage or dependency relationships between different communities (Haynes, 1987). Others have focused on giving as a part of kinship, caste and religious obligations that shape collective life and on giving as a mode of transmission of specific moral values, often built on middle-class or elite social and economic ideals (Osella and Osella, 2009; Osberg, 2018). Giving can also be understood as a way to position oneself within particular networks, whether humanitarian, pious or other. With our focus on giving in the Global South, we build on this scholarship with an emphasis on the transnational dimension. We contend that the Global South should not be seen as a passive recipient of this transnational welfare-oriented giving but as the site where the full meaning of such giving is actively realised or constructed.

Anthropological literature since Mauss (2000) has seen giving and exchange as fundamental to the building and nurturing of communal life. When giving occurs at a transnational scale however, it can also disrupt pre-existing communal boundaries or signal communities in flux or in the process of becoming. Without drawing boundaries between religious, kinship or ethnic-based community formations or traditions of giving, this Issue examines intra- and extra-communal transnational giving and the various kinds of relations they engender. It shows how funds from overseas, directed at co-religionists or one’s community, have forged religious and civic infrastructures for the minorities who may or may not enjoy full citizenship status (Larouche, Roohi, Jiang, Vevaina). While many scholars have focused on the engine of the gift, or what impels people to give to others, our volume shifts to explore not just why people give gifts but how and what these gifts do to social relations over space and time. The contributions thus also highlight a feature of transnational giving that is rarely emphasised – that gifts travel spatially and that histories of transnational giving have contributed to the framing of communal histories (Vevaina, Roohi). They also explore how giving from another community overseas has come to mark specific places and cement global connections, where overseas aid often creates not just relationships of dependency but forges new transnational solidarities (Creighton).

Lastly, the special issue explores how transnational giving inflects the relationship between citizens and the state and (re)shapes national political communities. Literature on transnational networks suggests it often creates new forms of transnational political communities that unsettle or challenge state sovereignty (Radcliffe, 2001; Legrand, 2019). However, in other instances, these philanthropic initiatives strengthen national identity by running parallel to or in collaboration with state-led welfare services (Widger, Larouche, Leichtman). Transnational giving is thus more intertwined with national political contexts than may be expected.

The papers selected in this special issue were first presented in a larger workshop that took place in Göttingen, Germany in June 2019, co-organized by the editors of this issue. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. We were enriched by a keynote address by Daromir Rudnyckyj whose work on finance and religious life we were inspired by, and whose final thoughts will serve as an afterword. Our presenters offered rich and ethnographically detailed instances and itineraries of transnational giving practices in the Global South. Building on these, this special issue develops three analytic lenses on the gift, transnationalism and state-nonstate forms of care that are described further in the following sections.

The Capacious Gift

An innovation of this special issue regarding the debate on the gift in social science is twofold. By focusing on a transnational scale and conceptualising giving as a broad category, including religious donations, community welfare and different forms of humanitarian aid, our papers allow for a more complex understanding of individual and communal giving and expand the scale of knowledge beyond any narrow territoriality. Further, we posit that it is more productive to pay attention to the social practices and politics surrounding transnational giving that may or may not speak to the earlier literature on the gift.

Giving has produced a significant scholarly interest, primarily due to the appeal of Mauss’ (2000) theory, which lies in his conceptualisation of gift exchanges as the basis of economic and social life (Yan, 2020). Yet, as our papers show, there are many layers to bring to this argument when looking at various forms of transnational giving. For Mauss, gifts maintain and create social relations as they are embedded in a triadic exchange cycle involving the obligation to give, receive, and reciprocate. In Mauss’ own words, gifts are contracts, socially instituted forms of exchange. Gift giving is imminently social because “it is not individuals but collectivities who impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other” (Mauss, 2000: 5). It is a system of total services that, with time, has become one of society’s most important institutions. In Mauss’s formulation, gifting in ‘primitive’ societies constituted a ‘total social fact’, a phenomenon encompassing all parts of social life, giving way to forms of credit and debt in more complex societies. One is forced to give, in general terms, to “prove good fortune” because we are “obliged to redistribute everything from a potlatch of which we have been beneficiaries” (Mauss, 2000: 40). For these same reasons, we are also compelled to receive the gift; the act of refusal expels us from the social order. As a result, the gift establishes a cycle of relationships and even a community.

Critically, in terms of method, unlike other scholars like Malinowski, whose work he consults, Mauss never conducted fieldwork of his own. Instead, his theoretical formulations had a larger spatial and temporal scale, from the Pacific Northwest of North America to Micronesia, from gift to credit economies. Mauss, like Durkheim, remained within a social evolutionary frame, where the ‘primitive’ society was a predecessor of their modern society. This specific temporal frame created blind spots for many ‘modern’ scholars who juxtaposed gifting (primitive) against more contemporary forms of credit and financial transfers (modern). Several pieces in this issue move past this dichotomy by further exploring how deeply financialised donations and giving can be (Vevaina, Roohi).

As anthropology moved more to the mode of field research in different contexts, several authors who have revisited Mauss’s theory have nuanced his interpretation of the obligation of reciprocity (Benthall, 2012; Silber, 2012; Kochuyt, 2009; Laidlaw, 2000). Gift giving builds a non-commodified exchange relation where the boundaries between gift and credit are blurred (Graeber 2012). However, regarding the religious gift, such as Hindu daan, Bornstein (2012), Parry (1986), and Laidlaw (2000) suggest that donations given to the poor do not necessarily create an obligation of reciprocity since, in some instances, gift-givers are in relation with God more than with the gift’s recipients (Copeman, 2011; Mittermaier, 2014). Leichtman, in this issue, explores this in Kuwait, as citizens are impelled to give out of national pride and self-cultivation. Creighton, in her piece, further complicates the idea of the obligation to return in gifting from Japan to Burma/Myanmar. She shows how it is actually the giver who feels obligated to continue giving in a context of memorialising war dead.

In a way, Mauss’s analysis of the gift exchange is an extended version of Durkheim’s argument about solidarity. Jane Guyer reminds us that the word obligation derives from Latin ligare – to bind. “Both obligation and bond can imply constraint and captivity, but both can also imply an act one performs on oneself” (Guyer, 2012: 493). The gift exchange is the practice of both forms of solidarity. Thinking with Mauss and others, we show in this issue how gift-giving plays significant and complex roles in tying people together across borders not only through the cycles of obligation and reciprocity but propelled by multiple impulses and logics about the contours of community itself. Mauss came from the French tradition, a direct challenge to Anglo-American liberal social thought, which emphasises individuals and free choice (Osteen, 2002: 3). Instead, he emphasised that gift-giving and receiving were essentially collective practices. Understanding gift exchange only through a Western sense of personhood may contribute to misunderstanding giving; if we assume that a person is individual and free, then we cannot understand anything but the commodity versus gift binary (Osteen 2002). Hence, even the individual philanthropists described in this volume (Larouche, Roohi, Vevaina) give within a communal frame due to historical and religious obligations to their community.

Furthermore, by examining both ceremonial and non-ceremonial religious giving this issue thus aims to contribute to the long-standing debate on what drives giving (Malinowski, 2002; Sahlins, 2017; Weiner, 1992) when it traverses national borders. It shows that distance does not necessarily weaken these power relations and structuring effects of the gift while also giving rise to some form of flexibility. While focusing on the engine of the gift, or why people give to others, this issue moves further to explore how and what these gifts do to social relations transnationally and transtemporally. Roohi, for instance, looks at how giving amongst the Kammas is marked by a past precedence that frames and even constrains forms of contemporary donations, given its historical entanglement with the Kammas’ quest for upward social mobility. Creighton looks instead at Japanese giving as a way to repent and make good on past misdeeds and current obligations.

Transnational giving and communal boundary-making, blurring and crossing

Another significant contribution of this special issue is highlighting the relation between transnational giving and ethnic, religious or kinship-based transnational community formations. While studies on gift and charitable giving abound, few have looked at how charitable, and welfare-oriented giving are transforming the meaning of communal belonging on a transnational scale. Addressing this lacuna, papers in this issue emphasise how and in which ways giving becomes a connective tissue binding different groups of people across time and space. While community evokes the idea of a group living in proximity and sharing common beliefs and norms (Bell and Newby, 2021), the transnational operability of giving attaches newer meanings to communal belonging, creating communities across places and shaping their subjectivities.

The study of transnationalism, as an integrative approach, connecting places and ensuing transformative processes, notably emerged in the early nineties because of a methodological imperative to study migrant flows (of people, ideas, tangible and intangible resources) in a rapidly globalising milieu (Schiller et al., 1992). Questioning inherent presumptions of nation-states as units of analysis, transnationalism studies critiqued the container model and provided an alternative to existing methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Research on transnationalism has also preoccupied itself with the formation of transnational communities and the mechanisms behind various religious, ethnic and (trans)national community-building projects (Portes et al., 1999; Vertovec, 2001; Al-Ali and Koser, 2003). While its conceptualisation of communities has been narrowly focused on migrant groups who forge relations with their kith and kin in their places of origin and settlement, ethnographic perspectives can provide a deeper understanding of human relationships formed through the exchange, reciprocity, and obligations to give across spatial boundaries.

Our special issue contributes to the debates on community and belonging by positing that transnational welfare and humanitarian flows can deterritorialise earlier relations and reterritorialise them in newer times and space. Avoiding the trap of essentialising ethnic groups, we argue that with new transnational social, religious and political mobilisations based on shared ideology, giving can potentially result in the blurring or even crossing of community boundaries even as they replenish older ones. Giving can create new boundaries (of religion, caste and kinship), even as it binds hitherto unrelated groups of people together through acts of giving and receiving (Weng, 2014, Creighton in this issue). Moreover, unlike the usual configuration of aid flowing from the global North to the Global South for humanitarian and development goals (Fassin, 2013; Ticktin, 2014), in this issue, we show that transnational giving can also be oriented by logics as diverse as kin welfare, group-based social mobility, politically driven status accumulation or negotiations. We contend that the ethnographic trail of transnational giving to map the circuitous journey of welfare-oriented resources can provide critical insights into how a community imagines itself and how this imagination evolves. Whereas transnational giving and remitting can be strategic, acting as an ‘insurance policy’ for the community in the face of economic uncertainty (Cliggett, 2003), it can do communal boundary work, by channelling the impulse to give under rational and communal control (Roohi, Leichtman).

While intellectual and public debates are raging globally around the question of citizenship and the boundaries of national belonging (Staeheli, 2008; Bauböck, 2012; Schramm 2020) transnational giving provides a parallel lens as a corrective to these overemphasised debates. Much of cross-border giving emanates from sharing sensibilities, fostering new forms of relatedness beyond the traditional conceptualisation of an externally bounded community (Brubaker, 2002). Giving is then both constitutive and reflective of the dynamics of existing groups and those on the verge of becoming one. The mechanics of giving can circumscribe how these communities functionally operate, defining their internal rituals and conventions, limits and boundaries, and a sense of identity around which the members cohere. Transnational giving can also signal shifts and mutations the community undergoes due to the intensification of global interconnections. The original idea of an imagined community that is generally understood to be contiguous with the nation-state (Anderson, 2006) is disrupted through transnational giving, where the imagination of a community may not be defined by borders. Moreover, the politically defined stakes of citizenship and the heavy contestations around it can both re- or de-emphasize the sense of membership to a national political community through acts of cross-border giving (Larouche, Leichtman, Roohi, and Jiang).

Rather than being reciprocal, giving can be asymmetrical and can often emanate from deeply unequal social relations that may be further precipitated by acts of transnational giving. It is through attention to the modes and techniques of giving that we can offer deeper insights into who in the community is considered an (un) worthy recipient of their giving and how such imaginaries translate into who constitutes the inside and outside of the community transnationally. Communities spread across different geographies can find newer means to solidify their boundaries or a sense of group identity (Roohi, Larouche, Jiang, Leichtman). In doing so, they may valorise certain forms of belonging or ideologies, while diminishing the potencies of other group identities or exacerbating group-based inequalities (Roohi, Vevaina). On the other hand, as Creighton’s contribution in this issue illustrates, they can also forge newer solidarities outside the conventional notion of a community, binding the giver and the receiver in a long-term, if non-reciprocal, relationship.

Nonstate giving, welfare and citizenship

The last intervention of this issue pertains to the ways in which nonstate forms of transnational giving articulate with state welfare and citizenship. By focusing on nonstate forms of giving, this special issue recognises the global rising significance and involvement of “civil society” groups, religious networks, and various transnational institutions in social service provision, which goes hand in hand with the economic liberalisation and welfare reforms of the past 30 years (Rudnyckyj and Schwittay 2014). One of the objectives of the issue is thus to understand how nonstate, transnational giving inflects relationships between citizens and the state and between citizens themselves. In keeping with this objective, several articles in this issue interrogate whether transnational giving practices lead to the creation of new political communities and imaginations of citizenship.

Anthropological studies of citizenship have tended to look beyond its statutory dimension to focus on how it takes shape in practice and varies within and between different national contexts (Paz 2019). Instead of considering citizenship as a fixed legal status recognising membership in a given state, anthropology highlights “its debated, contested and always-in-the-making character” (Neveu, 2013: 205). In addition, contrary to approaches that focus mainly on citizenship processes at the nation-state level, anthropological perspectives pay attention to the multiple scales of belonging, engagement, and political community formation (Neveu, 2013; Lazar, 2013; Ong, 1999, 2006). One crucial question this special issue thus addresses is how transnational giving contributes to the formation of alternative forms of political membership that might have an influence on feelings and modes of belonging to national political communities. As some of the papers in this issue show, the ethnic, religious and kinship-based networks created through giving sometimes bypass state sovereignty. Jiang’s study on the transnational networks built by temporary African migrants in Guangzhou, China, exemplifies gift economies that take shape independently from the state. These aid-giving systems evolve into mutual obligations based on shared religious values that shape the African migrants’ conduct and act as mechanisms of social integration that offer African migrants from different countries a sense of belonging away from home based on shared religious identity. However, in other instances, philanthropic initiatives strengthen national belonging by running parallel to or in collaboration with state-led welfare services, as shown in Larouche’s paper on Indian Islamic philanthropy and Widger’s paper on a Sri Lankan philanthropic association’s evolution through colonial and postcolonial times. Along the same line, in her analysis of the work of Kuwaiti Islamic charities in Africa, Leichtman demonstrates that transnational volunteer religious giving initiatives can directly work to the state’s advantage. By advancing exceptional Muslim humanitarianism in the Arab Gulf as an alternative to Western (Christian) humanitarianism, they boost the state’s international image and contribute to the making of “moral and nationalistic Kuwaiti citizens”.

Many contributors to this special issue also pay attention to the role played by transnational giving in producing substantive, social forms of citizenship (Widger, Leichtman, Jiang, Larouche). Holston and Appadurai (1998) differentiate formal and substantive citizenship by stating that the former refers to formal membership in a political community (the nation-state) and the latter to the “array of civil, political, socioeconomic, and cultural rights that people possess and exercise” (1998: 4). This builds on T.H. Marshall’s conceptualisation of citizenship as composed of many dimensions, including a social element. This social element includes a range of rights, such as the right to “a modicum of economic welfare and security,” public education or healthcare (Marshall, 1950; Jayal 2013: 5). While access to this bundle of social rights can be thought of as resulting from formal citizenship status, the link between formal membership and the substantive advantages of citizenship is not always straightforward. Even if citizens enjoy political equality, not everyone benefits from a meaningful realisation of the social rights of citizenship, as Larouche’s paper shows by discussing the increasing marginalisation of Muslims in India (see Harriss, 2022; Kruks-Wisner, 2018). Meaningful citizenship is thus not a given but is realized through everyday negotiations and demands for resources, infrastructures and social protections (Anand, 2017; Das, 2011).

Several articles in this issue thus attempt to analyse how transnational giving participates in the concretisation of these social rights of citizenship, in interaction with state welfare. Since the 1980s and more recently with austerity measures, economic policies in many countries throughout the world have tended to favour cuts in state-led social service provision, which has increased the role played by a variety of nonstate actors (NGOs, private sector, religious and community groups, etc.) in social welfare provision (Koch and James 2020; Bernal and Grewal 2014). Scholars point out that this increased privatisation of social service provision has been paralleled with moralised discourses of citizenship emphasising individual voluntary labour and philanthropy over the development of better public social services (Muehlbach, 2012). But to dismiss philanthropy as neoliberalism’s handmaiden overlooks transnational giving’s multiple possibilities: it has emerged as a small yet significant source of global aid which engenders human relationships (Klaits, 2017). Moreover, where states have limited capacity to provide welfare or demonstrate biases in dispensing public goods, transnational nonstate actors, like religious or communal groups, play a crucial role in ensuring that basic forms of social security are provided for (Cammett and McLean, 2014). While they unsettle vertical hierarchies locating states at the top (Mitchell 1991, 2006; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002), papers in this issue show that transnational gifts sometimes also act along these hierarchies and maintain them. Discussing the work of Islamic philanthropies in India and of Sri Lanka’s oldest charitable society, Larouche and Widger both highlight the shifting and complex stance of nonstate care providers regarding the state, who at times work in collaboration with, alongside or independently of the state.

Thinking with and beyond the gift

Thinking along with and contributing to the major debates on gift and exchange, communal being and belonging, and welfare and citizenship, our special issue apprehends their changing meaning due to transnational giving. It shows how transnational giving in the postcolonial context speaks differently to the West’s humanitarian agenda and draws attention to gifting flows that do not follow common North-South power relations. However, this does not mean that the transnational giving practices discussed in this special issue always meaningfully challenge growing inequalities. In fact, in some instances, giving is deeply tied to communal and nationalist projects that can often replicate structures of power and reproduce rather than challenge populist or revivalist tendencies and ethincised differences.

Giving also produces symbolic power for the giver and generates different forms of capital for the donor communities. Veyne (1976), for example, focuses on various forms of asymmetrical gifts that the powerful would distribute more or less freely to express their social and political superiority in the Greco-Roman period (Le Goff, 2016). Gifts, in this perspective, serve to symbolize hierarchical and power relations more than they created relations of reciprocity (Silber, 2004). Others have pointed out that the desire to give may, at times, not offer any rights to the receivers (Bornstein, 2009). Therefore, transnational giving in the Global South may nurture communal life beyond borders and time, forge new solidarities, and create forms of social citizenship, but it also remains individually, communally or institutionally embedded in various forms of power relations.

With its nuanced ethnographic and multi-sited research across Asia, Africa, and North America, this special issue will contribute to several contemporary debates on the relationship between transnational giving and communal belonging. While this issue offers important anthropological insights about the articulations and changing meaning of giving, community, and citizenship, the questions it raises also speak to a broader range of social science disciplines. Although the research for this special issue was conducted before the emergence of COVID-19, the effects of this pandemic have revealed not only the interconnectedness of the globe but the critical need of most of the world’s citizens to receive aid. In many places, the very unwillingness to give or share supplies, information, etc., has forced citizens to increasingly turn to nonstate sources and networks, much of which existed in pre-COVID-19 times. Understanding community formation processes beyond national borders, new norms of obligations accompanying transnational giving, and its entanglements with the state will be even more pressing global questions in a post-COVID-19 world. We believe transnational giving is a critical way to approach this conversation.