Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique
Name
Ungiven - Dwai Banerjee - Modern Asian Studies.pdf
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266.96 KB
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Author(s)
Banerjee, Dwaipayan
Copeman, Jacob
Date Issued
January 2018
Journal
Modern Asian Studies
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Citation
Banerjee, Dwaipayan, and Jacob Copeman. “Ungiven: Philanthropy as Critique.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 01, Jan. 2018, pp. 325–50.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17000245
