Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique
Author(s)
Banerjee, Dwaipayan; Copeman, Jacob
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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.
Date issued
2018-01Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and SocietyJournal
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
ISSN
0026-749X
1469-8099