Synopses & Reviews
Believing that charity inadvertently legitimates social inequality and fosters dependence, many international development organizations have increasingly sought to replace material aid with efforts to build self-reliance and local institutions. But in some cultureslike those in rural Uganda, where
Having People, Having Heart takes placepeople see this shift not as an effort toward empowerment but as a suspect refusal to redistribute wealth. Exploring this conflict, China Scherz balances the negative assessments of charity that have led to this shift with the viewpoints of those who actually receive aid.
Through detailed studies of two different orphan support organizations in Uganda, Scherz shows how many Ugandans view material forms of Catholic charity as deeply intertwined with their own ethics of care and exchange. With a detailed examination of this overlooked relationship in hand, she reassesses the generally assumed paradox of material aid as both promising independence and preventing it. The result is a sophisticated demonstration of the powerful role that anthropological concepts of exchange, value, personhood, and religion play in the politics of international aid and development.
Review
... an important milestone....--Sheridan Griswold, Correspondent"Mmegi" (01/01/2009)
Review
"... an important milestone...." --Sheridan Griswold, Correspondent, Mmegi, June 5, 2009 Indiana University Press Indiana University Press
Review
“Having People, Having Heart is a fascinating and original book that unsettles preconceptions—and social science theories—about the evils of charity. Scherz convincingly shows how Ugandan nuns practices of charity, which center not upon autonomy but on interdependence, are a better fit with the relational ethics of the region than are NGO workers practices of development. This regional ethics of interdependence prescribes correct (and correctly flexible) relations between patron and client. In such a worldview charity is no insult and independence from others no laudable goal.”
Review
“Having People, Having Heart is a profound ethnographic interrogation of sustainable development and Christian charity in Uganda. Breaking new ground in the anthropology of ethics, Scherz explores how local commitment to the morality of patron-client relationships troubles the ethical ambitions that drive NGO work. In a text that is at once ethnographically complex and exceptionally well argued, and that attends as much to the ethics of institutional as to personal life, she offers the kind of analysis of the politics and morality of aid in the contemporary world that reminds us why anthropology remains a crucial discipline going forward.”
Synopsis
In the rush to development in Botswana, and Africa more generally, changes in work, diet, and medical care have resulted in escalating experiences of chronic illness, debilitating disease, and accident. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana documents how transformations wrought by colonialism, independence, industrialization, and development have effected changes in bodily life and perceptions of health, illness, and debility. In this intimate and powerful book, Julie Livingston explores the lives of debilitated persons, their caregivers, the medical and social networks of caring, and methods that communities have adopted for promoting well-being. Livingston traces how Tswana medical thought and practice have become intertwined with Western bio-medical ideas and techniques. By focusing on experiences and meanings of illness and bodily misfortune, Livingston sheds light on the complexities of the current HIV/AIDS epidemic and places it in context with a long and complex history of impairment and debility. This book presents practical and thoughtful responses to physical misfortune and offers an understanding of the complex dynamic between social change and suffering.
About the Author
China Scherz is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
ONE / Introduction: What We Are Doing Here Is Not Charity
TWO / Genealogies: Accidental Histories of Charity, Sustainable Development, and Kiganda Ethics of Interdependence
THREE / Waiting: The Disappointments of Sustainable Development
FOUR / Love Is the Answer”: Charity and Kiganda Ethics of Interdependence
FIVE / Performance Philanthropy: Sustainable Development and the Ethics of Audit
SIX / Let Us Make God Our Banker”: Charity and an Ethics of Virtue
SEVEN Conclusion: The Politics and Antipolitics of Charity and Sustainable Development
Notes
References
Index