Abstract
To receive a gift of charity is to receive a gift that cannot be reciprocated, and many have argued that this can only lead to humiliation. For anthropologists, this critique originates in Marcel Mauss’s classic essay, The Gift, where Mauss seems to describe an agonistic theory of exchange in which people secure power and prestige through their generosity. This essay challenges this reading of Mauss by exploring the ways in which prospective beneficiaries seek to attach themselves to a community of East African nuns in efforts to secure future support for themselves and their children. By linking these cases to older writings on patronage in Uganda, this essay complicates arguments about agency and charity’s wounds.
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Notes
- 1.
Mercy House and all of the names given to the people and places associated with it are pseudonyms. I conducted fieldwork at Mercy House from November 2007 through April 2008 and in May 2010 as part of a larger study on orphans support NGOs in Uganda (Scherz 2014). During this period, I traveled to Mercy House on a regular basis generally staying for a week at a time in the sisters’ guesthouse or in a room attached to the boys dormitory. At Mercy House, I spent my days observing activities and talking with the sisters, the residents, and the steady stream of volunteers who came to donate their time through an array of self-defined projects. I have stayed in regular contact with the sisters and residents of the home since that time and have also conducted interviews with many of Mercy House’s donors.
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Acknowledgments
This research was made possible through a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Foreign Language Area Studies Summer Language Fellowship, and grants from the Berkeley Center for African Studies, the University of California at San Francisco, and Reed College. The arguments presented here were greatly enhanced by the lively discussions that took place at the conference “Asking and Giving in Religious and Humanitarian Discourses” that Fred Klaits and Marla Segol organized at the University at Buffalo, and I am grateful to them for making those conversations possible. My deepest debt is to the sisters and residents of Mercy House who so generously shared their time and insights with me.
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Scherz, C. (2017). Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage. In: Klaits, F. (eds) The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54244-7_3
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