Afterword: Begging the Questions

Abstract

This afterword offers a brief commentary on the chapters in this volume, addressing key themes with regard to the role of the request in religious humanitarianism, while highlighting other, less explicit but no less prevalent themes. Included here is the capacity for acts and processes of asking to generate moral anxieties, miscommunications, and uncertainties, even as they are imagined or fashioned to function as means of disambiguation. Building on the ethnographic case studies, the afterword analyzes the category of the request as a multimodal medium, based in ethical and religious norms of reciprocity and yet suffused with elements of mystery regarding outcomes and affordances that are often difficult for interested parties to anticipate.