The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Asking in Time

   • Frederick Klaits

   Pages 1-24

3. Witchcraft and the Gift: Killing and Healing in Northwest Zambia

   • Sónia Silva

   Pages 25-45

4. Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage

   • China Scherz

   Pages 47-64

5. When God Is a Moral Accountant: Requests and Dilemmas of Accountability in US Medical Relief in Madagascar

   • Britt Halvorson

   Pages 65-92

6. How Asking and Giving Beget Distrust in Christian Child Sponsorship

   • Hillary Kaell

   Pages 93-116

7. Funding Meaning on Jewish Service Trips to Post-Katrina New Orleans

   • Moshe Kornfeld

   Pages 117-143

8. Dignity, Not Pity: Fundraising, Zakat, and Spiritual Exchange

   • Rhea Rahman

   Pages 145-170

9. Afterword: Begging the Questions

   • Omri Elisha

   Pages 171-178

10. Back Matter

    Pages 179-183

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This collection revisits classical anthropological treatments of the gift by documenting how people may be valued both through the requests they make and through what they give. Many humanitarian practitioners, the authors propose, regard giving to those in need as the epitome of moral action but are liable to view those people’s requests for charity as merely utilitarian. Yet in many religious discourses, prayers and requests for alms are highly valued as moral acts, obligatory for establishing relationships with the divine. Framing the moral qualities of asking and giving in conjunction with each other, the contributors explore the generation of trust and mistrust, the politics of charity and accountability, and tensions between universalism and particularism in religious philanthropy.  

• Anthropology of giving
• Morality of giving
• Morality of asking
• Christian giving
• Spiritual exchange
• Humanitarianism
• The gift
• Social outreach
• Anthropology of religion
• Jewish giving
• Religious service
• Religious humanitarianism
• religion and society

• State University of New York, Buffalo, USA

  Frederick Klaits

Frederick Klaits is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. He is the author of Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS (2010).

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