Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique

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...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Banerjee, Dwaipayan (Contributor), Copeman, Jacob (Author)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press, 2018-10-22T17:33:50Z.
Subjects:
Online Access:Get fulltext
LEADER 01693 am a22001933u 4500
001 118653
042 |a dc 
100 1 0 |a Banerjee, Dwaipayan  |e author 
100 1 0 |a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Banerjee, Dwaipayan  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Banerjee, Dwaipayan  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a Copeman, Jacob  |e author 
245 0 0 |a Ungiven: Philanthropy as critique 
260 |b Cambridge University Press,   |c 2018-10-22T17:33:50Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118653 
520 |a 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. 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Modern Asian Studies