The ethics of religious giving in Asia: introduction

ABSTRACT

The ethical evaluation of religious giving involves multiple metrics of theological references, everyday ethics, ritual correctness, and materialist self-interest. Understanding how these categories are constantly re-made and experienced in the lives of individuals and the broader history of religious traditions is vital to understandings of the ethics of religious giving. The salience of this ‘value pluralism’ is particularly amplified in contemporary Asian contexts, where complex inter- and intra-religious dynamics, agendas of modernizing reform, state projects of nation building, economic development programs, and various forms of activist mobilization cut across intertwining vectors. It is our goal to describe the ongoing everyday decision-making processes of individuals in diverse contexts in order to contribute both empirically and theoretically to discussions of the ethics of religious giving. In this special issue, we present an interactionist perspective in which the category of ‘the religious’ is dynamically and mutually reconfigured in relation to other salient fields of charity, philanthropy, and humanitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• ethics
• charity
• philanthropy
• humanitarianism

Introduction

Whenever a Muslim of means encounters a person in need, he should give to aid that person, whether or not he has already paid zakāt. (Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, d. 1111)¹

Forms of giving are often regarded as expressions of both ethical values and ritual requirements across diverse religious traditions. Many religious doctrines preach ideals of compassion and generosity and/or provide liturgical prescriptions for the conduct of offerings or donations and the actual practices and perceptions of what are considered ‘proper’ kinds of giving are myriad. In the epigram above, an eminent medieval Muslim scholar succinctly addresses the tensions that might arise between two different forms of religious giving within his own tradition: the first is an immediate, compassionate response to the perceived material needs of others (ṣadaqa) and the second is a ritualized form of giving, formally structured by Islamic jurisprudence (zakāt); the latter has been the subject of extensive elaboration within the tradition for more than a millennium, resulting in a rich archive for the exploration of debates about the meanings of religious giving within a single tradition over large expanses of time and space. In the eleventh century, the Muslim jurist and political theorist Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥabīb al-Māwardī (d. 1058) characterized zakāt as “a purification for the donor and a support for the recipient” (Māwardī, Al-Aḥkam al-Sulṭāniyya, as quoted in Calder 1981, 468), thus highlighting the differential ways in which one act of religious giving was regarded from different perspectives. The point was not simply acknowledging the roles of donor and recipient in a transaction, but rather signaling that there are other dimensions involved in giving zakāt that register beyond the transfer of material wealth and property. Drawing on this passage from al-Māwardī, Norman Calder has commented insightfully on the ‘dual aspect’ of this central pillar of Islam:

As a social tax it provides for the transfer of wealth from certain productive classes of society to certain poor of non-productive classes. As a religious duty … it is a ritual whose correct performance involves an attention to precise details of quantity …, timing …, and intention … which may be irrelevant or even inimical to the fulfillment of the social aim. (Calder 1981, 468)²

Even within the same religious tradition, there are thus multiple forms of what can be considered as ‘proper’ religious giving. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin, James Laidlaw approaches the choices made in such situations in relation to the concept of ‘value pluralism’ for the contexts in which people make critical choices among competing factors for consideration (Laidlaw 2014, 165–168). In some cases, practices of religious giving might even be in pronounced contradiction to a culture’s normative ethical prescriptions and the maintenance of social order, as Robert Weller has highlighted in his work on modern forms of religiosity and associational life in Taiwan. Weller points to a ‘split culture’ that is on the one hand less communitarian than individualistic, displaying little commitment to public morality, and on the other hand committed to a universalizing morality, resembling Western civil society (Weller 1999, 83–84). The evaluation of a particular act of ‘religious giving’ can thus involve multiple metrics, including everyday ethics, ritual correctness, and materialist self-interest, thus extending considerably beyond current popular notions of ‘charity’ and/or ‘philanthropy’.

Religious giving in comparative contexts

The terms ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’ have nonetheless come to dominate recent academic discussion of religious giving, much of which is concerned with more instrumentalist questions of its channeling for diverse social, economic, and political projects than critical reflections on the ethics at work by individuals and institutions involved (see e.g. Davis 2013). Current popular usage, however, obscures more complex fields of meaning from earlier periods of history. In classical Greek, the term philanthropia was used with reference to a divine quality manifest in gifts of the gods to men. Even when it later came to be used with reference to high-status persons granting boons to those of lower rank, the ‘gifts’ given were not always monetary, but included amnesty and other interventions that made philanthropia synonymous with ‘good will and justice’. Moses Finley has described the eclipse of these earlier meanings of the term: “it remained for later ages to express humanity in purely monetary terms, to degrade it to the level of gifts to the poor and needy” (Finley 1973, 38–39). Other shifts in conceptions of ‘charity’ reveal the extent to which even in the case of Christianity the care of the poor was not always viewed in terms of a scriptural mandate of the ‘social gospel’, but rather something repeatedly reconfigured in relation to political and socio-economic developments. As, for example, Peter Brown has noted in relation to the conversion of wealthy Roman élites following Constantine in 312:

[T]he “vertical” aspect of almsgiving—that stressed the stark drop between God and humanity, rich and poor—gained ever-greater prominence. The anonymous poor who had come to crowd around the churches were “others,” and no longer “brothers,” and it became more difficult to see almsgiving as a gesture of solidarity, as had been the case when the poor were known fellow believers. Rather, it became easier to see almsgiving as a purely expiatory action that involved little or no bonding with the poor themselves. Acts of mercy to the faceless poor simply mirrored (and so could be thought, on some level, to provoke) the acts of mercy by which a distant God cancelled the sins of the almsgiver. (Brown 2015, 44–45)

The history of religions is replete with examples demonstrating that, while religious groups and individuals have been providing goods and services for the poor and needy, particular kinds of giving have been understood in diverse and complex ways³—both within and across traditions. The case studies presented in this special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion explore the ethics of religious giving in Asian contexts as both empirical and theoretical contributions. Taken together, these investigations across diverse non-Western contacts aim to broaden current understandings of exchanges and transactions beyond the limited framework of religious market/religious economy theories (Stark and Bainbridge 1996; Stark and Finke 2000).

Looking beyond the American context that has been so influential for the development and popularization of this dominant paradigm, a turn to case studies in Asia has already opened the way to new understandings of the dynamics of religious giving. Historical studies of ‘doing good’ in China have highlighted the ways in which individuals engage with certain forms of practice to re-create and re-envision their roles in society and their relationship vis-à-vis other (less fortunate) members of society (Smith 2009). As Angela Leung keenly observed, during the Ming period, “religious giving is not about solving the issue of poverty (in effect it can’t), but aims to remake social order and … often has a strong ethical incentive” (Leung 2001, 4). Recognizing the diversity of ends toward which practices of religious giving have been directed in contexts beyond the modern West and its globalization should serve to remind us of the need to contextualize current fixations on religious giving primarily as a means to subsidize and/or extend the reach of social service provision, humanitarian aid, and development projects.⁴

The salience of diverse factors involved in the ethics of religious giving are particularly amplified in many contemporary Asian contexts, where complex inter- and intra-religious dynamics, agendas of modernizing reform, state projects of nation-building, economic development programs, and diverse forms of activist mobilization cut across multiple intersecting vectors. Through his studies of popular communal cults, qigong networks, Daoist cultivators, Confucian volunteers, and Buddhist philanthropists in contemporary China, David Palmer has developed a broader vision of the ‘religious gift economy’, comprised not only of gifting exchanges between humans, but also of those between gods and humans (Palmer 2011). The plurality of values in play across different forms of gifting in these cases reinforces the point highlighted above in relation to ṣadaqa and zakāt about diverse motivations for—and ethical evaluations of—religious gifts. This collection of studies continues work along these lines of expanding empirical research in order to develop new ways to understand aspects of religious giving that are not adequately dealt with by approaches built upon “the a priori assumption that all human activity consists of market exchanges” (Palmer 2011, 573). The importance of gaining some critical perspective on market logics is particularly vital—and challenging—for understanding contemporary dynamics of religion and development. As Didier Fassin has recently stressed, “That social scientists would adopt the same language and manifest the same concern is certainly not neutral”, calling for “the critical examination of this parallel evolution of society and those who study it” (Fassin 2014, 433).

Religion and development in contemporary Asia

Interest in ‘religion and development’ (both practical and critical/academic) has expanded dramatically over the past two decades.⁵ The contexts for this were informed by, among other factors, James Wolfensohn’s active engagement with religious leaders and organizations during his term as the President of the World Bank (1995–2005) as well as the greater political legitimacy and legal remit of ‘faith-based organizations’ promoted by George W. Bush in the US and Tony Blair in the UK (Fountain, Bush, and Feener 2015, 21). On a global scale, neo-liberal re-structurings have opened new opportunities for the service provision activities of religious NGOs to complement and enhance systems of low state capacity, even as, in some contexts, religious NGOs are associated with political parties and, as part of their electoral strategies, compete directly with state services (see Davis and Robinson 2012).⁶ Much of the analysis of these developments has been dominated by market theory approaches and political economy approaches—and, in the case of many Islamic charities, the scrutiny of what might be labeled ‘security studies’.⁷

A different approach to contemporary practices of Muslim religious giving is presented by Filippo Osella and Tom Widger in their recent work on Islamic charity in Sri Lanka. They highlight the ethical issues beyond the politics of transnational organizations to focus on micro-scale dimensions of religious giving in relation to both projects for cultivation of the self and in the design and the implementation of programs for social transformation. Their work presents rich ethnographic views on the ways in which classical Islamic religious ideas and institutions are transformed in contemporary contexts (Osella and Widger 2018). Their work furthermore resonates with emerging critical perspectives on the elaboration of particular kinds of ethical formulations reflecting broader shifts toward an emphasis on redistributive aspects of religious giving in Islam elsewhere in the world (see e.g. Fauzia 2013; Singer 2008; Lev 2005).

In his contribution to this collection, Francis Lim presents a new sociological model for the study of religious giving based on a contextual approach to ethics. Drawing on Roland Robertson’s conception of the ‘global field’, he develops a contextualized approach to understand the ways in which the religious giver, the national society, the global civil society, and the global discourse on wellbeing and development inform evolving evaluations of what is considered to be ‘proper’ religious giving in his case studies from contemporary China. While Lim focuses on a methodology for studying ethical negotiations involved in religious giving and receiving, other articles in this special issue employ anthropological approaches to ‘ethics’ in the broad sense, mapped in Webb Keane’s recent work as “a heterogeneous set of psychological and social resources” (Keane 2015, 25).

A major emphasis in the recent anthropological literature on the subject is a shift from studying moral codes and ethical systems to studying ethical processes and ethical subjects. Joel Robbins (2007) posits a distinction between ‘reproduction’ and ‘freedom’ as two basic forms of morality: the first upholding and maintaining established traditions (hence reproducing relational selves), the second moral questioning as a result of conflicting moral values that are presented by dramatic cultural changes.⁸ Jarrett Zigon has reacted with an alternative distinction between non-consciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning in a way that emphasizes the open-ended and situational experiences of individuals over more coherent spheres of moral imagination (Zigon 2009; see also Zigon 2008). Through all of this runs a debate about readings of Foucault and his work on ethical process as a work on the self. One of the most powerful recent interventions in this conversation has been Laidlaw’s re-reading of Foucault’s later work to emphasize an understanding of ‘problematization’ as a methodological constant, rather than as an ‘event’ (Laidlaw 2014, 118).⁹

In a recent study of Islamic religious giving in Palestine, Emanuel Schaeublin (2016) provides a rich ethnography of the ways in which everyday social interaction contributes to the continual constitution of ethical agents—as both givers and receivers. He closely examines the ways in which diverse parties negotiate the productive tensions between conceptual structures of calculation and abundance, this-worldly and other-worldly orientations, lateral and hierarchic discipline, situated appeals to fragments of scripture and Islamic religious texts, and the ethical ambiguity of inter-personal negotiations of relative social position.

Conceptions of how religious considerations interact with other contextual factors in the ongoing everyday decision-making of individuals is at the center of the work presented in this collection, with explorations of what people actually do and think on the ground, contributing both empirically and theoretically to the ethics of religious giving. While the micro-politics of gifting practices in some respects reflect shared values of particular societies, they also reveal significant anxieties about the propriety, efficacy, and ethics of both giving and receiving and provide material with which critically to engage with entanglements of the ethical and the political in relation to discourses of piety, ritual efficacy, privilege, and communal solidarity across diverse religious traditions in the contemporary world.

In his contribution to this collection, Charles Carstens examines the narratives of a monastic gift recipient in contemporary Myanmar to present a complex picture of the ways in which conceptions of dāna are shaped, not only by Buddhist doctrine, but also by inter-subjective relationships. Detailing three different narratives provided by a monk who was once situated in monastic life, then caught in the dilemma of disrobing, before finally becoming a successful lay businessman, Carstens points out the different moral frameworks at work: hospitality, anade (roughly translated as ‘embarrassment caused by indebtedness’), and benefactor–beneficiary dynamics. Not only does Carstens highlight the connection and difference between dāna as embodied and narrative practices, and between textual and empirical practices, he also reveals the salience of narratives of reciprocal gift relations in attempts to grapple with inter-subjective tensions and complexities of social relations in which individuals are caught.

Thomas Borchert’s article similarly takes the discussion of what might define a particular gift as inappropriate beyond the textual stipulations of vinaya in narratives around ‘bad’ gifts among monastics in south-west China and Thailand. His focus is on contexts of interaction informing the evaluation of particular acts of giving to religious specialists and the impact these have on the formation of individual identities and the demarcation of distinct status groups in society. Attending to the objects of giving allows us to see that the presumed universal aspects of discipline within Theravāda Buddhism are marked by significant diversity. Moreover, while the role of laity in the disciplining process has been overlooked, Borchert argues that gifts—good and bad—show us some of the ways in which the discipline is shaped by lay concerns.

Daniel Birchok’s discussion expands on some of these themes in his examination of the way religious differences can serve as the basis of reciprocity, instead of simply building boundaries. In his discussion of the experiences of a Chinese Indonesian’s conversion from Buddhism to Islam in the overwhelmingly Muslim province of Aceh, Indonesia, Birchok presents a case of intertwining salience of religious conversion and religious giving. Positing religious giving as a way of “imagining alternative forms of relationality and modes of being in the world” (Mittermaier 2014, 55), Birchok calls our attention to the practice of kandoeri as “an instance of an Islamic ethic of the gift”. Thus he not only opens up the possibility of letting the Maussian analysis of the gift back into the discussion of Islam, but also opens up possible ways to “understand Islam, the gift, and moral personhood in the contemporary world”.

Michael Hertzberg reminds us, however, that, in other cases, forms of giving from religious individuals and institutions often contribute to inter-communal strife. In an earlier work, Hertzberg (2015) examined debates about ‘unethical conversion’ and the politics of humanitarian aid and popular discourses of suspicion in Christian and Buddhist relations in post-tsunami Sri Lanka as the context for the promulgation of an Anti-Conversion Bill. Constitutional and other legal protection of Buddhism as a religion of state from the incursion of proselytization by other religious groups is in place in a number of southern Asian states, including Cambodia and Bhutan (and there has been pressure for analogous legislation in Thailand over the past decade) (Feener 2014, 7). In his contribution to this special issue, Hertzberg critically reviews the recent escalation of anti-conversion legislation in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and in a number of Indian states. These new laws effectively criminalize particular forms of religious giving in which humanitarian aid is perceived as a potential inducement to conversion and as disruptive to the established social order in religiously plural contexts. Beyond the particular prescriptions, however, Hertzberg reveals the ways in which the development of this legislation involved the interaction of a range of discourses on religious conversion, the regulation of minority affairs, and the position of the state as the adjudicator of communal rights and the maintainer of social order.

Ethics of religious giving

‘Religious giving’ is an ambivalent term, which obviously involves more than what is generally imagined in discourses of faith-based philanthropy. It can mean individuals or communities giving to the religious individuals and/or institutions or the dispersal of gifts from religious bodies to individuals and communities. Specific religious traditions have established normative models and technical procedures that define gifting for their adherents, but these can also shift over time and place, necessitating the formulation of new forms of justification and ethical evaluation. The Indic concept of dāna provides a potent example of this. Diverse discourses around Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist understandings and practices of dāna have been the focus of a number of important works of recent scholarship on the ethics of religious giving (Laidlaw 2000; Bornstein 2012). In his ethnography of Burmese Buddhists in the twentieth century, Melford Spiro explored diverse forms of dāna and their relative social value, highlighting the ways in which the cultural contexts of Buddhist Burma inform the ways in which different kinds of giving are viewed as ‘religious’ or not:

To contribute to the support of a monk, to erect a pagoda, to offer flowers to a Buddha image—these are dāna. To contribute to the support of a widow, to build a school, to bring flowers to the sick—these are not, or at best are inferior dāna; little if any merit is to be gained from them. (Spiro 1970, 109)

The dominant vectors of all these practices of gifting were—at the time of Spiro’s fieldwork—relatively stable in their established pattern of material donations from lay Buddhists to monks and monastic institutions. However, in the aftermath of the Cyclone Nargis of 2008, Buddhist monasteries became some of the most important nodes in the networks of post-disaster aid from international NGOs and some monks became pro-active agents in processes of giving compassionate relief to the laypeople of their communities (Jaquet and Walton 2013).¹⁰ While Elizabeth Harris has noted that there are some earlier precedents for “socially active bhikku” whose work was “not without a Buddhist rationale” in the Theravādin context of Sri Lanka, social reconfigurations in that country in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 have significantly re-shaped discourse and practice around religious giving there (Harris 2013, 20).

In an influential essay on the anthropology of ethics, Michael Lambek has stressed that

ethics always needs to provide a space for argument, if not simply conversation … and religion in its various social historical formations can be examined with respect to how it both enables and frustrates ethical exercises (Lambek 2012, 354).

The work presented in this special issue pushes further to explore the ethics of religious giving through an interactionist perspective in which the category of ‘the religious’ is dynamically and mutually reconfigured in relation to other salient fields, including charity, philanthropy, and humanitarianism. All of these related terms—so often conflated in contemporary academic and practitioner discourse—need to be understood not as fixed and stable categories, but rather as ‘moving targets’ tracked across complex and ever shifting landscapes (Feener, Fountain, and Bush 2015). Keane’s recent work calls attention to the fact that, as such categories circulate, people “find new ways to recognize themselves in them” (Keane 2015, 192). Understanding the ways in which these categories are constantly re-made and experienced in the lives of individuals and in the broader history of religious traditions is thus vital to understandings of the ethics of religious giving.

Acknowledgments

This collection of essays grew out of a workshop convened at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS) in October 2014. We would like to thank all of the colleagues who participated in the discussions there for helping us to further refine our thinking on some of the core issues debated there. We gratefully acknowledge the support of ARI/NUS that made the event possible and especially the assistance of Valerie Yeo, Sharon Ong, and Henry Kwan.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

R. Michael Feener

R. Michael Feener is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and a member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Research Leader of the Religion and Globalization Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He taught at Reed College and the University of California, Riverside, and held visiting professor positions and research fellowships at Harvard, Kyoto University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Copenhagen, The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Honolulu), and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion, and development. CORRESPONDENCE: Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Marton Road, Oxford, OX3 0EE.

Keping Wu

Keping Wu is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, a research scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Notes

1. Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Ḥalabī, 1347H./1929), I: 192.

2. Elsewhere, Calder points to analogous tensions at play in the discussions of Sunnī jurists, such as in the work of eleventh-century Sunni jurist al-Sarakshī (d. 1097), on “certain tensions arising between the demands of God and the rights and duties of the zakāt donors, zakāt recipients, tax-collectors and governor” (Calder 1995, 58–59). Both Calder 1995 and Calder 1981 have been republished in Mojaddedi and Rippin 2006.

3. The insight that gift-giving is both diverse and complex was a key thrust of Marcel Mauss’s seminal contribution to the analysis of gifting (see Mauss [1925] 1967).

4. For further discussion on this theme, see Kuah-Pearce and Cornelio 2015.

5. For critical reflections on the shape that these discussions have taken, see Fountain 2013 and Jones and Petersen 2011.

6. For the ways in which neo-liberal reforms have re-shaped the operations of religious NGOs, see especially Atia 2013 and Adams 2013.

7. For critical interventions in dominant international discourses on contemporary Islamic charities, see Lacey and Benthall 2014.

8. These distinct ‘spheres’ of morality reflect the broader model of disruption prominent in Robbins’s ground-breaking work on conversion to charismatic forms of Christianity. For a critique of this emphasis on rupture in contemporary conversations on the anthropology of religion, see Brown and Feener 2017.

9. It should be noted, however, that the spiral dynamics of this discourse, as Robbins’s work mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, drew and built upon Laidlaw’s earlier work, in particular Laidlaw 2002.

10. For further discussion of the religion–disaster–relief nexus, see Fountain and McLaughlin 2016.