The effects of a merciful heart

Abstract

In this article, I examine the relationship of charitable help that, through the persons and the work of caregivers, connects some donors to the young persons who grow up in home-based childcare institutions in contemporary Malaysia. The prism of my analysis is the small charity functions that take place within the homes that I have studied, which allow donors and receivers to elaborate, perfect and enact moral ideas of themselves and of their place in society. Because they stage the main characters of charity, the functions also give an insight into how, since an early age, children actively explore the dominant and largely ethnicized model of virtue and merit they are summoned to embody, thus making sense of their shared condition of “charity children”. This self-care work, I argue, inspired by Erica Bornstein’s study on Indian charity, is made possible by the “pure gift” core that characterizes donors and caretakers, as it frees the aided children from the necessity to “buy” their care back, which is otherwise requested in traditional child fostering.

• Charity
• children
• fosterage
• Malaysia
• moral economy
• orphans

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kostas Retsikas and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

1. This article is the outcome of fieldwork research carried out in short but regular periods in Penang from 2008 to 2014.

2. In my experience, in Penang and the mainland, one does not meet solitary or grouped wanderers as described by Aliaas, Bajunid and Abdullah (2012) for Chow Kit in Kuala Lumpur. Even if we compare Kuala Lumpur with what is described, for example, by Beazley (2003) in Yogyakarta, or Bolotta (2014) in Bangkok, numbers are far smaller.

3. “Malaysians” is what all the citizens of Malaysia are called. A Malay (Melayu) is a person who belongs to the Malay ethnic constellation spread all through South East Asian coasts. Sixty percent of Malaysians are Malay, including the Prime Minister and the Sultans of nine of the States.

4. In Thailand, too, the state explicitly considers “volunteerism”, in the Thai case inspired by Buddhism, as a fundamental part of the national character (Nattaka Chaisinthop, 2011: 70–75).

5. Literally, hati actually means “liver”.

6. Kochuyit’s (2009) remarkable article gives a complete idea of the principles regulating mutual help in Islam.

7. I have explored in detail how the homes develop counter-narratives of ethnicity in Vignato (2014).

8. Tamil popular devotion constructs divinity through rituals, as I learned in my 20 year-long fieldwork with Indians. See the fundamental text by Biardeau (1976). About the sacrality of orphanages, see Bornstein (2012: 83).

9. In a wider acceptation, Parry (1986) qualifies the “Indian gift” exactly as a kind of sacrifice.

10. Chinese and Indians easily and often mix ritual activities. They share features in their traditional religions or their religious affiliations to Christianity and Buddhism.

11. The children I met in the homes differ in experience, age, background, health and, of course, personalities. What I discuss here is how some of them, for distinct reasons I cannot detail (and most times, ignore) spontaneously manifested their reaction. Describing the rich life that they invent and struggle through in each home is not the object of this article.

12. Ranjitham was proud of her lively English and I transcribe it as it was, so as not to erase her liveliness.

13. For an overview of theories of gift and reciprocity, see Schrift (1997).

14. According to Parry (1986), this is what the “Indian gift” (dana) is about. Bornstein, though, suggests that the traditional Indian gift is a forerunner of what, in present times, sustains the whole of NGO-based philantropy (Bornstein, 2009: 628).