Let us make God our banker: Ethics, temporality, and agency in a Ugandan charity home

Abstract

Faith in divine intervention affects the ethical and temporal orientations of a community of East African nuns managing a charity home in Central Uganda and leads them to make programmatic decisions that put them at odds with mainstream approaches in development and humanitarianism. By demonstrating that their resistance to long-term planning and audit practices is not the product of material privation or ignorance but, rather, a consciously developed orientation toward time and agency, I bring together concerns from the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of development. Further, by seeking to explain how the sisters come to hold their particular beliefs, I move beyond the elucidation of doctrine to show how mundane forms of practice are central to the formation of ethical subjectivity. [Africa, agency, Christianity, charity, ethics, temporality] Teresa and a ducat can do nothing: God, Teresa and a ducat can do everything. Let us do everything we can, but let us make God our banker.-Saint Teresa of Avila, 16th-century Spanish mystic

Toward a Bright Future: Politics of Potential in a Ugandan Village

“…First, since the 1990s, international financial institutions and development agencies have lauded “community‐based” initiatives as a corrective to the top‐down development approaches that prevailed in the 1980s (Elyachar ). This type of approach, in which NGOs “partner” with local communities, is part of a global neoliberal shift away from charity and toward the creation of sustainable, locally driven development (Moodie ; Scherz ; Swidler and Watkins ). In a move that harkens back to techniques of colonial governance, NGOs often instantiate or reify village “leadership committees” to aid in the implementation of local projects (Bornstein ; Ferguson ).…”

The evangelical financial ethic: Doubled forms and the search for God in the economic world

“…Whereas social studies of finance scholars have steadily focused on market calculations, anthropologists analyzing evangelical economic activity have stressed its noncalculative character and articulated the importance of practices that relinquish financial control (Bielo ; Coleman ; Scherz ; Wiegele ). Evangelicals, particularly those who preach the “prosperity gospel,” praise occasional and exceptionally large financial gifts that create powerful and present relationships to God and to ministers .…”

“…Questions of ethical conduct and religion tap into a rich vein of contemporary anthropology, particularly as it relates to subject formation across a variety of sites (see, for example, Mahmood ; O'Neill ; Scherz ; Simon ). The focus of this article, on relations between markets, devices, and ethics, requires me to take up that conversation elsewhere.…”

Everyday Diplomacy

“…Furthermore, as both Pandolfi (2002) and Fassin (2008) suggest, essentialized categories such as 'refugees' or 'street children' are constructed by humanitarian agencies as (geo)political subjectivities because the agencies give increasing importance not only to caring and saving lives but also to 'giving testimony' , speaking for or representing those who suffer, to the wider world. There is a growing body of work on how humanitarianism operates in situ, and what modalities of moral reasoning and practices it engenders (Bornstein 2012;Scherz 2013). These studies have developed ethnographically sensitive theoretical models that locate such actors in transnational forms of increasingly mobile sovereignty and governmentality (Pandolfi 2002).…”