Trading Futures

Abstract

In this article, we explore what happens when idea(l)s of Islamic charity (sadaqah) and social enterprise converge within a low-cost public health clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For both the clinic’s wealthy sponsors and the urban poor who use it, interpreting the intervention as a pious expression of care toward the poor or as a for-profit humanitarian venture meant extending different futures to the poor. The ambiguous temporalities of gifts and commodities anticipated by benefactors and beneficiaries involved in this challenges anthropological assumptions concerning the marketizing effects of neoliberal development interventions. Our ethnography revealed a hesitancy among the clinic’s sponsors, managers, and users to endow the intervention with a final interpretation, undermining its stated goal of promoting health care privatization and “responsibilization” of the poor.

Religious Nationalism, Strategic Detachment and the Politics of Vernacular Humanitarianism in Post-War Sri Lanka

“…To counter the threat posed by nationalist governments not just to their ability to engage in charity but to do business without fear of harassment, some minority-owned fi rms have adopted approaches that explicitly deny any claim to minority ethno-religious identity when framing and directing their development interventions. For example, LankaComm, a Muslim-owned company that had established a low-cost health service across poor communities in Colombo as an expression of sadaqah, reframed their gift in the secular terms of 'corporate social responsibility' and 'social enterprise', in so doing appealing to a broad base of customers for their health service (Widger and Osella 2021). More generally, Muslim-and minority-owned businesses in Sri Lanka have been careful to represent their humanitarianism within the language of Buddhist nationalism, and direct their support towards Sinhala and Buddhist causes championed by ruling politicians -giving rise to a fi eld of what I have called 'philanthronationalism' (Widger 2016a(Widger , 2016b(Widger , 2017(Widger , 2022.…”