No abstract

This article is an examination of the uses and effects of words and silence. It analyses the rhetorical strategies used in connection with a fundamental cleavage in highland Malagasy society: the distinction between people of free and slave descent. A pervasive silence hangs over this topic since it is almost never mentioned between the two groups. This silence, along with the careful words used to play down status differentiation, forms the rhetorical micro-politics of village life. The article takes the view that this wholesale avoidance constitutes a generalized speech act: that is to say, it is constituted of diverse motivations and strategies, and has multiple and contradictory effects. One of these is that while allowing a liveable fiction of equality to be evoked, these rhetorical strategies also entrench the division even more deeply. Ny vava tsy ambina no ahitan-doza.An unguarded mouth spells danger.Malagasy proverbIt takes less than two minutes to walk from the main village of Antanety, westwards across groundnut and manioc fields, to the shabby little group of mud and thatch houses called Tananomby. The distance is meaningful, for the residents of Tananomby are descendants of slaves while the residents of Antanety are not. The placement of slave-descent hamlets to the west of the main village is common throughout the Malagasy highlands, and the western location of settlements such as Tananomby is a topographical fact with symbolic resonance. This resonance comes from the cosmological significance invested in the cardinal points: in brief, the north and east are associated with the ancestors, and are considered auspicious and sacred, while the west and the south are profane and dangerous (Hébert 1965;Vig 1977).In my early days of fieldwork in Antanety, armed with a cursory knowledge of such arrangements from my preparatory ethnographic readings, I was able immediately to bs_bs_banner

Many charities rely on donations to support their work addressing some of the world’s most pressing problems. We conducted a meta-review to determine what interventions work to increase charitable donations. We found 21 systematic reviews incorporating 1339 primary studies and over 2,139,938 participants. Our meta-meta-analysis estimated the average effect of an intervention on charitable donation size and incidence: r = 0.08 (95% CI [0.03, 0.12]). Due to limitations in the included systematic reviews, we are not certain this estimate reflects the true overall effect size. The most robust evidence found suggests charities could increase donations by (1) emphasising individual beneficiaries, (2) increasing the visibility of donations, (3) describing the impact of the donation, and (4) enacting or promoting tax-deductibility of the charity. We make recommendations for improving primary research and reviews about charitable donations, and how to apply the meta-review findings to increase charitable donations.

Purpose. How can charities best increase the donations to their causes? This study aims to answer this question by synthesizing review-level evidence for increasing charitable giving.Methodology. This paper is an umbrella review of systematic reviews on interventions that influence financial donations to non-profits.Findings. We found 14 meta-analyses (combined N = 1,510,966) covering nine factors influencing charitable giving. Three factors increased donations: tax deductibility, encouraging women to make intuitive judgements, and legitimizing paltry contributions. Two factors reduced donations: compassion fade and larger starting amounts of money. Four factors did not influence donations: ‘door-in-the-face’, prosocial media, government crowding out/in, and artificial surveillance cues. Most reviews focused on contrived experiments measuring one-off donations, such as dictator games. None met all best-practice guidelines for systematic reviews.Practical implications. To increase donations, charities could promote the tax deductibility of the donation, the effects of even small contributions, and highlight the impact of the donation. Systematic reviews allow for more robust conclusions, but many recent reviews of philanthropy marketing neglect best-practice and focus on topics of limited applied utility.

No abstract