Kin, friends, philanthronationalists: “Relations” as a modality of colonial and post-colonial charity in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Through an historical ethnographic analysis of Sri Lanka’s oldest charity, the Colombo Friend-in-Need Society, this article explores changing modalities of humanitarian “relations” in colonial and post-colonial contexts. For two hundred years, “the Society” would provide a model of liberal humanitarianism premised on “friendship,” a civil and secular relation that the organisation distinguished from “kinship” on the one side and “religion” on the other. Sorting and ranking kinds of charitable practice according to their relations became a project through which the elite could establish the relative values of different forms of mutuality and autonomy and their contribution to colonial and post-colonial development. Paying attention to the Society’s role in this process also helps to reveal the historical contingencies of “relation” as a foundational anthropological concept and analytical objective.

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

“…implicit power imbalances' (Fechter andSchwittay 2019: 1769) that continue to be present in vernacular humanitarianism, and of the need to avoid romanticising local humanitarian traditions as worthy alternatives to universal humanitarianism. While readers will come to their own conclusions about the political and moral value of strategic detachment, the premise that anthropologists oft en start off with, that the relational is inherently positive and the anti-relational, non-relational or detached is inherently negative (Candea et al 2015;Strathern 2020;Widger 2022), receives further challenge from the experiences of minority humanitarians in Sri Lanka. Th ose stories that I have reported here off er further reason to take seriously the political and social possibilities of detachment and disinterestedness beyond a Maussian frame.…”

“…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.…”

The dynamic space of aid relations in protracted internal displacement: the case of Sri Lanka's northern Muslims

“…Sri Lanka has a long tradition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and studies have approached NGOs, charities, and philanthropic initiatives using a variety ofsometimes overlapping-categorisations, such as different generations of organisations, religious and secular, rights-based versus socially-oriented, nationalist/ethnic or cosmopolitan, approaches that dominated at different times and when there were different political leaderships and conflict settings (Bastian, 1999;Goodhand and Lewer, 1999;Orjuela, 2005;Widger, 2023). In narratives about Sri Lanka's civil society, there is very little presence of Muslim organisations and initiatives (however, see Osella, Stirrat, and Widger, 2015;Widger, 2023). Throughout the war, there were interventions to support the displaced by a range of local, national, and international actors.…”

“…In a context of political volatility that accompanied the final stages of the war, international and national NGOs operated in an increasingly restrictive environment as the political discourse became progressively hostile towards such actors (Walton, 2008(Walton, , 2012, which eventually led to the Ministry of Defence taking over administrative responsibility for NGOs in 2010. Two competing visions for postwar Sri Lanka impacted the ways in which charity and assistance occurred within the country (Widger, 2023): a liberal-cosmopolitan post-ethnic future and a vernacular ethnonationalist Sri Lankan Buddhist future. As a result, minorities, like the Muslims, were at greater risk and thus their charitable activities may have been more aligned with a liberal-cosmopolitan view of assistance-shared with the international humanitarian community.…”