Having People, Having Heart - by China Scherz (Paperback)

About the Book

If asked, most people, including most social scientists would say that sustainable self-sufficiency is an ideal vastly to be preferred to living off charity. Anthropologist China Scherz challenges this truism through a detailed comparison of two very different organizations in Uganda where she conducted fieldwork for two years. The one, Hope Child, is an internationally-funded Ugandan NGO that implements sustainable development models. In contrast, Mercy House, is a Catholic charitable home for orphans, children with disabilities, and the elderly. Scherz asks readers to reconsider both the relational ethic that underlies some charity work and the technical-bureaucratic ethic that underlies contemporary sustainable development. She argues that the Ugandan nuns practices of charity are a better fit with regional ethics and religious values than are the NGO---workers practices of development. Kiganda ethics center "not "upon autonomy but on interdependence, the author argues; this ethics of interdependence prescribes correct (and correctly flexible) relations between patron and client. In such a worldview charity is no insult and independence from others no laudable goal. The book closes with a brief but urgent call to reconsider charitable interdependence as one possible ethical response to a deeply unequal world. Scherz has laid the ethnographic groundwork necessary to make this call a compelling one."

Book Synopsis

Believing that charity inadvertently legitimates social inequality and fosters dependence, many international development organizations have increasingly sought to replace material aid with efforts to build self-reliance and local institutions. But in some cultures-like those in rural Uganda, where Having People, Having Heart takes place-people see this shift not as an effort toward empowerment but as a suspect refusal to redistribute wealth. Exploring this conflict, China Scherz balances the negative assessments of charity that have led to this shift with the viewpoints of those who actually receive aid.

Through detailed studies of two different orphan support organizations in Uganda, Scherz shows how many Ugandans view material forms of Catholic charity as deeply intertwined with their own ethics of care and exchange. With a detailed examination of this overlooked relationship in hand, she reassesses the generally assumed paradox of material aid as both promising independence and preventing it. The result is a sophisticated demonstration of the powerful role that anthropological concepts of exchange, value, personhood, and religion play in the politics of international aid and development.

Review Quotes

"Challenges current international development norms and standards, suggesting that Ugandans see those norms as suspect refusals to redistribute wealth." -- "Washington Post"

"Scherz contrasts the group that she calls Hope Child, a local NGO committed to the paradigm of sustainable development, with the work of the Franciscan sisters of Mercy House, a home for vulnerable children, the disabled, and the elderly. By placing these organizations alongside each other, Scherz is able to bring out the underlying logics of exchange that inform charity and sustainable development, as well as the techniques and technologies that transform these logics into projects of ethical self-formation. . . . In the final paragraphs of her book, Scherz urges readers who are concerned with helping the poor to position themselves in such a way as to make relationships of dependence possible, to '[be] someone others might attach themselves to.' This is a radical revaluation of the term 'dependence, ' which has so long been the bugbear of development efforts. Rather than willing those in poverty to be able to help themselves, one commits to being a helper; rather than decrying such assistance as unsustainable, one commits to sustaining it. Here small acts emerge as compelling because they are socially productive, giving rise to the sort of relationships that have the power to effect real change--change that, importantly, resonates especially well in many of the places where development projects are positioned."
-- "Books & Culture"

About the Author

China Scherzis assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia."