Widger, Tom and Osella, Filippo (2020) Trading futures: Sadaqah, social enterprise, and the polytemporalities of development gifts. Focaal European Journal of Anthropology. pp. 1-14. ISSN 0920-1297

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of Global Studies > Anthropology
SWORD Depositor:	Mx Elements Account
Depositing User:	Mx Elements Account
Date Deposited:	18 Dec 2020 08:54
Last Modified:	20 Jan 2021 14:56
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/95902

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