While anthropology's engagement with kinship is well known, its silence about the excluded - the orphan - has eluded scholarly attention. My project is inspired by this silence and by the prevalence of orphans as a subject of humanitarian activity. It continues an interest in religion and humanitarianism that I began to explore in my book, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford University Press 2005). The orphan as a character in literature and history has inspired empathy and pathos. Countless films, fables, stories, and fairy-tales - iconographic narratives that seem to cut across cultures and eras - have been written about orphans. Orphans are also newsworthy subjects of social concern. Whether due to HIV/AIDS, natural disasters such as the tsunami, or poverty, children abandoned as orphans evoke calls for public care. But before the orphan becomes visible in the language of kinship, at the moment of its potential re-assimilation as "adopted" kin, his or her life is a matter of another persistent theme in anthropology - the gift. My project brings together these two enduring anthropological themes: kinship and the gift, to shed light on practices of giving and dān to orphans, the needy, the poor, and God in India. Based on ethnographic research in New Delhi, India, the project makes accessible key differences not only among donors, benefactors, and philanthropists but also among beneficiaries, recipients, and claimants. In doing so, I aim to make legible mutual critiques of rights-based regimes of social welfare and philanthropic endeavors.
