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AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data collected in China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and India, this article explores the life-world and practices of small-scale Indian export agents based in Yiwu, China, the world centre for the export of small commodities. It shows that in a market overdetermined by fast-moving goods, short-term gains, and low margins, export agents have to steer their way between acting with extreme caution or taking risks with their clients and suppliers. These apparently contradictory dispositions or orientations are negotiated by the judicious exercise of mistrust and suspicion. The article suggests not only that mistrust is valued and cultivated as an indispensable practical resource for success in Yiwu's export trade, but that contingent relations of trust between market players emerge at the interstices of a generalized mutual mistrust, via the mobilization of practices of hospitality, commensality, and masculine conviviality. Indeed, feelings of amity and mutuality elicited by the performance of modalities of social intimacy become the affective terrain upon which divergent economic interests might be reconciled and taken forward. That is, mistrust might not lead to generalized distrust, instead a situational or contingent trust might actually emerge through the judicious exercise of mistrust.

There are no reliable figures to help us measure the volume of charitable donations in South Asia but, according to the 2014 World Giving Index, Sri Lanka is ranked ninth in the world for the charitable efforts of its citizens, while other South Asian countries figure in the top 75 out of 135 countries surveyed. According to the same index, India comes first in the world for the overall number of people donating money to charities and volunteering for social causes; Pakistan is ranked sixth for the number of charitable donations; India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are within the top ten countries for the number of people who have 'helped a stranger' in the 12 months prior to the survey. According to a 2001 survey by the Sampradaan Centre for Indian Philanthropy, among members of the A–C socio-economic classes, 96 per cent of respondents donated annually an average of Rs 1,420. The total amount donated was Rs 16.16 billion. Two surveys conducted in West Bengal and Sri Lanka suggest that South Asians across the social spectrum contribute readily to charity.

There are no reliable figures to help us measure the volume of charitable donations in South Asia but, according to the 2014 World Giving Index, Sri Lanka is ranked ninth in the world for the charitable efforts of its citizens, while other South Asian countries figure in the top 75 out of 135 countries surveyed. According to the same index, India comes first in the world for the overall number of people donating money to charities and volunteering for social causes; Pakistan is ranked sixth for the number of charitable donations; India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are within the top ten countries for the number of people who have 'helped a stranger' in the 12 months prior to the survey. According to a 2001 survey by the Sampradaan Centre for Indian Philanthropy, among members of the A–C socio-economic classes, 96 per cent of respondents donated annually an average of Rs 1,420. The total amount donated was Rs 16.16 billion. Two surveys conducted in West Bengal and Sri Lanka suggest that South Asians across the social spectrum contribute readily to charity.

Peasant Moorings: Village Ties and Mobility Rationales in South India. Jean‐Luc Racine. ed. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997. 400 pp.

"Discusses contemporary Islamic reformism in South Asia in some of its diverse historical orientations and geographical expressions"--Provided by publisher

Annotation The Izhavas are an ex-untouchable community in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Politically and economically weak, stigmatised as 'toddy tappers' and 'devil dancers', and considered unapproachable by clean caste Hindus, a century ago Izhavas were associated with other manual-labouring untouchable castes. In recent decades they have sought to improve their position by accumulating economic, symbolic and cultural capital through employment, religion, politics, migration, marriage, education and have tried to assert their right to mobility, often in the face of opposition from their high status Christian and Nayar neighbours. This study examines how Izhavas, through repudiation of their nineteenth-century identity and search for mobility, have come into complex relationships with modernity, colonialism and globalisation. Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella highlight the complexities and contradictions of modern identity, both locally and globally. The authors' approach builds upon and goes beyond a south Asian focus, showing how the Izhavas represent the rise of formerly stigmatised groups who remain at the same time trapped by stereotype and material disadvantage. Absolute mobility, they argue, has not led to relative mobility within a society which remains stratified and prone to new forms of social exclusion

Why should we care about giving in modern South Asia, and why now? These are among the questions at the forefront of this special issue whose contributors explore charitable practices and philanthropic transformations in diverse historical and cultural contexts across the colonial/post-colonial divide at a time when trade liberalization, the transformation of state welfare-ism, and the consolidation of a global economy has led to a deepening of neo-liberal regimes across the region as well as political and religious fundamentalisms. We also write at a time when non-governmental organizations have proliferated across the region, as has the discourse regarding humanitarian aid for a diverse range of development projects. This special issue, then, seeks to throw light on what is new and different, and what persists in the context of the region's long and well-established traditions of giving. Who gives and toward what purposes and with what stated intentions? How have acts of giving changed over time and across cultural, religious, and regional complexes? What are the institutional frameworks within which specifically local, national and regional mechanisms and instruments of giving intersect with global practices? How do the economic and financial incentives interact with ethical and affective imperatives to give?

AbstractRecent research on contemporary modalities of Islamic or Muslim philanthropy has focused on processes of subjectification through which givers and recipients of charity are habituated or craft themselves to an ethic of piety, social responsibility, and (neoliberal) economic virtuosity. These studies, however, have concentrated almost exclusively on those who give charity, leading to an over-emphasis on the perspectives of givers, and on their role in determining how the poor might deal with their everyday lives and imagined futures. As a result, small-scale gifting relations in which the Muslim poor may also be involved—making the poor simultaneously giversandrecipients of charity—have been obscured or erased altogether. In this article, we argue that the concerns of the poor might not always or necessarily be those of the wealthy donors of charity. By receivingandgivingsadaqaandzakat, poor and working-class Muslims in a Colombo neighbourhood imagine inclusion and belonging to the wider Muslim community in Colombo, which is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and (middle-class) pious donors. Importantly, this imagination of inclusion and belonging comes at a time when the Muslim poor are increasingly marginalized by virtue of a (middle-class) discourse that, by framing charity as a means 'to help the poor to help themselves', has turned socio-economicupliftmentinto an ethical duty and, consequently, failure to improve oneself has become the symptom of wider moral shortcomings.

AbstractThis article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the "bazaar economy" in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a "new economy." The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as "neoliberal global capitalism."