Loans as gifts?
I looked at the charity Kiva (kiva.org) in the context of Carrier’s ideology of the perfect gift for this week’s assignment. I chose Kiva because it struck me as being immediately very unlike a charity in the traditional sense. Kiva is a platform for people to provide loans to impoverished borrowers who wish, for example, to grow their business, send a child to university, or repair a home. The whole point of Kiva is that the lender is providing a loan not giving a gift or donation. The loan is expected to be repaid. In my essay I argue that Kiva actually attempts to adhere to the ideology of the perfect gift despite (or in fact because of) this stipulation of repayment. I argue that Kiva encourages one to think of charity as “wounding” as Mary Douglas describes it because it places the recipient in the position of symbolic debt. Charity is thus a burden. On the other hand, because Kiva provides an avenue by which the recipient can reciprocate the loan-as-gift, a Kiva loan more closely approximates the perfect gift (at least in the context of charity that wounds) because it sets free the recipient from symbolic debt upon repayment of the material debt.
Kiva also panders in the discourse of empowerment so prevalent in development. Kiva suggests that the material cash loan transforms itself into the perfect gift of immaterial empowerment. Kiva helps people help themselves, as the informational video proclaims. In this sense, Kiva not only falls in line with what Stirrat and Henkel identify as the emerging orthodoxy in development but also succeeds in presenting a material gift as immaterial and thus aligned with the ideology of the perfect gift.
Much of what Kiva is about seems to be addressing some of the pitfalls identified by Stirrat and Henkel in modern charities. For example, they observe that charitable gifts no longer reach the end recipient in the original form in which they were donated. Instead, as gifts of cash are mediated by various intervening NGOs, the cash gets turned largely into bureaucracy and eventually into advice aiming to help communities help themselves. While Kiva engages in the gift of empowerment, it does seek to make the process a bit more direct and transparent. The loans provided are still loans when they are received (although in many cases there is an intermediary micro-finance organization who provides the loan to an applicant and then lists the applicant on Kiva where it is eventually funded—this fosters efficiency so that applicants don’t have to wait around for months to have a loan fuliflled).
I have to admit, however, that I find Kiva a bit problematic. I can’t help but feel that the idea that loans do not wound in the way charitable gifts do only partly accounts for Kiva’s preference of loans over gifts. I have the hunch that Kiva is also interested in the shaping of people into neoliberal selves who act according to market mechanisms. The neoliberal self, after all, does not accept charity, but seeks loans in order to run one’s self like a business lest they be run out of business. And I suggest that this shaping of selves also occurs on the side of the lenders who are encouraged to “invest” in entrepreneurs rather than to give freely to the needy and who are encouraged to peruse the various applicants in search of the best proposals to fund. Individuals, in other words, are encouraged to act like businesses, banks, and venture capitalist funds. Kiva, in a sense then, still deals in advice: loans teach people lessons about how to be modern, self-sufficient, autonomous economic agents.
Anyway, I became interested in other charities that provide cash as gifts or loans, and it turns out there are quite a few. GiveDirectly (givedirectly.org), which provides cash gifts rather than loans, makes for a good comparison with Kiva. For an interesting overview of the growing popularity of giving cash directly to the needy through charities, check out this article from the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/new-help-for-the-poor-cash-grants-through-a-web-site
It also addresses how the market mechanism of allowing donors/lenders to individually choose the applicant or project they wish to fund is not necessarily the most equitable method of distributing assistance to those in need.
Cameron
