Asking in Time

Abstract

This introductory essay highlights the importance of asking as well as giving within both humanitarian and religious frameworks. Humanitarian workers share with religious believers a profound appreciation of the moral force inherent in forms of giving, such as charity, philanthropy, and development assistance, as well as in styles of asking that include prayer, protest, fund-raising, and begging. Within anthropology, the foundational text on giving as a source of morality is Marcel Mauss’s study, The Gift. While Mauss depicts the gift as the moral basis of legal and religious justice, he does not view the request as compelling a return. The question, then, is how to conceptualize the sorts of obligations that activities of asking may confer, and how these might be related to the obligations attendant on giving. The approach taken here extends David Graeber’s discussion in Debt: The First 5,000 Years of how different kinds of economic transactions shape the ways relationships between their participants develop over time. In parallel fashion, forms of asking help to create and sustain the temporal frameworks in religious and humanitarian endeavors are carried out.