443578

12

ISS27410.1177/0268580912443578MuktaInternational Sociology

Article

Who or what do we care

about in the 21st century?

International Sociology
27(4) 446463
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0268580912443578
iss.sagepub.com

Parita Mukta

University of Warwick, UK

Abstract
The article explores the importance of Richard Titmusss 1970 book, The Gift Relationship. It
analyses the substance of the gift relationship, and its steady erosion through the embrace of
neoliberalism globally, by seeing how the gift of life has become a theft of life through the work
of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It sets out the importance of redistribution and recognition to the
study of sociology, outlines the lacuna in Honneth and Fraser, and argues that the preciousness
of the gift relationship can only be kept alive by scrupulous attention to social structures that
nurture this; and by rejecting the death-fetish that is implicitly and explicitly present in scholarship
that explores death as resistance (Mbembe). The article calls for an end to the romance with
death, and for the work of mourning to be undertaken, without which there can be no going
forward into the futures we wish to create.

Keywords
Gift of life, Mbembe, politics of life, recognition, redistribution, Scheper-Hughes, Titmuss

These reflections are a response to a series of intellectual and public shifts that have
taken place in the international, political, social and cultural arenas over the past three
decades. There are three key constellations that have been crucial to this formation. One
is the rise and engagement of a vibrant international Third World (in particular for me
Indian) feminism with its attendant intellectual dynamic and concern for the politics of
life. In its initial phase, this feminism was quick to foreground the overtly resistive
strands of activism (Omvedt, Sen, Lalita, Trivedi). This was, in part, a response to female
subjects being reduced to passive beings, as well as a move to foreground women as
subjects in the making of their lives, of history and society. Even as resistance through
collective struggle was primarily foregrounded in these works, there was an awareness
of the costs of this resistance to the women, which lay in the experience of deep
betrayals, isolation and loss (Lalita, 1989; Trivedi, 1984). This feminist scholarship
Corresponding author:
Parita Mukta, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: Parita.Mukta@warwick.ac.uk

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matured as the political landscape in India was taken up by authoritarian movements

(filled with angry, hate-fuelled emotions) from the mid-1980s, and it became ever more
attentive to the consequences of this xenophobic hatred for women, men and children of
both the minority and majority communities. However, the violence of these authoritarian movements did not propel the feminist movement to re-examine its own relationship
to movements of the left, including the revolutionary left, and the feminist impulse
stopped short, in large measure, of a clear disavowal of the use of violence for the
achievement of social justice (Roy, 2009). This even when the second constellation
the role of revolutionary political violence had become increasingly marginalized and
tempered into negotiated political settlements in the globe (Northern Ireland, South
Africa) thereby leaving the terrain of the politics of violence to extremist movements as
well as to state/co-state militaries and their corporate mercenary partners (Iraq,
Afghanistan). The third key constellation has been the ending of the Cold War in 1989,
making nuclear armaments (that nightmare to end all nightmares) ever more redundant.
The possibility of peace in the globe then became overshadowed by a newly configured
war on terror (with tragic outcomes in the cities of London and Madrid, then the
Norwegian island of Utoeya) and despair over events in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
In these reflections, I wish to expand the arguments that I began in a chapter titled
Visions of a peaceable life (Mukta, 2010). While this argued for the importance of
developing varied, imaginative and grounded visions that feed into that core vision that
of a peaceable life here in this universe the chapter did not scrutinize that which is so
deeply opposed to a peaceable life. This is the political, social, cultural, emotional and
psychic fascination (I call this the fetish) with death. For the purposes of these reflections, then, I wish to engage with the centrality of the question of the violence done to
life (in myriad ways) and thereby, arrive at a clear articulation that is critical of intellectual, political and emotional strands that embrace death. I do this by returning to, and
engaging with, a key text that explored the core question of the basis of the gift of life.
I begin thus with a memory, and a book. I had an introduction to this book as a social
sciences undergraduate in a Scottish university (Edinburgh) well before interdisciplinarity became a major theme in sociology. I do not have an actual memory of reading this
book, holding it in my hand or taking notes from it (and alas, my undergraduate notes
have long since been discarded both in the various geographical moves, and the move up
into academia). A lecturer must have introduced the bases of the core idea and ideal contained in that book, and it is this that has stayed with me in an abiding way. Revisiting
this book has been a very productive exercise, and I will, first, outline briefly the central
concerns of this book as well as the meanings it has held for me both in my intellectual
and larger life.

The gift relationship

The book is Richard Titmusss The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social
Policy (first published in Britain in 1970, and the original text is now available in a 1997
edition with five additional chapters written by contemporary commentators). The Gift
Relationship is a steadfastly British book, in tone, style and content, that crystallizes the
best combination of social research and social commentary as this relates to fraught

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questions surrounding life-issues. It is at root an exploration of the donation of blood by

one human being to another. Titmusss study carefully scrutinizes and compares what is
entailed in this particular human transaction when the social and health systems through
which this is done are run either on commercial, market principles, or when blood is
given on a voluntary basis of gifting within a universal system of health care. The central
question (to enhance the life of another either through the sale of ones blood, or through
the gifting of it) remains crucially important today, both in its specific concreteness, as
well as in its symbolism as a wider metaphor for how measures for achieving global
human welfare are viewed, constituted and organized. Indeed, the question is a measure
of not only the organizational principle of welfare policy, but of the organizational principle of human relationships themselves.
Titmuss stated at the outset that the study grew from years of introspection from a
series of value questions to distinguish the social from the economic in public policies. He asked whether this could be done without raising questions about the morality
of society and of mans regard or disregard of others. The fundamental questions, he
averred, were: why give to strangers who is my stranger in the relatively affluent,
acquisitive and divisive societies of the twentieth century? What are the connections
then, if obligations are extended between the reciprocals of giving and receiving and the
modern welfare systems? (Titmuss, 1997: 5758). The themes then that are foregrounded in the book are those of human connectivity, and of giving and receiving the
gift of life in a world rent apart by divisiveness. The Gift Relationship is thus a very large
book, which, while based on a questionnaire survey undertaken in Britain, the US, South
Africa and the former Soviet Union, goes to the very heart of the central question in
human life: whether to give a gift of blood that can save a life or to sell it, to someone
who is not and probably never will be known to oneself.
Titmusss study revealed that in Britain, the National Health Services foundational
principle of the provision of services were held in common by the voluntary blood
donor, these being that services were accessed on the basis of common human needs;
and that because the NHS is structured so as not [to give] donors a right to prescribe
the group characteristics of recipients the Service thus presumes an unspoken shared
belief in the universality of need (p. 306). The voluntary donors were thus explicitly
linked up to a system where there must be no allocation of resources which could create
a sense of separateness between people (p. 306). For both donors and the recipients then
the universe was not compartmentalized within narrow identities. However, the study
found that in apartheid South Africa, the Witwatersrand miners were coerced into the
sale of blood for fear of losing their jobs; and that donors of white blood (that very
antithesis of the genuine properties that constitute human blood) received a higher price
than did donors of black blood. It is not known, said Titmuss, whether in order to
maintain gold production in South Africa some recipients are charged, on private market
principles, four times as much for White blood as for Black blood (pp. 254256).
There are, in this 1970 study, other, achingly painful echoes that speak directly to the
coerced pillage of blood in the world today: of the dangers around contaminated blood
being taken from the poorest of the poor in the USA, including those on Skid Row an
economic exchange which Titmuss pointed out was a redistribution from the poor to the
wealthy, where the sale of blood saw the emergence of a new class of an exploited

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human population of high blood yielders created by the blood-banking systems

(pp. 168172). The evidence presented in the study, the framing of the arguments and the
writing leave one in no doubt that the author of The Gift Relationship opposed both the
growth of an international proletariat that lived to sell its blood to the global rich, and to
public policies being made subservient to the laws of the marketplace, rather than the
meeting of life-sustaining needs.
I do not, now, remember which of these details were imparted to me in an undergraduate class in Edinburgh. Having come to Britain as a young student to acquire scholarship
in a place that was (comfortingly) not rampaged by soldiers who arrived with guns at the
university gates, I was seeking some kind of anchorage to my considerable intellectual
meanderings. While not remembering the details of the book, what I do remember, distinctly and vividly, is a very real sense that the message that was imparted provided
words to something that I had felt, known (as a young person) to be intrinsically true
axiomatically so. I remember the sense (and I think it is this that has abided with me, and
drawn me back to the book) of a binding together, of a knitting together of something in
my mind (dare I say heart) to my personal, social and ethical being, and thus feeling
properly grounded in this world. I think this is the best of what sociology can provide.
Rereading the book today, it is Titmusss description of blood as a commonality and
connectivity within the human race that I find moving in its very prosaicness and matterof-factness (p. 61). There are sentences here of pure lyricism that form a binding thread
in an otherwise measured text. Astutely too (and astonishingly, in a move that cuts across
all intellectual obfuscations), Titmuss affirmed (and this in 1970) that if an individual
sold his/her blood in the marketplace rather than gifting it, then to abolish the moral
choice of giving to strangers could lead to an ideology to end all ideologies (p. 58).
The Gift Relationship is thus a remarkable and prescient book. It raises fundamental
questions about the laws of the marketplace in organizing and providing welfare to
individuals, families and communities, issues which have become more acute in the
globe since the embrace of neoliberal economics worldwide. The impact of neoliberal
policies bit deep in the developing world from the 1970s onwards, and are beginning to
be felt ever more so post-2009 in a west where democratically elected governments continue to be disabled by their fear of the might of financial institutions, wary of enforcing
publicly accountable and safe regulations. There is an eerie resonance here between the
unethical practices of commercial blood banks and those of financial banks, which
require closer examination than I can provide here.
The structural adjustment programmes or the reforms asked for by the International
Monetary Fund from the 1980s led to a decline in real minimum wages in large parts of
Latin America, and the percentage of workers in the formal sector fell considerably in
East and Central Africa (Van der Hoeven and Saget, 2005: 199, 205206) as in other
countries (Bello, 1994). The Indian case has clearly shown that despite its rising status as
an economic power, economic liberalization has exacerbated inequalities in both the
urban and rural sectors (Breman, 2003, 2007, 2009). Women and childrens health suffered disproportionately under structural adjustment programmes (Lugalla, 1995). The
conditionalities imposed saw governments in the South lose their sovereignty to international financial institutions, and saw genocidal violence in Rwanda, a genocide that had
as much to do with economic restructuring as with political reconstitution (Storey, 2001;

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Uvin, 1997, 1998). In India, the state of Gujarat (the state with the longest history of
foreign and diasporic capital investment) has seen the gravest violence to minorities in
the period of globalization (Breman, 2003: part III). There are inter-linkages within and
between the economic, social, political and cultural malcontents that spill out of restructuring programmes.
Today, western governments are wooing India and China, countries that they see as
having a captive pool of consumers. Both countries have not only an aspirant consumer
class, but also the largest numbers of hungry and malnourished human beings on this
earth said to be 142 million in China and 221 million in India in 2005. The UN
Millennium Task Force on Hunger Report of 2005 showed that there were 852 million
people in the world who were chronically or acutely malnourished, and that 24% of all
pre-school children in the developing world were underweight (UN Millennium Project,
2005: 12). It is worth pausing to remind ourselves that behind these statistics are the real
lives of hundreds of thousands of young people that are not able to fully function, let
alone flourish. The Millennium Development Projects goal of halving hunger by the
year 2015 had been hailed as a modest and achievable goal pre the banker-led crisis of
2008, but the increased insecurity since then has witnessed a spurt in the growth of
poverty-led mortalities, and not only in the South, with the life chances of children both
in the developing world and the west becoming issues of ever graver concern (Amnesty
International, 2010; World Development Movement Report, 2010). The litmus test of
any civilization is how it cares for its young and vulnerable, and if our adherence to planetary humanism (Gilroy, 2000) is to have any substance, then surely food and nutrition
the very bases of life require attention.
The pervasive terror projected by all major governments today in the articulation of
their policies and politics, at the prospect of bankers pulling the plug from the economy
while continuing to reward themselves, makes the goal of achieving a peaceable earth
precarious to say the least, while global hunger, the most primal of violence, exists.
Hunger and malnutrition remain (in an age of neoliberal, liquid modernity) the touchstone of our civilization. When we allow millions to be deprived of the basis of life and
living, then this is a violence to the lives of human beings so profound, so basic, that at
its deepest and most damaging, it corrodes and eats away at that connectivity, that sense
of interrelatedness that binds human beings together despite and within their manifold
difference. When this is broken, such that the hungry and malnourished become statistical objects of a voyeuristic gaze of the sleek and well fed, then something very profound
has been sundered in the human order.
It would be an ethical redundancy to argue that the hungry pose a security risk and
that global hunger thus requires to be redressed. The relationship between structural
violence and political violence (or the blind fury of atavistic violence) is undoubtedly
complex and will be explored in the last section of this article. No, the ethical statement
I am making here is: we have the global resources, the knowledge and the means to put
an end to the unconscionable violence done to those millions who are deprived of the
bases of life and living. The relationship between hunger, malnutrition, poverty and poor
health (including poor mental health) is so well documented now, that it is a truism to say
that this results in early death, not in times of spectacular famines but in ordinary, everyday times, each day, every day.

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Reclaiming the gift relationship, rejecting neocannibalism

I turn now to the concept of neo-cannibalism to make sense of our times. The public
anthropologist, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, has referred to the global sale of human organs
(and kidney organs in particular) as the theft of life, and as neo-or postmodern cannibalism (Scheper-Hughes, 1996, 1998, 2001) whereby the impoverished and the indebted
in India, China, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa sell their kidney to the highest bidder in the
world. In China (the country to have the second largest numbers of executions in the
world) as well as in Taiwan, doctors were known to remove organs from executed prisoners (Scheper-Hughes, 2001). This theft of life takes place when the marginalized and
the desperate in the world are coerced by their economic impecuniousness, as well as the
pressures of unscrupulous medical brokers, to seek a drastic and damaging solution to
the problem of immediate debt. The callousness and cruelties embedded in the global
circuit of kidney sales meant that the wealthy in Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, etc. went
abroad to obtain unethically acquired organs. The US transplant centres too, both private
and public, court affluent organ-seekers from abroad. Organs were actually stolen from
the dead in police mortuaries in South Africa, and also, distressingly, from living inmates
in a state mental asylum in Argentina. This neo-or postmodern cannibalism has taken
the law of the marketplace to its ultimate end-point, whereby rich bodies can live off
desperately poor and suffering bodies, making the saving of lives governable by the law
of exploitation.
Scheper-Hughess work is detailed in its exposure of the abuse of the bodies of the
desperate in the world. It is important to stay with the deeper insight that both ScheperHughes and Titmuss provide, in their fundamentally ethical and moral exploration of the
ways in which the political, ethical and moral compass is turned upside down by practices that have a deleterious operational life. The ramifications of these are great, and
require serious attention in our scrutiny of the world today. This is perhaps even more
pronounced in the realm of bodily, social and economic rights to which much less public
attention has been paid, as compared to the violation of political rights. As ScheperHughes argues in her studies of the international sale of human organs, the gift of life
becomes a theft of life when the gifting is coerced, manipulated or stolen (e.g. from
mortuaries), violating medical procedures, medical laws and international regulations on
the procurement and transplant of organs. An individuals freedom to prolong and
enhance his/her own life based on the structurally coerced choice of another is a serious
violation of human rights. Much more, Scheper-Hughes has argued that principles based
around free and autonomous choice based on Euro-American notions of contract,
exploits the desperation of the poor, turning their suffering into an opportunity (ScheperHughes, 2001). These notions of freedom and choice turn right into wrong and turn
the moral world topsy-turvy, much like Arendts banality of evil that shifted both the
form of thought and ethical judgement before and during the Nazi-led experiments. It
is instructive that both Titmuss as well as Scheper-Hughes refer pointedly to the extermination camps the former rejecting the flawed logic that sought to rely on technological
processes to solve the moral dilemmas of the market in blood as being reminiscent of
the final solution (Titmuss, 1997: 310).

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Titmuss and Scheper-Hughes are fine public scholars, who are not given to shockspeak: no, their anguish is that the law of the marketplace has shown that the use and
abuse of human beings (present in the world at least since the age of colonialism) has
become privatized, individualized, commercialized and structured within the practices of
everyday life. Scheper-Hughes calls this the fetishization of life whereby a life (of a
rich buyer) is preserved, prolonged, enhanced at almost any cost eras[ing] any possibility of a social ethic (2001). The fundamental insight here is that choice as per EuroAmerican notions of contract (which is now prevalent throughout the world) is based on
transferring the market principle into all walks of life. It is an unremitting and banal
cruelty, where ethical stances are turned upside down.
In Titmusss home country, that most cherished of public institutions, the National
Health Service, has seen a steady commercialization of the provision of health services,
eroding the earlier vision of universality (Pollock, 2005) that is growing apace post the
2008 economic crisis. Titmuss had argued very clearly earlier that the commercialized
sale of blood within a private sector (in hospitals and laboratories that operated on the
law of profit-maximization) made mockery of both the freedom to choose, and the very
notion of choice when this was governed and driven by the forces of poverty, ignorance
and want. In times of tough decision-making the rhetoric of choice is being used, not
least in the west, as an unethical sleight of hand to mask the limited and limiting life
circumstances of individuals and communities.
There is a disturbing expansion of this law of neo-cannibalism that makes human
beings, adults and children into commodities, things that can be bought, stolen and
traded, in many areas of the public and private, to satisfy the desires of not solely
profit-maximization, but individual desire too. This was witnessed for example in
post-earthquake Haiti, when sombre questions were raised of an illegal sale of children
under the guise of adoption. When body parts, bodies, human subjects both major
and minor, become mere properties that are fed off in circulations of profit and human
trafficking, then it calls into question the very basis of the structuring of the global
economic, social and political order.1 To be able to reclaim the gift relationship (so that
this remains palpably alive, fit and healthy) is to give serious attention to our local,
national and international structures that can continue to support this.

Reclaiming Sojourner Truth: Recognition and

redistribution
It is thus worth returning to Titmusss original text to re-examine and rethink the very
nature of the ethical workings of social and political institutions, for Titmuss writes with
clarity of the role of governmental institutions and policies in promoting a very solid
basis to the (combined) ethic of recognition and redistribution.2
There have of course been other, and arguably more sophisticated, versions of
Titmusss text that have explored the ethical, moral and philosophical question raised by
him (Buber, Levinas, Fromm, Baumann, among others). I find myself, however, going
back to the words of the freed slave Sojourner Truth delivered in 1851 at a suffragette
rally in Akron, Ohio:

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That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches,
and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! And aint I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have
ploughed and planted, gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And aint I a woman? I
could work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it and bear the lash as well!
And aint I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of all sold into slavery, and
when I cried out with my mothers grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aint I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head, whats that they call it? [whisper of intellect
around her] Thats it, honey. Whats that got to do with womens rights or negroes rights? If my
cup wont hold but a pint, and your holds a quart, wouldnt you be mean not to let me have my
little half measure full?

No reworkings of Am I that name? (Denise Riley) or indeed skilful (and less skilful)
versions of Can the subaltern speak? (Spivak) can obviate for me the immense power
of this claim, a claiming of both redistribution wouldnt you be mean not to let me
have my little half measure full? and recognition, in the question Aint I a woman?
with formidable strength in my arms and the power to stand here with you speaking up
with you even after seeing most of my children sold into slavery. Sojourner Truth is here,
simply and clearly, enunciating an ethical, political and moral solidarity with privileged
women that cuts through the weight of history, a real experience of suffering and the
power structures that divide. It is a claim that rings out with a resonance seldom found in
purely academic and philosophical texts.
Some of the tensions (between redistribution and recognition) have been ably worked
through by Nancy Fraser in an essay in her book Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections
on the Postsocialist Condition (1997) and her insistence that there can be no recognition without redistribution is well made. In her persistent reworking and engagement
with the work of Honneth (1995) and his exploration of love (founded upon the first
relationship with primary care givers), rights (in the legal, political and moral spheres)
and solidarity (social esteem), Fraser productively (Fraser, 2001; Fraser and Honneth,
2003) attempts to bridge the split between recognition (of cultural difference) and a more
egalitarian redistribution (of resources) by inserting the norm of parity of participation
thereby delinking recognition from a possible essentialist, continuing and separatist subordination, and texturing the call for justice and redistribution. Both Honneth and Fraser
rework theory within a normative framework that has continued to be an enduring legacy
within the sociological tradition.
If the answer (in late 19th-century France) by the major proponents (Comte, Enfantin,
Bazard) engaged in a very public debate (to the simple and yet profound question Who
and what is the sociologist?) was that they were each engaged in establishing a new
religion, a religion of humanity, and that sociologists would be the priesthood of the
new faith in man (Gouldner, 1973: 69) then we need to ask, at the end of the first decade
of the second millennium, at a time when not just faith in humanity but faith in the sustainability of future life as we have known it on planet earth is in question (with depletion
of resources, and the effects of global warming, becoming evident in vulnerable geographical locations), what we, individually and collectively, wish to cherish and build up
in our disciplines and in our world.

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The two core principles that underwrite the normative principles of sociology (redistribution and recognition) each announces, in its own way, that all human beings have
equal worth and hence that each human being is accorded the same status and stands
inviolate in the realm of political justice, social care, economic distribution and in communicative behaviour. Indeed that all life is interconnected (and hence the social, society, etc.). We thus need to ask (having seen huge shifts and movements within our
discipline) what institutions, policies and practices require to be implemented and fostered to ensure that the spread of neoliberal cannibalism is reversed. I believe that sociology can provide glimpses, even very tentative glimpses, tentative templates, for the
construction of a more just world. It has the potential to raise questions, and can provide
the possibilities and the openings for the creation of a better world and a better life for
the majority of humankind not the few. For social institutions and social practices have
a profound impact on whether forms of human life are left to the whims of the marketplace, or socially and ethically valued/nurtured/supported.
We have within our intellectual traditions (historically and today) many interlinked
and varied conceptual (or word-shorthands) for this endeavour: in pre-democratic days it
was called philanthropy or charity. With universal suffrage came the language of democratic participation and empowerment. In its collectivist forms, it has variously been
envisioned as socialist humanism, humanist feminism, planetary humanism (as well as
in organized movements that are both issue-based, as well as encompassing3). For it is
correct that we are, in important ways, all the same (Gilroy, 2002 in an interview for
openDemocracy).4 In many parts of the world outside Europe, where I have worked and
researched and observed, there is a robust and down-to-earth philosophy that carries this
sentiment, this marker of absolute levelling that we are, in important ways, all the
same. It surfaces critically not only in the popular realm, but in the work and creativity
of very able political writers, thinkers, creative artists of South Asia and Africa in colonial as well as post-colonial times. This is not a derivative discourse, nor an alternative
modernity, but the very ground on which equality and freedom are staked out.
Critically, though, violence, wars and conflict disrupt the very foundations of the
stability of life (upon which the possibility of achieving justice is predicated). Our theoretical frameworks are then unable to hold these experiences within themselves, and
break apart. The split then is not between recognition or redistribution but between a
framework that is peculiarly linked into conditions of reasonable political stability in
democracies, and the millions outside this who suffer both structural and political violence. I now go to the very heart of this in the next section by focusing, not on wars, but
on the politics of resistance (to this violence) and the necro-fetish.

Rejecting the necro-fetish: Loving the world

It is an absolute truism that what we value (the how of the question) is on an equal footing to the question of who we value. The how is a portent of the what-will-be, of the
tomorrow and the tomorrow, and nowhere is this more evident than in the politics of
resistance. It is only in giving it this meticulous attention that we can seriously begin the
work of rejecting the necro-fetish. Let me begin with the larger political questions
before exploring this in some detail.

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The conjoint twin to material, structural violence is political violence, the violence
primarily of state and extra-state bodies, but the violence also of political movements. It
is true that the relationship between structural violence and political violence is complex,
but not so complex as to be incomprehensible. While the two have fed off each other, in
todays complex mix of media systems, authoritarian violence is spectacularly manufactured, such that the sentiments of want, hurt and pain are politically constituted within
dominant communities so that they bear no social reality to the power they hold. These
dominant communities then go on to wreak havoc on impoverished mud-hut dwellers
(the Interhamwe in Rwanda became bloated on hate-speak, as did the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad in the Dangs region of Gujarat in 1998). Where global geopolitics is concerned,
the thread that knots structural violence with the political violence of movements (in
response to colonial occupations, global class racism, drone-inflicted civilian casualties)
is a recognizably intellectual and political response that feeds off the tragic death toll to
forge an ever more virulent politically violent response. Again, those who forge this
response are not always, or necessarily, those who undergo the worst of the imperial
onslaughts what they do carry, very sharply, is the burden of past, present and future
vendettas. It is then I think an ethical necessity to stand up against both the forces of
western occupation, as well as to speak out against the entrenched fostering of cyclical
deaths in these counter-movements. And it is here that the most profound ethical and
intellectual intervention requires to be made.
Those of us who have exercised our minds on questions of authoritarian violence of
the state, the violence of dominantly situated communities and the overbearing violence
of the judiciary, find, I think, that the political context may change as may the geographical locale, the time and scale, but essentially the nature of evil, the banality of evil, mans
inhumanity to man (and women used as targets of rape by all sides) can only productively be understood by looking closely at the transmission routes of brutal power. And
in the face of the weight and evidence of the crushing brutality of these structures, the
portent and glimmering for a better world are provided by those individuals and collectivities who do not succumb to these forces, and who stand for a different kind of witnessing (Janzen, 2000).
The exercise of overbearing power requires to be matched with a steely vigilance
against the encroachment of violence, death and despair in the intellectual realm. The
political forces of destruction, and the terrible pain inflicted on civilians in Iraq, the
Gaza, Afghanistan (among other places) have elicited analysis that is a major cause for
concern for the future of our political movements, the political life and the politics of life.
I turn now to the writings of Achille Mbembe, a post-colonial scholar whose writings
have received critical acclaim. I wish to engage with this in terms of what I describe as
the ethics and politics of life, thereby underlining the importance of a going-into-a-future
shorn of the death-fetish. In a number of texts, Mbembe has put forward a very disturbing and debilitating discussion of the relationship between resistance, sacrifice and terror
in the face of what he calls necropolitics and necropower (the subordination of life to
violent death) in the contemporary world. While all critical thinkers have had to contend
with major questions of the destruction of lives both in contemporary warfare (and in
ordinary times of structural violence), and many have offered sharp conceptual and
analytical insights, at the end, what matters are the implications these analyses have for

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our social, political and ethical practices. Neither Titmuss nor Scheper-Hughes (nor,
strikingly, Sojourner Truth) succumb to the dark shadow of the power of death. Titmusss
and Scheper-Hughess works demonstrate a steely adherence to keeping the focus on
public policies and individual practices that can continue to protect, enable and defend
the lives of the most liberalization-exposed (Scheper-Hughes, 1992). There is a desire
here to state what has consequence (amid the most terrible of life circumstances) and
what matters, in the defence of the lives of the vulnerable. And Sojourner Truth she
lived out her life fully amid a gritty acknowledgement of its harshness.
Mbembes text Necropolitics extends out from the execrable racism of the plantation system, to present-day colonial occupations. In this, he presents, in his own words,
a reading of politics as death through a working of Hegels death as freedom, death as
future and death as the ground of the becoming subject; Batailles exploration of death
and sovereignty as excess; and ending with an exploration of terror and death and freedom as an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics (Mbembe, 2003: 16, 14, 15ff., 39;
emphasis in original). Having begun productively, wishing to look at other foundational
categories that are less abstract and more tactile than reason, such as life and death
(2003: 14), the politics of life becomes subsumed in this writing to the work of death.
Mbembes is a disturbing text, and we can, of course, discuss whether the becoming
subject becomes so always and ineluctably, in the face of his/her own mortality, in the
knowledge of what he/she leaves behind on this earth, or indeed what future he/she may
wish to herald. In answer to the question, what is the relationship between politics and
death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency, Mbembe provides
a peculiarly death-valorizing answer. He moves from the violence of states, militarized
technologies, corporate mercenaries, corporations plundering oil and diamonds, etc. to
violence done to self and the other through using ones body as a carrier of bombs, in acts
of martyrdom. The lived body described here as a spatially heroic place that invites, or
catapults itself, into the arms of the grim reaper in acts of redemption is a peculiarly
disembodied one, in that it empties out (indeed flees from) that nano second of intense
pain, that flash of anguish (perhaps even refusal or regret of the done act) before complete darkness encompasses the bomb-carrying, embodied self.
Mbembe is of course correct in his analysis of the excess of violence in the wars of
the globalization era [that] aim to force the enemy into submission (2003: 31).5
However, Mbembe, extrapolating from the politics of the Middle East (out of which
Afghanistan has exploded in large measure), makes the larger claim that when individuals utilize their bodies as receptacles for bombs, resistance becomes synonymous with
self-destruction in acts of martyrdom whereby those resisting colonial warfare ultimately escape the state of siege and occupation through death (2003: 3637). He goes on
to make the even larger claim that under both conditions of slavery, and in countries
occupied today by invading armies, freedom chosen in and through death, either through
martyrdom, individual or collective suicide, is a marker of redemption of the vision of
freedom not yet come (Mbembe, 2003: 39).
I think it is absolutely the time that theorists, commentators and analysts put away
these life-denying parameters, practices and prisms. The fascination with violence, and
the fetish of death, in more recent times inimitably and always circling around (the sometimes acknowledged, at other times not, figure of Frantz Fanon), has been prevailing in

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some political and theoretical circles from Sartre to Mbembe. When the actually living
are corralled into a frame of the living dead by scholars such as Mbembe (2003: 40), then
what is negated are the impulses, desires, yearnings, the hope-against-all-odds by those
actually living to continue to live another day. In todays global wars, the populace made
landless and homeless, becoming refugees, itinerant migrants, displaced peoples with
only the sky above and the earth below survive to live another day, despite bearing
unbearable wounds, and above all, cling tenaciously to life. How do I know? I know. I
have talked to some of them in my many peregrinations on both structural and authoritarian violence. Above all, I refuse to submit to a valorization of death.
Indian feminists have long come up against the extreme limits of death valorizing
arguments, particularly around justifications for female foeticide (said to be a let-out
clause for not having to taste life in a misogynist society). Feminists have gone right to
the heart of these justificatory cruelties and provided both polemical and nuanced
answers to these. When attempting to understand organized revolutionary political
movements too, the testimonies and witnessing exposed the underbelly of the violence
done within the movement (Lalita, 1989). However, Srila Roy in her exploration of the
ethical ambivalence of resistant violence (2009) has pointed to the ways in which feminisms moorings in left-democratic politics has meant that it has stopped short of condemning the violence embedded within liberationary, anti-state and often ultra-left
politics. While productively charting feminisms uneasy contribution to the militarization of societies, and to the ways in which revolutionary violence is justified both as a
response to the violence of the state/s and for feminist ends, Roy pulls back from an
unequivocal position of articulating a feminist ethics towards and in relation to resistant
political violence. She engages finely with political ethics throughout, but her exploration of the ethics of violence specifically, but not only, in relation to a post-colonial
feminism, does not go beyond opening up the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of it for
feminist philosophies/ethics/politics. She notes that a singular feminist ethics towards
revolutionary violence may not be possible or even desirable (Roy, 2009). The core of
this for me is the understanding that violence is not something that is external to self, but
is rooted within political practices, political relationships, indeed within the fabric of
subjectivities and subjecthood. A productive way through this would be a close
engagement with the (variously held) romance with violence that has long gripped
left-democratic intellectuals of both genders and all social classes (throughout the
globe), and to explore, meticulously, the internal dissonances created through this.6
Taking an unequivocal stand against the use of political violence inevitably (and
rightly) leads to the tactile question of the politics of life, as well as the politics of care.
There is a growing scholarship around this (some of it more explicit about its philosophical moorings than others) that raises serious questions about the violation done to lives
(Akintola, 2008; Benera, 2008; Grown et al., 2006; Loyd, 2009; Rose, 1997).
On the politics of resistance, it is instructive that in Faces of freedom: Jewish and
Black experiences, Mbembe reflexively resurrects the sacrificial act, whereby liberation is said to be when the self is sacrificed to the future common good (he cites
Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Mandela here among others). He sees the absolute
authority granted to death or the possibility of death as a fundamental aspect of black
narratives of redemption. Reflexively, again, he questions the relationship between

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freedom and violence when Fanon lifted the interdiction against killing as a legitimate
means to obtain freedom (Mbembe, 2005: 297298).
Let us accept that the narratives of those particular political times necessitated a particular form of self-inscription, in symbolic language and actual actions that sought to
defy the overbearing weight of a colonial racism. Let us also permit ourselves to mourn
the lives of those who died before their time (Lumumba, King and those nameless who
appear in Turners 1840 painting The Slave Ship, hands raised to the sky as the swirling
waves gather to enfold them). Whether the deaths of Lumumba, King, those enslaved
further back in time whose bodies can just be glimpsed in the painting, as well as those
who today see themselves as martyrs in a war against western imperialism, can so seamlessly be woven together is a moot point. The continuing seduction of the fetish of death
makes me fear for the present and the futures that we wish to build. I have hopes that
Mbembe will join my now-and-younger-self in refusing and eschewing a form of analysis that necessitates that our much-loved cultural, political and spiritual icons die before
their time in order that their integrity be saved from decay by a glorious death.7 Neither
a valorization of glorious deaths, nor the eschewing of the work of mourning is productive for the futures we wish to create. The endless deferring of the work of grief of (for
example) those friends, brothers, sisters, mothers left behind by the 2005 London bombers (as well as those of the surviving witnesses) carries huge political, as well as emotional, cost, as we have known since at least the path breaking work of Alexander and
Margarete Mitscherlich (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 1975; Rose, 1996).
Let us do our work of mourning, for those individuals, named and unnamed, as well
as those world-views, theories and perspectives that belong to our troubled histories, and
lay them to rest, with pity (yes, pity)8 on our faces, so that we can allow ourselves to
clearly see the faces that haunt us. Let us move from the concentration camps and slave
plantations to todays camps, occupied by women, men and children who live on the
margins of survival (Raje, 2005; Umutesi, 2004). Let us own, accept and then put aside
the pagan ethos (Mbembe, 2005: 294) wherever it may arise, for this ethos is not
something to which only the west is shackled.9
This work of mourning is not a site of privilege, a place of therapeutic luxury and
pampering, or even (necessarily) a place of comfort. It is difficult work, which is sometimes repressively buried, at others disorganized, even disintegrative (Bourke, 1996;
Scheper-Hughes, 1992). But it is work that must be completed, and preferably without
taking recourse to the more facile theologies that seek meaning to meaningless deaths,
and the outrageous justifications for violent acts. For all those difficult emotions of anger,
guilt, regret are housed both in the body (which remembers; Rothschild, 2000; Scarry,
1987) as well as the body politic, which too has a storehouse of its own.
Making (embodied) peace in the body politic, making peace within ones embodied
self, making peace with ones embodied self, and the continuum of these relationships, is
an arena of study that deserves far deeper discussions than have been granted in our
scholarship. The absoluteness of bodily integrity, free from tramplings, violations and a
disregard that makes the other invisible, is at the core of making peace. This is not a
task that can be entered into in a facile way, requiring meticulous and careful attention.
For all human beings yearn, absolutely yearn to be seen, heard, listened to and accepted
as they are in that moment without being judged, trampled upon, discarded, devalued.

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Surely that is what the need for recognition (the hunger to be seen as a fully participatory
member, able to give and receive within the gift relationship) is all about. And what we
attempt to shed light upon through our own imperfect writings and living.
For today, let us honour the complexities and troubled uncertainties of the very frail
Mandela who is still with us. And Sojourner Truth I am glad she had a long, productive
life, and passed away with her daughters and her grandchildren around her. We require
to urgently rework our narratives of redemption (Mbembe, 2005: 298).10
We have within and amid us fine visions of life and living, which have great depth, and
which we carry in the pores of our skin. They occupy a different space in our beings (and
becomings) than the conceptual shorthands that are often articulated (dreamings, yearnings, peace-making, conflict resolutions, sustainable development, Fourth World, peasant
capitalism, envisioning, etc.). It is absolutely crucial that we listen to this place within us,
and that we honour this in ourselves, holding these visions of life dear, culturally, politically, ethically. The conceptual shorthands may not, necessarily, provide (in and of themselves) adequate resources to meet the challenges ahead, without the hard graft of the
meticulous interrogation of our intellectual frameworks, and the clearing out of the detritus of past romances, so that there is a radical psychic rupture with these. It is in doing this
hard graft that the seeds for a new tomorrow can grow, as we too grow into a more mature
form of loving the world: against neo-cannibalism, the theft of life, the privatized fetishization of life for a few on this earth, the fetish of death. For everyone to be included as
fully participative within the gift relationship, as both giver and receiver as the need arises.
And for a just redistribution that would ensure that the privileged no longer lead bunkerized lives, shut off from those whose health, happiness and well-being is fragile: for we
need to see them, face-to-face, and be accountable for our part within this.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. One can apply this all areas, from trafficking in women (the not-so-new slavery), to blood
diamonds, to the privatization of the military and the enlarged sphere occupied by corporate
mercenaries.
2. Professor Richard Titmuss died on 6 April 1973. For appreciative accounts of the continuing resonance of, in particular, The Gift Relationship, see among others, Bulmer (1988) and
Reisman (2004).
3. Thus for example, the Food Sovereignty Movement collectively strives for land redistribution, national sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, seed sovereignty, womens sovereignty, etc.
4. To return to Gilroys interview he goes on to say (following his explorations in science) if
I need a transfusion, I dont want blood from a horse or a dog. He insists that this conversation (about the ways we are all in some important ways the same) can only be kept going by
looking at the central role of racism which is the inability to concede that essential sameness.
Gilroys focus is of course the transatlantic slave trade, while he often has a rich reading of panAfricanist thinkers (and makes allusions to political events and political circumstances in the
Congo, Rwanda, etc.). Planetary humanism requires to be acted out carefully and meticulously.

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5. Evident also in the 2009 refugees streaming into the areas and cities of Pakistan after the
bombing of Afghanistan. There have always been and continue to be, in human history, spillages across borders, societies, polities, communities, societies, and individual life journeys.
6. It is a feminist truism now to accept that there are spillages (within the private sphere) of
public political violence, and not only for adult women (children, adolescents, the aged and
the disabled remain, despite the progress of political movements, curiously absent).
7. See Earthly life and its completion, in Upholding the Common Life: The Community of
Mirabai (Mukta, 1997b) in which I leave this foremother untouched and unviolated by self or
the other, singing and travelling on, embracing her liberties. This marked a substantive rupture from Trivedi (1984), and was further expanded to the centrality of the work of mourning
(Mukta, 1997a) in retaining both psychic and public health.
8. Pity: a feeling of tenderness aroused by the suffering of another, and prompting a desire for
its relief; a regrettable fact or circumstance; remorse; to repent; to grieve (The
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 1973: 1594).
9. See Anand Patwardhans film on the nuclear race in South Asia.
10. Mbembe pulls back from this right at the end of this article in his final paragraph, when he
acknowledges that the South African experience post-1990 demonstrates that there comes a
time when freedom has to be disentangled from the histories of spilled blood and sacrificial
cruelty, so that neither the self nor the enemy requires to be killed (Mbembe, 2005: 298).

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Author biography
Parita Mukta is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Her
research focuses on global poverty and hunger, structural violence, authoritarian violence, politics
of peace and social justice.

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Rsum
Larticle value limportance du livre de 1970 de Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship. Y sont
analyses lessence de la relation de don et lrosion progressive quelle subit avec ladhsion au
no-libralisme lchelle globale, en constatant partir des travaux de Nancy Scheper-Hughes
comment le don de vie sest transform en vol de vie . Larticle rend compte de limportance
de la redistribution et de la reconnaissance pour ltude sociologique, dcrit les problmes soulevs
par Honneth et Fraser, et fait valoir que la valeur de la relation de don ne peut tre prserve que par
une attention scrupuleuse porte aux structures sociales qui la cultivent, et en rejetant le ftichisme
morbide implicitement et explicitement prsent dans les travaux de recherche consacrs la mort
comme forme de rsistance (Mbembe). Larticle invite mettre un terme cette histoire damour
avec la mort et entreprendre dans ce sens un travail de deuil, sans quoi il ny a pas davances
possibles vers ces lendemains que nous appelons de nos vux.
Mots-cls: don de vie, Mbembe, politique de la vie, reconnaissance, redistribution, ScheperHughes, Titmuss

Resumen
Este artculo explora la importancia del libro de Richard Titmuss de 1970 The Gift Relationship.
Analiza la esencia de la relacin de donacin y su erosin progresiva a travs de la adhesin al
neo-liberalismo a escala global, mostrando cmo el regalo de la vida se ha convertido en el
robo de la vida a travs del trabajo de Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Muestra la importancia de la
redistribucin y el reconocimiento para el estudio de la Sociologa, subraya los problemas puestos
de manifiesto por Honneth y Fraser, y argumenta que la precariedad de la relacin de donacin
solamente se puede mantener con vida a travs de la atencin escrupulosa a las estructuras sociales
que la nutren; y rechazando el fetichismo morboso que est implcita y explcitamente presente en
la literatura que explora la muerte como resistencia (Mbembe). El artculo llama a poner un fin al
romance con la muerte, y por llevar a cabo el trabajo de duelo, sin el cual no puede haber avances
hacia el futuro que queremos crear.
Palabras clave: don de la vida, Mbembe, poltica de la vida, reconocimiento, redistribucin,
Scheper-Hughes, Titmuss

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