Background: transnational connections in Bibiyana

Bibiyana has had a long and intimate relationship with the global economy, stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century when a small number of men travelled to Calcutta to work on British ships as lascars (sailors). In Talukpur, the village where I did my fieldwork one man in particular became a sareng (ship foreman), actively recruiting other men from his lineage and neighbourhood to work on the ships. As has been documented by Adams and Choudhury, many lascars jumped ship in London, finding work in the restaurant and hotel trade.Footnote ¹⁰ By the 1950s there were already a small number of men settled there. This changed dramatically in the post-war period when British industry actively recruited labour from the Commonwealth. Encouraged by their contacts in ‘London’, men left Sylhet in their thousands to work and live in British industrial cities in the 1960s and 1970s, regularly remitting money back to the desh (home). During the 1980s, when I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork, the Londoni men began to reunite their families in the UK.

Although today most families are oriented towards Britain, with children and grandchildren who only visit Bangladesh for holidays, the original migrants spent most of their earnings buying up land, building houses, and transforming their status.Footnote ¹¹ By the 1980s, access to the local means of production—land on which to grow rice—was almost wholly based on one's access to foreign places: Londoni families owned almost all the local land, while those families who hadn't migrated but were once large landowners had slipped down the social scale to become landless or land poor. Local economic and political hierarchies were dominated by relative access to the UK and other destinations in Europe, the USA, or the Middle East.Footnote ¹²

These inequalities took on a distinctive local pattern, adhering to kinship networks. Large and dominant lineages capitalized on the opportunities of movement to Britain and built substantial power bases in their villages, while in another village a few miles across the fields (which I call Garibpur), which was originally settled by in-migrant labourers, no-one had the economic or social capital necessary for migration. During my doctoral fieldwork this village supplied agricultural and domestic labour to the far wealthier Londoni village of Talukpur, with relationships becoming established between particular families and their Londoni patrons across the fields. At the time of our 2008–2011 research, these relationships had partly broken down, largely because of the competition over jobs and contracts that the gas field had caused. The village was over 80 per cent landless, far higher than the national average of 56 per cent; a high preponderance of people lived in mud and thatch dwellings, and had no access to electricity: the power line that leads from the two Londoni villages passes it by.Footnote ¹³ In 2008 our research found many people who did not eat more than two small meals a day, and/or who did not know where their next meal was coming from.

While British-based families now largely invest money in British businesses (e.g. restaurants) rather than deshi (homeland) fields, transnational migration has continued to dominate the local economy, with high amounts of dependency on remittances and/or irregular donations by UK relatives in times of need. Indeed, there is now what Steve Vertovec has described as a ‘transnational habitus’: the aspirations of young people from middle income households are almost wholly directed at moving abroad, often via marriage to British-based partners.Footnote ¹⁴ Crucially, the charitable donations or ‘helping’ (shahajo) of Londonis is central to the livelihoods of the majority of households in the area, either in the form of regular remittances for those with a close Londoni relative, or an irregular lump sum in times of need or crisis. When we asked the poorer households how they coped in times of crisis, we learned not only of disastrous floods, illnesses, and accidents that threatened to tip them into destitution, but also of how they were saved by charity from Londonis. Often the charity flows from Londonis to their less well-off kin, but they can also encompass unrelated poor, who are still incorporated within the phrase ‘our own poor’. In the UK, for example, we met a man whose family fund the education of several children from very poor families in his village who are unrelated to him. When asked why he did this, he explained that it was part of his duty as a Muslim, and that he would always extend help to those within his home village who were poor (garib) and suffering (kostor).

‘Under our fields is gold’: Bibiyana's gas

If migration has shaped Bibiyana's political economy in particular ways, creating new forms of inequality and possibility, the area's rich reserves of natural gas were to lead to new forms of connection and disconnection.Footnote ¹⁵ The gas was discovered by Occidental in the mid-1990s and by 2000 the multinational Unocal was developing the resource, with plans for a large gas field. The land was forcibly acquired by the Bangladeshi government and rented to Unocal, who were contracted to develop the site. In 2005 Unocal merged with Chevron, and by 2007 the gas field went into production. Today, the Bibiyana Gas Field produces over 30 per cent of Bangladesh's gas.Footnote ¹⁶ Given the forcible loss of land, it is hardly surprising that the development of the gas plant met with substantial local resistance. As soon as people heard of the plans ‘demand resistance committees’ were set up and a series of demands put to Unocal: the rate of land compensation was high on the list, as was a supply of the gas (the villages do not have piped gas). A school, a hospital, a fertilizer factory, and improved roads were also key. Today, people say that Unocal agreed to these stipulations: if this is the case, the company were making promises they could never keep. Rates of compensation, the piping of gas to the communities, and the development of power plants and factories were not in their gift, but determined by the government. The negotiations took place in a context of passionate agitation: in the perspectives of landowners in particular, they were about to lose a resource which sustained not only their households but those of many people around them and which was irreplaceable.

In 2005 the road was blocked by local people in an attempt to stop construction work. The police were called, threats made by the district commissioner, arrests made, and writs issued. Yet although some local leaders tried to hold out against the inevitable, others started to negotiate. While the rate of land compensation was crucial, offers of a programme of ‘community engagement’, including an ‘alternative livelihoods’ project, the distribution of building materials and sanitation for the poorest households, a health clinic, and education stipends were also to be part of this. As we shall see, in utilitarian terms this programme might be understood as a means of obtaining a ‘social licence to operate’ (not to say a way of boosting Chevron's reputation, both locally and globally), but it was underpinned by the ethics of philanthropic humanitarianism, professed compassion for the poor, and a desire to empower and uplift ‘the community’.

From this background let us now return to my central theme: charity, philanthropy, and the politics of suffering in Bibiyana.

Humanitarianism and the politics of suffering

In his analysis of the rise of Western humanitarianism in the contemporary period, Didier Fassin argues that recognition of the suffering and psychic distress of unknown others has entered the political sphere as never before, framing policy, and creating new problems and new solutions.Footnote ¹⁷ The effect is the perfect anti-politics machine. Disaffected urban youth are seen as ‘excluded’ rather than as being part of an underclass, the solution being ‘listening rooms’ staffed with mental health workers, while ‘bio-legitimacy’, based on the need to save lives and alleviate suffering, which finds its roots in Christianity, propels humanitarian military action and disaster relief alike.Footnote ¹⁸ Never before, it seems, has there been so much pity for people in distant places, nor so much attention paid to their physical or emotional well-being.

Fassin's point, ultimately, is political. Contemporary moral economies have been constituted around a new relation to suffering, he argues, making it central to public life. While the ‘spectacle’ of suffering has disappeared (for example, public executions) its representation has become commonplace. Indeed, although within earlier periods of Western Christianity individual suffering led to redemption, this was not linked to compassion in the public domain. As Fassin observes: ‘With the entry of suffering into politics we might say that salvation emanates not through the passion one endures but through the compassion one feels. And this moral sentiment in turn becomes a source of action because we seek to correct the situation that gives rise to the misfortune of others.’Footnote ¹⁹

While Fassin's work primarily concerns state schemes in France we can identify similar humanitarian ethics underlying modern philanthropic missions rooted in the West, be these NGOs aiming to save the lives of distant others, or institutions set up in the name of philanthropic billionaires such as Bill Gates.Footnote ²⁰ For all, compassion for the suffering of unknown victims of war, trafficking, exploitation, poverty, and disease motivates those who donate to save lives or ‘hearts and minds’. Besides compassion for strangers, what also distinguishes these schemes is the ordering and systematization of the charitable impulse. A similar process can be seen in India, albeit with a different theological context. As Bornstein notes in New Delhi, pious Hindus spontaneously give dan to beggars outside the gates of their houses, an act of charity that evokes strong emotions of compassion and a sense of the immediate suffering of those who receive the donation. In contrast, social welfare renders the donation anonymous, regulating and nullifying emotion and affect, and thus controlling suffering. With reference to the long history of state and NGO schemes for social welfare in India, from colonial times to the present day, Bornstein notes the tendency for philanthropic organizations to harness dissent and protest into something far more manageable, for: ‘Philanthropy under this lens is a vehicle for capitalism to assimilate the resistance to its practices.’Footnote ²¹

Anthropologists working on the philanthropic efforts of mining companies have come to similar conclusions about the ways in which philanthropic efforts, based on the ethics of humanitarianism or its ‘liberal diagnostics’, both nullify protest and offer moral salvation to mining companies.Footnote ²² In contexts where mining has led to protest movements or has had overtly damaging results, philanthropy offers moral redemption. In her work on the Anglo-American mining company in South Africa, for example, Dinah Rajak shows how corporate social responsibility (CSR) brings morality into business practice, allowing mining companies to extend moral authority over the places where extraction takes place via discourses that stress partnership, responsibility, and so on.Footnote ²³ Here, then, suffering, with a solution provided by the programme of CSR, has entered business as well as politics. If there is suffering (resulting from poverty or illness) then corporate philanthropy and the application of neo-liberal economic tenets via health programmes, income generation, micro credit, and so on, can relieve it. It goes without saying that these solutions never recognize that the cause of the suffering might be political or, indeed, the consequence of the mining, a point made by other anthropologists working on CSR or mining companies. Elana Shever's work in Buenos Aires, for example, focuses upon the ‘smiling face’ of Shell Oil in a PR campaign to improve community relations, representing itself as a good and caring neighbour with a smiling, female face, when in fact the environmental and health problems faced by local people were caused by its operations.Footnote ²⁴

As I shall show later, through its CSR programmes in Bibiyana, Chevron is cast in the role of compassionate ‘partner’ who is able to extend help to the suffering populations of new territories. As the community liaison officer at Bibiyana put it when telling me about the programme of good works that Chevron had instituted in the area: ‘Before we arrived, there was nothing here.’ Crucially, however, the company has no direct relationship with the suffering poor. Reflecting what Jamie Cross has termed the ‘corporate ethic of detachment’, the poor are dealt with by intermediaries: the ‘local leaders’ who are their ‘partners’.Footnote ²⁵ As we shall see, inequality underscores these relationships, but is strenuously denied by the language of ‘community’, ‘sustainability’, ‘helping people to help themselves’, and ‘empowerment’. Before examining these programmes, let us turn to local and transnational charity and the politics of suffering in Bibiyana.

‘Our own poor’: transnational charity and the politics of suffering

Within the villages surrounding the gas field at Bibiyana, charity is based not upon humanitarian ideals of compassion for the suffering of a distant and global ‘poor’ who might be uplifted or empowered, but tied to a moral economy in which the suffering of known supplicants involves a personal claim to patrons who are obliged to offer particular forms of support, as classically described by James Scott in South East Asia.Footnote ²⁶ The closer the connection to the supplicant, whether this is via kinship or neighbourhood, the greater the obligation to help. Whenever I visit the village, for example, I am besieged by requests for shahajo (help) by destitute women and men, many of whom are known to me, or who are part of the extended family with whom I stay. A son has been injured in a bus crash; a woman's husband has died; a house was damaged in a flood; there was sickness. These stories inevitably lead to a request for shahajo: a cash donation. The request is made not so much because I am a rich foreigner, but because I am a known patron, part of a network of duty and responsibility. Indeed, when I expressed irritation at the requests for money from a distant cousin who came from a relatively prosperous household, I was told that the reason she could make such demands on me was because ‘she is part of the family’.

Rather than being ‘helped to help themselves’, those who receive charity expect long-term support, which those close to them are duty bound to give, and the closer the relationship, the greater the claim. Two recent examples come to mind. In the first, I sat with Amma, the elderly matriarch of my Bangladeshi household, in the courtyard of her bari (homestead) as she talked with Lacky, a landless woman from Garibpur.Footnote ²⁷ Amma's household is partly supported by three adult sons settled in the UK. Now in her fifties, Lacky has a long-term relationship with members of the household, having worked on-and-off as a domestic servant for them since the 1980s, labour which was largely rewarded with food, old saris, and rice rather than money.Footnote ²⁸ The women talked companionably, exchanging family news. Finally, the conversation turned to Lacky's health: the reason for her visit was that she needed money for medicine. Appealing to Amma and I, she explained with a grimace how her chronic asthma stopped her from working. When we gave her a hundred taka she tucked the money into her sari and left.

If Lacky is included as a member of ‘our own poor’ to whom small amounts of money or goods (food, betel nut, old clothes) might be given because of her geographical proximity and familiarity, others are more closely encompassed by the links of actual kinship. Over the fields is the bari of another family of very poor and distantly related cousins. Since the 1980s they have been living on khas (government) land on the edge of the village, arranged for them by the village chairman, not because they are servants but because they are members of the same lineage (gusthi). Tahir, the father of eight, works as a caretaker at the local school while his older sons are agricultural labourers, and makes ends meet via the charity of his wealthy cousins. When I visited in 2014 I was shocked to find them camping in the fields in a shack made from tarpaulin and plastic bags, their belongings spread out over the earth. There was a fire, Tahir told me, their katcha bari (made from straw and mud) was destroyed. But as he gestured to the ruins of their home, I noticed that brick foundations for a new house had already been laid. Amma's UK-based sons were paying for it, Tahir added. In a few weeks his family would have a brand-new home, constructed this time with bricks and a tin roof.

Such charitable acts are commonplace in Talukpur, for while the moral economy of patronage is localized for ‘our own poor’, these days charity is transnational as well as local. Indeed, as I have documented, poor people in Londoni villages are often dependent upon the support of their migrant kin/patrons for their survival.Footnote ²⁹ Saleha Begum is a case in point: she is another cousin who is structurally in the position of paternal aunt to Amma and survives on the charity of her Londoni relatives. She is housed in a brick building that I too helped pay for after pleas from her British-based family when her original home was damaged in a flood. Similar patterns of charitable donations, offered by transnational migrants to communities ‘back home’, have been observed in a variety of contexts, prompting considerable discussion concerning their potential for local development.Footnote ³⁰

Such is the clamour for shahajo that the demands of those in the desh (home) can sometimes feel overwhelming for people settled in Britain. Some may take pride in what they are able to do for their own poor in Bangladesh—one man proudly showed us records which demonstrated how he had paid for the education of poor children in his home village—but others find the burden of expectation too much. In Manchester, a restaurant owner complained of how he had to spend thousands of pounds on gifts and charitable donations on visits to the desh. It was too much, he said; he could no longer afford to return. Crucially, the demands made on Londonis revolve around two emotive states upon which the ethics of local and transnational charity rest: suffering and Islamic piety. Within this moral economy, bodily suffering—hunger, homelessness, and illness—is a claim that can be made upon patrons or kin, who are moved to provide support, not only out of compassion but also by their religiosity and desire to be good Muslims. On meeting Londoni relatives, Saleha Begum is apt to burst into tears, bemoaning her lot as a poor woman and falling to their feet as she expounds upon her suffering, with the result that they, out of compassion, a sense of duty, and desire to do good, give as much as they can. As a large landowner in another village explained, the sense of largesse and generosity that comes with extending help to poorer kin and neighbours is an important aspect of his identity as a good and honourable Muslim. He allowed the local poor to use his pond, he said; it did not matter if they were Muslim or Hindu, all were neighbours.

Meanwhile the experience of suffering (kostor) is understood as leading to piety and redemption, just as it was within pre-modern Christianity. If a woman is beaten by her husband, she is told that the more bruises she has, the more likely she is to get into heaven.Footnote ³¹ The laments of individual suffering—from beggars to poverty stricken relatives—thus work at two levels: as claims for support and as claims for piety among those who suffer, for their earthly ordeals bring them closer to God.Footnote ³²

Organized and formal donations: zakat and Qurbani Eid

The charitable acts described above are integral to the moral economy of transnational patronage; they are carried out on an ad hoc basis and are determined by individual circumstances as well as the disposition of the givers. This contrasts with the formal distributions made at Qurbani Eid and as part of zakat, one of the five pillars of faith and thus obligatory. During my 1980s fieldwork a proportion of the harvest was donated to the mosque as zakat. This was then redistributed to local poor people. In conversations with transnational Londonis in the UK in 2013 I was told that it was possible to give zakat by donating money to a mosque in Britain, or via donations to the Bibiyana mosque. Whatever the route, the point was that zakat was an obligatory donation, more like a tax than an act of charity, given in order to purify wealth and relieve the suffering of the poor, not in Britain but in Bangladesh or other Muslim countries. Indeed, my UK-based interlocutors were dismayed at the prospect of donating to the poor and homeless in Britain; ‘real’ poverty could not be found in Britain, one man laughed: only alcoholism and addiction. For him, charity could only be offered to one's own people, be these local deshi poor or Muslims in other parts of the world. It was possible to donate via international Muslim charities such as Islamic Aid,Footnote ³³ he said, though he would not personally do this for he had his ‘own poor’ back in the village.Footnote ³⁴

This principle—of basing what Benthall calls ‘financial worship’ in the desh in order to relieve the suffering of local supplicants—is vividly materialized during the sacrifice of bulls at Qurbani Eid.Footnote ³⁵ Purchased by money sent by their Londoni relatives, the cattle are sacrificed by specialist butchers in the bari courtyards. The meat is divided into piles: a proportion for the consumption of the household and close relatives, and another for the poor, who gather in anticipation. These people are local chotomanoosh (low status people without connection, often in-migrants). Donning their prayer caps, family men move down a line of the waiting crowd, filling the outstretched cloth bags of the garib (poor) with meat. Once the distribution is finished, the poor move off to the next bari; for some it will be the only time of the year that they taste meat.

As this implies, within Bibiyana and its transnational social fields it is not possible to make a strict distinction between spontaneous charity and more systematized donations. Rather, shahahjo (help) is motivated both by compassion for the suffering of known people and formalized Islamic worship, via zakat and Qurbani. As Bornstein notes in the Indian context, philanthropic systems can encompass both the spontaneous and the formal, whereas social welfare bleaches giving of its emotional content.Footnote ³⁶ Let us now move to Chevron's programmes of community engagement which, by chiming with international ideals of sustainability, empowerment, and the ethics of humanitarianism, made little sense to the Londoni donors who the corporation wished to enlist. Here, the contrast between the compassion of charity and the depersonalization and detachment of agendas of empowerment and sustainability could not be more stark.

Corporate philanthropy arrives in Bibiyana

If local charity is embedded in social relationships and geared around alleviating the suffering of known supplicants who make claims via stories of personal pain and suffering, the programme of good works initiated by Chevron in the name of ‘community engagement’ draws upon opposite principles: the problems that the programmes alleviate are experienced by a depersonalized ‘population’ and plans are made according to the standards of contemporary development discourse: community, capacity, needs.Footnote ³⁷ Take, for instance, the following extract from the Bibiyana newsletter, which reconfigures the suffering of poverty in technical terms of ‘needs’ and ‘capacity’:

In order to meet these ‘critical needs’ a programme of works was established, running largely through a local NGO, Friends in Village Development. Although approved by the ex-patriate British CEO, the projects were implemented by Bangladeshi nationals: the director of external affairs based in Dhaka and his community liaison team. In our interviews and discussions all espoused the core values of partnership and sustainability that are shared widely by NGOs and aid agencies within Bangladesh. Each individual involved was inevitably motivated by a range of personal objectives, ranging from ideals of national development, a desire to help ‘the poor’, and ambition to initiate a flagship community engagement project for the company. These ideals and aspirations rested uneasily alongside the realities of the team's work, in which protest and complaint often stymied their attempts at positive ‘community engagement’ and partnership. Their remit was, after all, to ‘manage’ a largely non-compliant population who in 2005 were not minded to offer the company a ‘social license to operate’.Footnote ³⁹ Despite the politically charged context, the projects were set up enthusiastically by the director of external affairs who explained to us how the experience of offering monetary compensation for land in a nearby gas field a decade earlier had led to anger among local people, for the money was soon spent and they were left with nothing. In Bibiyana, sustainability was therefore key. The projects included income generation, training, credit groups, and so on. Stipends were awarded to promising students at the local school and two clinics were built, and housing materials, sanitary latrines, and stoves were distributed to the poorest households. Recipients for the assistance were chosen by the NGO in conjunction with ‘village development organisations’ (VDOs). These were composed of members of the local elite, who often also worked as contractors for the company, providing labourers. Indeed, Chevron officials had very little direct contact with the people its programmes were aimed at. The rare occasions when they were encountered were largely during ritualized ‘handing over’ ceremonies, in which officials—often expatriate British or Americans—would, with much fanfare, hand over the donations, part of the performative work of development projects, which as David Mosse has observed, are largely focused upon the production of success.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unlike the provision of cash or other forms of help to ‘our own poor’, these ceremonies involve the handing over of development largesse either to intermediaries, or unknown recipients. For example, when told that the children who were being awarded stipends for schools were in fact from wealthier Londoni families, a top official appeared surprised, then said: ‘I thought they didn't look very poor!’

Crucially, in this scenario the personalized ties of charity and dependency are seen as morally suspicious rather than as a route to piety. Indeed, much of the assistance comes with a caveat: recipients are to contribute to the upkeep or costs of the goods or services. This chimes with the discursive trope of ‘sustainability’, which all Chevron officials were keen to stress. As the CEO at the time told me: ‘Give a man a fishing rod. . .’.Footnote ⁴¹ After all, he continued, in a statement which, in my view, showed total ignorance of the local politics of charity, relying instead on a romanticized vision of independent, feisty villagers struggling in the face of adversities which Chevron could help alleviate: ‘These are a proud, self reliant people. . .’

Here, by constructing the company as compassionate yet non-patronizing, drawing upon popular development discourse, Chevron manages to keep at bay some unpleasant realities of the ongoing protests against the gas field, posing as a morally pure and ethical business whose good works address the problems faced by the local population by providing a range of services. In the case of the stoves, a Bangladeshi NGO worker explained that when it appeared that people were not caring for them properly, they were ‘sold’ to recipients at a cost of 200 taka (production costs were 800 taka), in order to instil a sense of ownership.Footnote ⁴² In terms of development discourse, such initiatives encourage responsibility and sustainability; ultimately the relationship between donor and recipient is to be cut off. By being the intermediaries between Chevron's largesse and its recipients, it is the NGO fieldworkers who have relationships with poorer people within the villages and who receive the most flak for failing to give enough, or being too dictatorial about how gifts should be used: for example, we heard frequent complaints that so-and-so from the NGO hadn't allowed so-and-so from Garibpur to join the savings group. Meanwhile, Chevron's community liaison officers were rarely seen around the place.

Other gifts came with similar conditions, again aimed at producing a sense of ownership. Two ‘Smiling Sun’ medical clinics were built, run by a national health-care NGO, and partly funded by the donations of Londonis. These provide diagnostic services but not medicine, with a further programme of outreach health workers, and an ambulance which could take patients to the nearest hospital in Sylhet, though at a cost. As mentioned earlier, however, money for buying medicine is one of the main things that poorer people request from their patrons, as the example of Lacky's visit to Amma shows. Our research in 2008–11 indicated that the poorest households in the area did not use these services since, in their view, there was little point in having a diagnosis if they could not afford the prescribed medicines and, if in dire need, the fare of a CNGFootnote ⁴³ was lower than that of the ambulance. Although they have not actually built a school, the company has provided support for four high schools in the area, via the funding of teachers and teaching materials, the distribution of school uniforms, and providing several hundred scholarships for pupils each year.Footnote ⁴⁴

Some people told us they appreciated these programmes, but others complained that the costs were too high. As one man put it:

To sum up, the main aim of Chevron's philanthropic efforts in Bibiyana has been to promote the image of the company as morally irreproachable in order to further its ‘reputation’, both nationally and internationally. To do this, two important elements must be present: engagement in morally ‘pure’ philanthropic action based upon an (unachievable) ideal of equality rather than inequality between donor and receiver, and resting upon the notion of ‘sustainability’, and the idea, strongly promoted by the company, of ‘partnership’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, as Fassin reminds us, however much such programmes insist upon compassion and solidarity, inequality inevitably remains. After all, Chevron decide which programmes to fund, and refuse in some contexts to become a local patron, but at other times are lured by the performative production of project success to enact precisely that role. Consider, for example, the following:

In her ethnography of a charitable mission for orphans run by Franciscan nuns and a modernized NGO offering projects aimed at empowerment for children and their carers in Uganda, China Scherz shows how both organizations embody the contradictory ethics of charity, patronage, and interdependence on the one hand and independence, self-reliance, and sustainability on the other.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Franciscan mission has no qualms about taking on lost and hopeless cases of suffering children, but the NGO is careful to choose only clients who are likely to become empowered. Predictably, the latter garners funding and appreciation from international donors, while the former is seen as retrograde and faces a crisis of support. Like other work, Scherz's research points to the contradictory ethics that underlie philanthropic programmes that stress empowerment and self-reliance, while at the same time severing ties of support between donors and recipients.Footnote ⁴⁸

We should, however, beware of drawing the lines too clearly between local patronage and interdependence on the one hand and global humanitarianism on the other. In the final section of this article I turn to the Bibiyana Foundation, an attempt by Chevron to merge the two by bringing together the impulse of local and transnational philanthropy aimed at the alleviation of the suffering of known supplicants with the ethics of international humanitarianism, drawing upon compassion for anonymous and unknown populations.

Partnership requested: the Bibiyana Foundation comes to the UK

In 2010 Chevron's director of external affairs travelled to the UK to meet members of Bibiyana's transnational community. His purpose was somewhat unusual: to set up a foundation which utilized the charitable donations of expatriates from Bibiyana for community development activities in the area, rather than the largely individualized contributions, which, as we have seen, can amount to thousands of pounds per person per year. The plan was that Chevron would match these funds: for every hundred or thousand pounds raised by the Londonis the company would contribute an equal amount. This innovative scheme was directly aimed at both core ideals: partnership and sustainability, creating a charitable foundation that eventually would rely only upon funding by expatriates with a long-lasting stake in the development of their ‘homeland’ communities. For the director of external affairs who was pursuing the project, the scheme had the potential to meet both of his professed objectives: to further the interests of the company, and to harness the company's resources to improve the lot of the rural poor in Bangladesh.Footnote ⁴⁹ It thus potentially marked an important transition in transnational relations: from personalized, individual charity from Londoni patrons and deshi clients, to a more formal, systematized philanthropy. The need for donors to gain status and local recognition was acknowledged by the plan: scholarships, community facilities, and so on would be named.

Partnership with members of the Bangladeshi diaspora was key to the project. Although some of these partners might be from the actual villages of Bibiyana, the plan was also to seek a wider set of alliances from civil society groups in the UK and USA. These donors would have no pre-existing social links with the poor of Bibiyana. Similar projects organized by the NGO BRAC have been successful in attracting the attention of a younger generation of British Bengalis, who often have only limited links with poor relatives in the desh.

For many Londonis from the various villages in Bibiyana, however, the transition from shahajo to formalized donations organized via the NGO that Chevron planned to commission with the work was viewed as problematic. During the consultation meetings we attended, the vast majority were vociferously opposed to the scheme. What would be the point one man asked: he already gave large amounts of money to people in his village, and was contributing to the building of a mosque in his British neighbourhood; the fund would be yet another obligation. Another Londoni, who had taken steps to raise funds for a hospital with non-Bangladeshi members of the Rotary Club explained that it was all very well asking non-Bangladeshis to contribute, but he couldn't ask his compatriots for charity. Not only would he get ensnarled in the complex politics of his community in the UK where he would be at risk of rumours of misappropriating funds, but his request for donations might be misinterpreted as begging. It simply wouldn't be appropriate to ask his neighbours and relatives in Britain for money. Moreover, partnership with Chevron, the presence of which has been so controversial in the area, would bring its own dangers to his reputation. In the end the director of external affairs returned to Bangladesh empty handed. He had met with many transnational villagers, but none had agreed to form a partnership with his company. Instead the meetings had largely involved them criticizing him for Chevron's presence in the area, damage to the environment, and problems involving financial compensation for land.

As the above implies, the politics of charity and philanthropy in Bibiyana (both in the desh and transnationally) are complex. The transition from charity to philanthropy is not simple, for each form of giving is embedded in a significantly different moral order involving a different relationship between giver and receiver, and a different understanding of suffering and its alleviation. This is not to say that individuals are unable to engage in both forms of donation. Rather, not only are transnational villagers already committed to a range of personalized obligations in the desh, from building a village mosque to paying for the education of poor clients (in which a move to impersonal donations doesn't make much sense), but the work of fundraising, a practice that is seen in Britain as morally ‘good’, might be interpreted differently within the transnational community. In that context, requesting money might both put one in danger of accusations of corruption and/or malpractice, plus the threat of being in the role of low status receiver rather than high status giver. This danger is exacerbated by the involvement of Chevron, which is viewed within both Bibiyana and transnational communities in the UK with ambivalence and suspicion.

The partnership that the Fund needed, if it was to be successful at both a practical level and in terms of how it would be positioned within Chevron's narratives of successful community engagement (as another example of uncontroversial and mutually beneficial connectedness to satisfied locals), was thus harder to achieve than the programme's creators had originally imagined. Indeed, from the perspective of the British villagers we met, Chevron's needs seemed greater than theirs. They already had excellent relations with their home villages; many had established reputations as community leaders and patrons, whose moral standing was continually reproduced via their generosity to their ‘own poor’. They did not need ‘partnership’ with Chevron in the funding of community development programmes. What they required from Chevron was accountability over environmental issues, appropriate grievance procedures, and dialogue.