Pfeil, Gretchen Elisabeth

GRETCHEN PFEIL, then a student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received funding in October 2006 to aid research on 'Reckoning Charity's Risks and Rewards: Sufi Muslim Alms and Evangelical Missionary Gifts in Urban Senegal,' supervised by Dr. Michael Silverstein. The research was designed as a study of the large and vibrant economy of charitable giving in Dakar, Senegal. It frames these acts of giving as a site in which local Muslim and expatriate Christian actors attempt to realize ideal forms of sociality by managing the manipulation of objects in transaction. The research proposed that Muslim and Christian givers employed different kinds of moral judgment in the management of small-scale transaction, resulting in distinct modes of circulation of goods revealed in differences in social formation at larger scales. Prepared meals, commodity foods, and money were tracked in charitable transactions to follow three objects of analysis: material goods, persons/social roles, and verbal/affective signs. The research employed individual and focus group interviews, participant observation and apprenticeship in related tasks (such as food preparation and shopping) and media studies to identify 'divisions of charitable labor' in the household and salient moments of judgment in practice. The research found that Evangelical giving focused on judgment about the proper accounting of the relationship between gifts and their stakes. Senegalese Muslim charitable practice, however, focused on enacting two other values: sutura and masla (Wolof 'discretion' and 'tolerance'). Enacting these values entails limitation of circulation of information and goods. Thus, not only do Muslim and Christian forms of giving rely upon and enact different kinds of moral judgment, they also involve different operative values, which not only create different forms of circulation as hypothesized, but also entail substantially different constitutions of agents/ givers.