Amy Schiller, "The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It" (Melville House, 2023)

06/27/24 • 48 min

Amy Schiller, who spent a number of years working in both political and major gift fundraising, has a new book detailing some of the fundamental problems currently afflicting American philanthropy and how to correct some of these problems. Schiller, a political theorist currently at Dartmouth College’s Society of Fellows, brings two important perspectives to her research in The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023)—combining her experience in the philanthropic world with her training and expertise in political theory, especially democratic theory. The Price of Humanity also provides the reader with a vital history of philanthropy and giving, especially in the West, and how thinking about the role of supporting others as part of the common good has shifted over the course of more than two millennia. Schiller makes an important point about how St. Augustine, in his teachings on donations and giving, shifted the framing and understanding of giving from a community-based common good to a global approach to donating, tying the act of giving to individual salvation. This approach not only highlighted suffering and need and stratified those who give from those who are in need, but it also disconnected the philanthropic experience from the immediate community while objectifying those who are in poverty or generally in need.

The Price of Humanity doesn’t dwell in the past but provides this important lens that continues to apply to our contemporary thinking about giving. This more disconnected approach is also overlaid, in our current environment, with the demand that non-profits and philanthropies product quantifiable goods: how many cases of malaria have been eradicated, how much food has been provided to those experiencing scarcity, how are the dollars donated spent and by whom and in what ways? Thus, in so many ways, philanthropic organizations have to report out their successes in the same ways that private corporations need to detail their fiscal health to their boards of directors and shareholders. All of these approaches tend to disconnect the act of giving from the world in which we live, according to Schiller, and this disconnection makes the reason for giving much more attenuated, distancing us from each other, our communities, and the real role of the common good. Instead of linking individuals together in our shared love for one another and humanity as a whole—which is actually what the word philanthropy means in the original Greek—we live in a philanthropic world that separates and isolates. The Price of Humanity spotlights different approaches to giving, with discussions of the Gates Foundation, Effective Altruism, Robber Barons and the Gilded Age, and other forms of the business of giving. Schiller also focuses on modern examples of philanthropy as the common good, which brings it into the realm of democratic theory, as a means to provide the flourishing of humanity, not merely fulfilling the desperate needs of individuals. This is a fascinating and valuable interrogation of the idea of giving to others, and how we need to reconsider our thinking about the act of giving itself and the role that this act plays in our community and in our democracy.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Shuchi Kapila, "Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Shuchi Kapila, Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

Dr. Shuchi Kapila, Professor of English at Grinnell College, has a new book that explores the India/Pakistan Partition in 1947 through the lens of memory, generational conversation and inheritance. Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is most clearly focused on this idea of how we learn to remember the past, particularly the complexities of a past that includes trauma and violence along with independence and hope. This book, part of the Palgrave MacMillan series on Memory Studies, examines these ideas of memory and nostalgia and how they have shaped the cultural and political understanding of Partition in India, but also in the diaspora. Kapila starts with her own lived experiences, recalling bits of stories her mother told of her life before Partition. This is the path that Postmemory and the Partition of India continues along, as Kapila notes that the memories of Partition are fragmented, are communicated in bits, often in a non-linear way. Thus, the memories themselves were not fully communicated to the children of those who experienced Partition, and this generation of children, now adults, are reflecting on their own inheritance from Partition, even though they themselves did not live through it. Part of the focus in Learning to Remember is drawing out this approach to remembering—what is it that the traumatized generation passed along, even unknowingly, to their children. The transfer of more than 12 million people without much planning or organization, in context of the British removal of colonial power from the Asian subcontinent, and the establishment of independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, were all jarring events, leaving individuals stateless, or newly engulfed in nation-states that had not previously existed. Families were separated, women were abducted, violence and displacement all dominated this period—and for those who lived through it, it was not necessarily contextualized by a state power committing crimes against particular populations, as was the case in the Holocaust, or the Apartheid regime in South Africa, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Thus, the responses that happened in regard to these events, with the Nuremburg Trials, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did not happen in the same way in terms of Partition.

Kapila explores different avenues that have been developing to rectify some of this missing memory of Partition. She does interviews with those who experienced Partition and she also interviews her generational contemporaries, examining how different generations have essentially experienced Partition and also how they have learned to remember this assaultive experience that is also the foundation of independent nation-states. This is the thrust of the first half of the book—these intergenerational conversations and understandings of Partition. The second half of the book looks more closely at the two physical spaces that have been established to communicate about Partition. These two physical spaces include the Berkeley, California 1947 Partition Archive, which now contains at least 10,000 oral histories of Partition, available for researchers, scholars, and individuals to explore and examine. India has also recently opened the Partition Museum, Amritsar, the first museum of its kind in India. Museums tend to craft particular narratives of events or experiences, and Kapila considers this new museum, and how it is participating in that narrative design, while also engaging with critiques and analysis of the newly established museum, which opened in 2017.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Erin Lin, "When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia.

Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying their land.

Lin argues that the half-century legacy of American bombs has sedimented the war into the layers of contemporary Cambodian society. Policies aimed at developing or modernizing Cambodia, whether economic liberalization or authoritarian consolidation, must be realized in an environment haunted by the violence of the past.

As the stories Lin captures show, the bombing served as a critical juncture in these farming villages, marking the place in time where development stopped.

Our guest today is Erin Lin, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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