Our own poor: transnational charity, development gifts and the politics of suffering in Sylhet and the U.K.

Based on fieldwork in Bibiyana, NE Bangladesh, this paper compares the transnational charity offered to known individuals by migrant, UK based families, with the philanthropic efforts of the multinational company Chevron, who operate a large gas field in the neighbourhood. Applying Fassin’s notion of the ‘politics of suffering’ to both types of exchange, the paper argues that the two types of giving are underlain by incommensurate moral economies. Whilst in instances of transnational charity, social inequality and the compassion felt towards the suffering of known people, or ‘our own poor’, underscore the exchanges, in the philanthropic efforts of ‘community engagement’ the inequality of giver and receiver is repressed and the exchange is animated by a moral economy, rooted in Christianity, in which compassion guides actions towards the suffering of unknown, anonymous strangers.