Global Philanthropy, FCRA, and the Regulation of Rights-based NGO-work in India
How are philanthropy and humanitarian work regulated in India? This talk explores recent efforts by NGOs to reform laws governing the non-profit sector, alongside government efforts to regulate foreign philanthropy and domestic NGO-work. Based on ethnographic research with an advocacy NGO in Delhi, it explores how law becomes a language of activism in the intersection of transnational humanitarian efforts and state regulation.
Erica Bornstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interests include non-governmental organizations, philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism, political/legal anthropology, and the anthropology of religion. Bornstein is the author of two ethnographic monographs: Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford 2012) and The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford 2005). She is the co-editor with Peter Redfield of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (School for Advanced Research Press 2011). Her current research focuses on civil society and its regulation in New Delhi.