The making of the “brown savior”: Race, caste, class, and india’s (global) help economy
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Shankar, Arjun [1]
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[1] Georgetown University
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- Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 4, 2022, págs. 431-453
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This article offers a theoretical excavation of the brown savior, afigure that has taken on a critical role in the newly reconstructedhelp industries in India. Brown saviors help us to think more critically about the global help industries, an area in which racializingprocesses have been relatively understudied despite the fact that, historically, nearly all help interventions have focused on previously colonized peoples. I suggest that the brown savior is afigure that reveals the contradictions in the contemporary helpeconomy, which reproduces forms of racialized difference and hierarchy by conscripting new actors who can ascend to the role ofsavior and, therefore, continue the project of racial capitalist accumulation. I specifically place the category of“brown”in relationto“savior”in the Indian context to draw attention to how a particular class ofsavarna(dominant-caste) Hindus was historicallyconstituted and actively reproduces colonial-era racialized values through twenty-first-century help economies tethered to theireconomic, political, and social capital in both India and the United States.
