Giving Clothes: Contestations of Socio-religious Hegemony and the Charitable Distribution of Used Clothing in Guyana
Sinah Kloß
BCDSS Research Group Leader
The distribution of (used) clothing can influence socio-religious hierarchies and challenge established power structures. Hindus in Guyana associated the charitable distribution of clothing with Christian missions and Christian attempts at conversion. As a countermeasure, they organized their own distributions and actively claimed the position of the giving and charitable group.
During my anthropological fieldwork in Guyana in the early 2010s, many Hindus related charitable clothing distributions exclusively to Christian missions and Christian attempts of converting Hindus. Indeed, in the past, only Christians were in the position to conduct such distributions due to their links to colonial powers. The continuing transnational migration of Guyanese Hindus to North America since the 1960s has provided some Guyanese with the means to collect new and used clothing in their diasporic settings and ship them to Guyana, where they are redistributed among “the poor and needy”. For example in 2015, some Guyanese migrants based in Florida and New York organized such distributions. They actively claimed the position of “giver” and provider of “charity”, considering this practice as a means of countering and resisting the Hindu community’s perceived “threat” of conversion. They actively contested what Christian missionaries were said to have been labelled as “gifts from Jesus” before. Clothing distributions may hence influence socio-religious hierarchies and challenge established power structures. Alongside practices of consuming clothing (i.e. wearing them), the exchange of (used) clothes may enhance or lower a group’s or person’s status by displaying taste and (re-)creating capital.
Fig. 1: A Hindu mandir in Guyana (photo: S. Kloß, 2015).
Fig. 2: A yellow saree had been offered to a female deity. Clothes like that will be collected and shipped to Guyana for redistribution in the temple community or for use in the temple (photo: S. Kloß, 2012).
Fig. 3: Some ritual paraphernalia adding up during a Sunday puja (ritual veneration) in New York, including cloth and sarees (photo: S. Kloß, 2012).
Further Reading
Halstead, N., 2011. “Gift Practices in Guyanese East Indian Diaspora: Belonging, Loss, and Status.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 16 (2), 278–295.
Jayawardena, C., 1966. “Religious Belief and Social Change: Aspects of the Development of Hinduism in British Guiana.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 8 (2), 211–240.
Kloß, Sinah T., 2017. Contesting “Gifts from Jesus”: Conversion, Charity, and the Distribution of Used Clothing in Guyana. Social Sciences and Missions, 30 (3), 346–365.
Kloß, Sinah T., 2020. “Giving and Development: Ethno-Religious Identities and ‘Holistic Development’ in Guyana.” In: Faith-Based Organizations in Development Discourses and Practice (eds. J. Koehrsen, A. Heuser), London: Routledge, pp. 113–138.
Williams, B. 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins. Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle, Durham: Duke University Press.