Introduction

This paper aims to inquire on processes and consequences of ‘kinning’ in philanthropy. While traditional conceptualisations of philanthropy depart from the assumption of distinguishing the ‘civil’ or ‘voluntary’ sector from private, kinship-based relations (and also from the market, and from the state), my research aims to investigate into the entanglements between these domains. More specifically, this paper, based on an in-depth qualitative case study of a specific philanthropic programme, is interested in processes whereby recipient-donor relations become perceived and interpreted in familial and kinship terms.

Usual studies collapse the occurrence of kinship idioms in philanthropy either as evidence of ‘prosociality’ (e.g. trust, care, love) or more frequently as ‘paternalism’, that is as evidence of power and domination of donors over recipients, and of their objectification. In this paper, I propose that kinship and family idioms and metaphors in philanthropy (and in related fields of volunteering, charity, citizen aid or grassroots humanitarianism) should be taken more seriously. Instead of simplifying and essentialising them either as indicating ‘prosociality’ or ‘paternalism’, family metaphors and related concepts, practices and emotions should be re-embedded into their socio-historical contexts.

Abstract ideals of helping distant others by means of philanthropy may be interwoven with various specific ideologies and ethical repertoires that enable the actual practical realisation of connecting with distant causes and individuals (Boltanski, Reference Boltanski1999; Malkki, Reference Malkki2015; Dromi, Reference Dromi2021; author). Such ideologies—referred to as ‘moral frameworks’ by sociological models of volunteer motivation (e.g. Wuthnow, Reference Wuthnow1991; Wilson and Musick, Reference Musick and Wilson2008, pp. 70–85)—define values, causes and aims to pursue, specify groups to support and point out proper practices, ways and tools of helping. Such ideologies in the background of helping have the capacity to ground philanthropic processes: they contextualise abstract helping intentions by naturalising donor–recipient connections, and offer identities, roles, activity repertoires that make the helping process comprehensible, worthy and legitimate for the participants (Wilson & Musick, Reference Musick and Wilson2008, pp. 315–318, Oreg & Appe, Reference Oreg and Appe2020; Dromi, Reference Dromi2021).

The broadest question of my research thus inquires on such moral frameworks, evoked by kinship idioms in philanthropic interactions. What kind of roles, identities, responsibilities and obligations do various kinship idioms offer for the participants of the helping process? How do these roles shape actual donor–recipient interactions and practices of helping? And ultimately, how do these moral frameworks shape ideologies of belonging, solidarity and helping that circulate beyond the helping interaction?

Such entanglements of kinship, philanthropy and ideologies and discourses of helping are analysed on a specific terrain, that of philanthropic programmes built upon ideologies of national solidarity, organised from Hungary, and directed towards supporting ethnic Hungarian children, their families and their communities in Romania. The analysis is based on ethnographic research conducted in one such programme: a child sponsorship network designed along the idiom of ‘godparenthood’, aiming to support Hungarian-speaking children and families in Moldavian Csángó villages in Romania.

On this specific empirical terrain, the paper will show that by no means may such philanthropic kinship relations be treated as homogeneous and universal; on the contrary, precisely this multifaceted nature and flexibility of family concepts allow for the operation and long-term maintenance of such philanthropic aid often bridging large socio-economic distances.

In this vein, this paper aims to further earlier research on ‘hybridisation’ mechanisms in philanthropy by complementing recent scholarly focus on its sectoral entanglements. While recent research has already pointed out the significance of the state and the market in such hybridisation phenomena (Shachar et al., Reference Shachar, von Essen and Hustinx2019; Lichtermann & Eliasoph, Reference Lichterman and Eliasoph2014), this paper foregrounds the entanglements of philanthropy with the fourth domain, that is with kinship and private familial relationships.

Also, concern for the entanglements between philanthropy and private relations of kinship contributes to a relatively neglected topic in the research of philanthropy, and the related fields of volunteering and civic aid: that of donor–recipient inequalities (Grubb, Reference Grubb2021; Carlsen et al., Reference Carlsen, Doerr and Toubøl2020). This paper will show that kinship relations in the institutional context of philanthropy may become powerful mediators, which may recreate, modify or reshape donor–recipient hierarchies and related care-control dynamics in diverse ways.

Kinship Idioms in Philanthropy Research

Although the term ‘kinning’, invented by Howell (Reference Howell2006), was initially applied to describe the building of parent–child relations in processes of transnational adoption, suggestions have also been made to broaden these explorations to other terrains (Thelen et al., Reference Thelen, Thiemann and Roth2014; Thelen, Reference Thelen2015; Rebollo et al., Reference Rebollo and Escribano2018). As for philanthropy, various ethnographic, anthropological and sociological studies focus on the possible enhanced role of personal relations between donors and recipients of help (for an overview of the topic: Fechter, Reference Fechter2019). Among these several authors have taken notice of the working of kinship and familial idioms and metaphors in the construction of personal donor–recipient relationships: in case of international development and humanitarian child-sponsorship (Bornstein, Reference Bornstein2001, Reference Bornstein2012; Drążkiewicz, Reference Drążkiewicz2020; Fechter, Reference Fechter2019; Noh, Reference Noh2019; Rabbitts, Reference Rabbitts2012; Zarzycka, Reference Zarzycka2016; Zakariás & Feischmidt, Reference Zakariás and Feischmidt2020), in personal mentoring schemes of disadvantaged students built upon volunteering in educational and welfare settings (Molpeceres et al., Reference Molpeceres, Pinazo and Aliena2012), in a historical account of donor identity formation by the Red Cross (Dromi, Reference Dromi2021), and more recently in personalised helping and mentoring of refugee minors residing in Western European countries (Raithelhuber, Reference Raithelhuber2019; Scheibelhofer, Reference Scheibelhofer, Feischmidt, Pries and Cantat2019; Aflaki & Freise, Reference Aflaki and Freise2019).

In her seminal work on humanitarianism in urban India, Bornstein (Reference Bornstein2012, Ch. 5) reveals how giving outside one’s own biological family may become endowed with kinship idioms. Conceiving recipients of support in familial terms makes such support socially meaningful in social contexts where care and concern for others is primarily and dominantly linked to care for the own kin. Such relationality is shown to enable long-term personal connections, responsibilities and obligations, and is contrasted by Bornstein with more impersonal and temporary forms of humanitarianism. Analysing religious-based child-sponsorship initiated from the UK towards non-Western countries, Frances Rabbitts highlights how donor–recipient relations may be conceived of as analogous to familial (especially parental) connections, which contributes to shape such charitable and humanitarian relations ‘providing contextual environments within which charity is situated and understood’ (see also Molpeceres et al., Reference Molpeceres, Pinazo and Aliena2012). While developing her ideas on the role of the ‘desire for connection’ in humanitarian and charity processes Anne-Meike Fechter (Reference Fechter2019) alludes to the enhanced role of familial, kinship idioms and metaphors in creating donor–recipient relations. She emphasises the potential of such kinship metaphors in naturalising connections and specifically helping relations between strangers, distant according to socio-economic positions or cultural–geographical imaginaries.

The above authors and research perspectives understand familial and kinship idioms as facilitating connections between strangers, and emphasise their capacity to induce relations of care. Another major scholarly focus on familial metaphors—not entirely distinct from the earlier—regard familial metaphors as evidence of power and domination. Critical research on child-sponsorship and mentoring echoes a more general critique of philanthropy, humanitarianism and development on the reproduction of donor–recipient power relations subordinating the latter in various ways (Grubb, Reference Grubb2021; Rabbitts, Reference Rabbitts2012; Zarzycka, Reference Zarzycka2016). Postcolonial and feminist critiques of philanthropy and humanitarianism (e.g. Burman, Reference Burman1994; Manzo, Reference Manzo2008; Sinervo & Cheney, Reference Sinervo, Cheney, Cheney and Sinervo2019; Suski, Reference Suski, Wilson and Brown2009; Holzberg, Reference Holzberg2019) discuss the role of kinship idioms in its specific form of ‘paternalism’, claiming that oppressive parental desires and imaginaries lie behind support directed towards the ‘Third-World’. According to such critiques, these organisations and programmes, often building upon the historically developed Western image of the vulnerable and innocent child decontextualise the helping process, disregard the local knowledges and perspectives of targeted individuals and communities, ultimately rendering recipients voicelessness and passivity.

This paper claims that while thoroughly elaborating core characteristics and potentialities of such organisations and practices, both of these approaches carry the risks of essentialising and decontextualising the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘kinship’. As they often fail to pose the question ‘what kind of kinship? What kind of family?’ these perspectives may sometimes overlook important consequences of the use of such metaphors on philanthropic relations. Anthropological and sociological studies of kinship and parenting revealed the multiplicity of forms of familial relations, and revealed that these might be associated with diverse practices, concepts and emotions, and diverse configurations of power. Such studies, mostly related to the field of governmentality, have shown how parental roles, responsibilities and emotional repertoires have shifted throughout various socio-historical contexts; and depending on socio-political, legal and institutional circumstances, how these developed into multiple forms. (Burman, Reference Burman2016; Faircloth, Reference Faircloth, Lee, Bristow, Faircloth and Macvarish2014; Rose, Reference Rose1999).

We have no reason to assume that family idioms evoked in the institutional context of philanthropy do not show similar variability. Based on ethnographic research carried out in a particular philanthropic setting, this paper explores how ‘everyday’ understandings of familiarity described by scholarly studies on kinship and parenting shape donor–recipient philanthropic relations, and specifically, relations of care and control. Before immersing into empirical analysis, however, a brief description on the social context and the applied methodology is necessary, that form the topics of the next sections.

The Research Context and Methodology

Kinship, Nationhood and the Possibility of Connection

In organisational-institutional representations such as the homepage of the association, or formal speeches in official celebrations, idioms and metaphors related to family and kinship prevail in abundance. The following extract from a video-testimony of a godparent exhibited on the webpage of the programme illustrates well such abundance of connotations and meanings connecting nationhood and kinship on various levels.

Familial parent–child metaphors unite ethnic Hungarian minority communities and the Hungarian state: Moldavian Csángós are ‘orphans of the nation’. Also, the Hungarian nation is imagined as strengthened by relegating Moldavian Csángó families to the national body, the latter representing national authenticity through their authentic (national) traditions and values. Such ideas easily resonate and slip into each other, connecting kinship and nationhood on various scales.

As described by Anderson, the modern nationalist sentiment and an abstract solidarity towards co-nationals are partly implied by the public use of a metaphoric language on the nation as an imagined family.Footnote ³ In line with this proposition, in the philanthropic programme explored in this paper the idiom of kinship resonates well with explicit and implicit intentions and desires related to nationhood and authenticity. Such abundance of familial tropes allows for closing the conceptual distance between the abstract goals of philanthropic support and creating actual donor–recipient relations. All these concepts, then, elicit and legitimise personal godparent–godchild relationships in practice, in their actuality.

Such mental operation, however, is much more difficult on the side of the recipients of philanthropic support. On my first trip to Moldavia, in 2009 I was accompanying a group of friends, all around thirty years old. Three of them already had godchildren in a Moldavian village, while two persons were considering of becoming godparents. During our journey, one of them, Peti finally decided to engage himself.

In order to better discern this uneasy encounter, we must consider the local socio-historical context of the programme. In Csángó communities, assimilation processes are under way, referred to by ethnographers and linguists as language-shift, language-change, and identity change (Peti & Tánczos, Reference Peti and Tánczos2012). This makes the ideology of Hungarian national preservation hard to identify with for many Csángó habitants in Moldavian villages. Donor perspectives are conceptually setting heroic minority resistance of the Csángós against the assimilationist state of Romania. However, Hungarian national curriculum (Hungarian national history, geography, literature etc.) has not been taught in the second half of the twentieth century in these villages, and local Romanian state institutions, such as public administration or education were explicitly hostile with the use of Hungarian language, and with evoking Hungarian national discourse and narratives (Laihonen et al., Reference Laihonen, Bodó, Heltai and Fazakas2020). Related to that, strategies of social mobility (education, employment) became closely tied to the Romanian state and its majority language institutions, and to ethnically heterogeneous networks of labour migration towards Western Europe. Therefore, the idea of (Hungarian) national unity and the ideology of (Hungarian) national preservation is often missing from the local social imagination; just as acquaintance and habitual embodiment of roles and ‘language-plays’ (Eriksen, Reference Eriksen1991) prescribed by these ideologies, such as a ‘heartfelt need’ to speak one’s mother tongue, a strong dedication to Hungarian language education and religious services, or performing folkloric customs as part of identity politics. Moreover, in the local social imagination, as modernisation and social mobility is associated with Romanian language use and Romanian identification, Csángó-ness and Hungarian language use is often attributed with underdevelopment and ultimately, poverty. (Peti, Reference Peti, Barszczewska and Lehel2011).

Such processes of language change and assimilation results that the broader goals of the ideology of ‘Hungarian national preservation’ remain distant and may even become denigrating for the recipients of support. Among such circumstances, the idea of philanthropic support arriving from Hungarian donors and volunteers, based on this ideology of national survival, is mostly illegible—as illustrated by the above extract from my research diary. The stakes of kinship metaphors here become much greater than just contextualising, as for the Hungarian donors and volunteers, the somewhat abstract goals of national solidarity. The idiom of kinship, and specifically godparenthood—recorded by ethnographers and anthropologists as central in Csángó lifeworlds (Timaru, Reference Timaru2020)—enables that the connection and helping relations may become socially meaningful for communities and individuals unfamiliar with the idea of national philanthropy.

On my visit to a Moldavian village in Autumn 2010, I met Kati, the mother of a local schoolgirl. Kati tried to obtain information about the (philanthropic) godparents of her daughter, living in Budapest, and complained that although her daughter had spent numerous letters yearly to her godparents, the latter never answered. Kati explained the image of the philanthropic godparent programme likening their role to ‘everyday’ forms of godparenthood that link members of the local community:

Besides bridging—albeit unevenly—diverging understandings of national ideologies of donors and potential recipients, godparental relations are also addressed to mediate differences of socio-economic positions among donors and recipients. The initiators of the programme, volunteers and godparents are middle-class health, education, cultural professionals, entrepreneurs, managers all being able to afford to participate in the programme. They have the financial means to offer donations, they have free time to do fund-raising and voluntary work, they have the material means and free time to offer accommodation in their homes, and to travel to great distances to visit the supported communities in their settlements. The majority of the recipients of support are less wealthy, less educated, often having finished only primary education, living in economically depressed rural areas in Moldavia, Romania. The majority of adults work in agriculture or on the secondary labour market, being able to afford large distance travels only as part of their labour migration to Western Europe.

Personal familial relations among such conditions require careful arrangements and intricate processes managed and organised through collective and individual institutional practices on the part of ‘relationship brokers’ (Fechter, Reference Fechter2020), that is volunteers and Hungarian language teachers residing in these villages. While mediation and brokering plays a central role in enabling the travelling of persons and objects through great social, geographic and physical distances, and contribute to the flow of knowledge and resources through complex trajectories, the organisation of the programme also allows for the deployment and proliferation of spaces of more direct personal encounters and interactions between donors and recipients. Godchildren and their siblings may be invited to godparents’ homes in Hungary to spend some holiday time there (usually a few days) and godparents may also visit their godchildren in summer camps in Hungary or even in their homes in Moldavia. Also, godparents may keep direct contact with their godchildren and their families by phone. Ágnes and Tamás, a couple in their forties, living in Budapest, enthusiastically recalled their encounter with their goddaughter Regina as follows:

As this extract illustrates, direct communication creates social spaces where donors and recipients evade institutional settings of education and civic organisation. They remain among themselves—and such privacy enables them to translate metaphoric kinship, initially controlled and reproduced by intermediary institutional actors, into everyday meanings and practices.

Parenting Scripts and Care-Control Dynamics

A custom cultivated in various regions in Central and Eastern Europe as related to baptism of newborn children, godparenthood belongs to the realm of ‘chosen kinship’. Godparents, either invited by family members, or offering themselves their support, become mandated with long lasting responsibilities and obligations both towards the godchildren and towards their parents. Godparenthood is also attributed with power—godparents becoming entitled to interfere with essential decisions around the fate of godchildren (Timaru, Reference Timaru2020; Vasile et al., Reference Vasile, Cash and Heady2018). Such godparental responsibilities become evoked also in philanthropic donor–recipient relations. Three major ‘cultural scripts’ of parenting (Faircloth, Reference Faircloth, Lee, Bristow, Faircloth and Macvarish2014) may be found in godparental relations in the explored philanthropic programme: (1) parental responsibilities of national socialisation are complemented with (2) a focus on achieving education and development, and (3) with bringing fun, joy to the recipients, and thus building intimacy and closeness with them through popular consumption.

Discussion and Conclusions

The present paper aimed to analyse entanglements between the often separately conceptualised domains of philanthropy and kinship. It proposed, more specifically, a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of ‘philanthropic kinning’ that is of philanthropic helping intertwined with creating personal connections of family and kin between donors and recipients. In line with earlier research the paper has shown how idioms of kinship may become important elements in contextualising abstract ideas of philanthropic support. The paper explored how the ‘ordinary ethics’ of kinship (Rabbitts, Reference Rabbitts2012) and more specifically parenting allows for the construction of philanthropic relations, either rendering them socially meaningful in cases when ideas of philanthropic and humanitarian helping are incomprehensible for potential participants (as in Bornstein, Reference Bornstein2012); or filling abstract ideas of philanthropic helping with specific practical ways of feeling, thinking and acting (as in Rabbitts, Reference Rabbitts2012; Raithelhuber, Reference Raithelhuber2019). Moreover, the paper elaborated further such modes of contextualisation: answering to calls to unearth the operation of power at the heart of donor–recipient personal relations (Fechter, Reference Fechter2019, Reference Fechter2020), it explored hierarchic roles, dispositions, expectations and identities that became enhanced by specific idioms of family and kinship.

These tasks were accomplished by focusing on a specific form of philanthropy, based on the ideology of responsibilities towards Hungarian co-ethnic minorities abroad, that is philanthropy initiated from Hungary towards ethnic Hungarian minorities, with the mission of supporting them in the preservation of national culture and identities. Placing a programme in the centre of analysis that connects communities divergent in their comprehension and acceptance of the philanthropic mission—related in this case to the Hungarian national discourses -, enabled to show how familial and kinship idioms contribute to the creation and everyday operation of helping. First, on the side of the donors, it revealed how resonating with the idea of the nation (Yuval-Davis, Reference Yuval-Davis2005) kinship idioms close the gap between abstract ideas of philanthropic helping and the intent of creating actual donor–recipient relations. Second, on the side of recipients, it also revealed how it made—to a certain extent—philanthropic support socially meaningful for people and communities unfamiliar or hostile with national ideologies of authenticity operating in the background of the philanthropic programme.

Inquiring on the ways family, parenting and kinship idioms are embedded into donor–recipient philanthropic relations and interactions, the paper also pointed out how such ‘kinning’ contributes to reshaping the philanthropic process: how it evokes ideas, goals, values, identities, dispositions and practices diverging from the initial ideological framework of the philanthropic programme. While (god)parental roles of national socialisation resonate closely with national ideologies present in the mission of the programme, parental responsibilities of supporting education and employability of kids, first, and the quest for fun, joy and intimacy with the children, second, allowed for thinking beyond the initial philanthropic goals of preserving Hungarian national language, culture and community.

Such reshaping of philanthropic goals and practices also affected inequalities, power and knowledge production in philanthropic donor–recipient relations. It was shown above how godparent roles and practices of national socialisation may imply epistemic violence, causing frustration for godchildren and the entire recipient family, in cases when godparents disregard diverging concerns of national identification. Godparental focus on education, development and employability of godchildren, while disciplinary, were found to be more legitimate in the eyes of kids and/or their parents, and may provide a common ground and a common cause in the familial relations evoked in the philanthropic programme. The (god)parental quest for intimacy with godchildren, and the desire to bring fun and joy for them carries the greatest potentials for interactions to become oriented by the recipients of the philanthropic support, and thus for giving godchildren and their families voice and agency.

Feminist and postcolonial critiques of kinship idioms in philanthropy, humanitarianism or civic aid rapidly conclude that the (Western middle-class) desires to help unavoidably lead to various forms of domination articulating through each other (here familial relations of paternalism and national ideologies), resulting in the reinforcement and crystallisation of power hierarchies (for example Aflaki & Freise, Reference Aflaki and Freise2019; Burman, Reference Burman1994; Grubb, Reference Grubb2021; Zarzycka, Reference Zarzycka2016). The present article shows that such claims may be foregone conclusions needing further elaboration and refinement. The multiplicity of parenting modes and ideals (‘scripts’) in the explored programme of philanthropic godparenthood opened up a space of manoeuvre regarding practices, meanings and power relations in donor–recipient interactions and relationships. Specifically, modes and ideals of parenting allowed for the actions and perspectives of recipients to orient and lead the helping process in various ways.

Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that neither disciplining nor love and care follow straight from the mere existence of personal donor–recipient contacts and the use of family metaphors. Complex patterns of care and control are enabled by specific organisational and discoursive components: by historically and socially varying meanings assigned to kinship terms, and specifically to parental responsibilities and obligations.

These explorations helped us complement recent research on hybridisation processes related to philanthropy, volunteering, humanitarianism, and the third or NGO sector at large. Recent studies already underlined the significance of the state and the market in such hybridisation (Shachar et al., Reference Shachar, von Essen and Hustinx2019; Lichtermann & Eliasoph, Reference Lichterman and Eliasoph2014). By demonstrating how kinship in philanthropy may become a powerful mediator between donor and recipient perspectives, this paper foregrounded the entanglements of philanthropy with yet another domain; and explored kinship with its multiple capacities in creating and maintaining such helping relationships.

Concerning the relevance of our descriptions for the broader field of philanthropy, I deny the peculiarity of this case. While the present paper is based upon a case study of a single civic programme, earlier research (Zakariás, Reference Zakariás, Jochen and Albrecht2015, Reference Zakariás2019; Zakariás & Feischmidt, Reference Zakariás and Feischmidt2020) has found a wide array of philanthropic and voluntary initiatives targeting ethnic Hungarian children in minority that incubate such processes. The production of care and intimacy is closely intertwined with mobilising concepts of kinship in ‘twin-school’ based voluntary programs, ubiquitous in the Hungarian public education since the postsocialist transition, linking schools, teachers, students and their families in Hungary and in ethnic Hungarian minority communities in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania or Serbia. In these programmes that place personal donor–recipient relations in the centre, familial connotations and ideas of kinship between donors and recipients pop up frequently. Apart from the notion of godparenthood, ‘mother–child’ metaphors, as well as peer-group relations of becoming ‘siblings’ may appear in donors’ as well as recipients’ accounts. Such kinship metaphors, in turn, contribute to further enhancing caring dispositions, practices and temporalities in these philanthropic relationships, and shape in various ways knowledge and national ideologies of Hungarianness in the background of these programmes.

Moreover, this paper may have potentials for further generalisations. Although the current research, by unearthing the operation of national ideologies as linked to philanthropy, may seem to speak primarily to the field of nationalism studies, it also carries compelling messages beyond this scientific domain. It emphasises how philanthropy invite and evoke various moral frameworks and ideologies, beyond bare donor–recipient relations. Layered upon each other, these ideologies may simultaneously provide the moral foundations of donor and recipient roles, emotions, identities and motivations, and may orient practices of offering and accepting support. Accordingly, research cited in the theoretical section, addressing the operation of familial and kinship metaphors in philanthropy reveal a multiplicity of such conceptual frameworks and ideologies, beyond the national: global humanitarianism, transnational development or—for refugee godparenthood—the ideology of migrant integration all provide moral frameworks that are orchestrated in parallel and as related to familial moralities, concepts, metaphors. The call for a systematic elaboration on interacting effects of familial idioms, ideological and moral frameworks and the institutional context of philanthropy, formulated by this paper, may well be relevant in the above mentioned contexts as well, indeed diverse and heterogenous.

As a last remark, it must be stated that the phenomena analysed in this paper is far from unique in yet another sense: family metaphors and idioms of kinship may play a central role in the social construction and organisation of philanthropy in various ways. Such metaphors may be central, inter alia, in defining the recipients of philanthropic support, as for example the frequent case of support for families in material and economic disadvantage; or in defining the needs that must be helped and the helping activities, such as in case of offering professional parenting support through NGOs (de Koning et al., Reference de Koning, Johansen and Marchesi2020). Family metaphors and idioms of kinship, furthermore, may also induce helping motivations based on donor’s familial roles and identities, conceived as similar to potential recipients’- such empathetic identification, based on shared motherhood has been explored in milk donation philanthropy (Oreg & Appe, Reference Oreg and Appe2020, Oreg & Appe, Reference Oreg and Appe2021). Within this broad and diverse array, our present study focuses on a specific subset of phenomena, that is on philanthropy that addresses previously unrelated donors and recipients as members of the same family, thus creating direct familial connections between them. Although family and kinship identities, roles, dispositions and practices of participants might be evoked and mobilised in all of the above cases, this paper assumes that such roles and identities would be most crystallised in the last set of philanthropic programmes. Such direct and explicit bonding of donors and recipients allowed us to explore hybridisation in its most pronounced and clear-cut forms—the relevance and generalisability of our conclusions to a broader palette of programmes linking philanthropy to familial metaphors, however, needs further systematic analysis.