The Anthropologist as Witness: Humanitarianism between Ethnography and Critique

Guilhot, Nicolas

doi:10.1353/hum.2012.0002

Cited by 26 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…He terms this ‘humanitarian reason’ and identifies it as a ‘general logic’ (2011, 244) governing the condition of precarity. It is a significant work, with important insights into the relationship between humanitarianism as both ‘a machine that elicits and administers testimonies’ (Guilhot , 90) and a system – a ‘moral economy’ as Fassin would have it – that is constitutive of contemporary forms of governmentality. Fassin's account of this governmental logic – if that is what it is – is ultimately a rather ahistorical one.…”

Section: Political Rationalities and Spaces Of Moral Reasonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic: humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

Reid-Henry

2013

Trans Inst British Geog

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Images of catastrophe and the suffering of others form an important part of the contemporary western imagination. Such images trace the geography of an uneven world at the same time as they assert the moral and political horizons of liberal forms of care towards it. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of political rationality, I revisit the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2011) developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state. In particular, I explore the processes that, during the course of the long 19th century, invoked both a market‐driven moral economy and a state‐driven political morality within humanitarian endeavour. The final part of the paper then applies these reflections on humanitarianism's past to its much‐debated present. I move away from what is sometimes a rather binary focus on humanitarianism as a problem of Western intervention in other spaces to draw attention instead to its strategic function as a ‘liberal diagnostic’: a recursive moral practice that helps constitute a liberal politics as much as it projects that politics onto other people and places. I sketch out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation.

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Section: Political Rationalities and Spaces Of Moral Reasonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic: humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

Reid-Henry

2013

Trans Inst British Geog

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“…As recent critiques of anthropologies of witnessing and testimony suggest (Dean 2017;Guilhot 2012), the political subjectivity of witnesses does not depend on outside interpellation -either in terms of whatever status the perpetrator bestows upon them, or on documenters' decisions about whether the testimony is relevant. The common omission of the event from analytical consideration obscures the complexity of theatricality and translation, and destabilizing binaries of sincerity and play, that typifies even the most disciplined bureaucratic encounters between victim/witness and bureaucratic actors, whether NGOs or state agents (cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

Grinberg¹

2021

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This article shows that human rights NGOs sustain their relevance not by producing testimony texts and witness subject positions, but rather through the social and performative dimensions of events in which witnessing is transformed into testimony. The interactional dimensions between witness and documenter are usually omitted from textual representations due to NGOs’ rigid bureaucratic writing, and are also largely overlooked by scholars. Witnessing and testimony are analysed as spatiotemporal sites and occasions of contending with violence and colonialism. Through the peculiar case of Palestinian witnesses and Israeli NGOs’ sustained commitment to witnessing and testimony, despite shared acknowledgement of the failures of human rights, the event is theorized as malleable enough to be reshaped by its participants. These additional interactional layers may undermine the very logics of human rights witnessing and testimony.

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“…[47] Due to the focus on the individual, as opposed to community conditions, social processes are translated into the clinical language of individual suffering. [48] Analytically, "humanitarian" action can be contrasted to "development", which aims for long-term lasting improvements. [49 p1] As such, suggestions to redirect and reorganize medical missions place emphasis on achieving more congruence with the local conditions and culture, and as supports for long-term improvements [e.g., 4].…”

Section: Theoretical Background: Medical Mission Deliverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Underlying premises in medical mission trips for Madiha (Kulina) Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon

Frenopoulo¹

2021

aporia

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This article proposes two premises that underlie biomedical health care delivery provided through medical missions to Madiha (Kulina) Indigenous Amazonian people living in forest villages. First, that health care is implemented through a set of detached transferable goods and services. Second, that health is a condition that requires the importation of knowledge and resources. The premises were induced through qualitative research on the Brazilian government’s medical missions that provide biomedical care to Madiha (Kulina) in the southwestern Amazon as part of the national health care system. Despite policy rhetoric, delivery practices disregard embedding health and health care in local infrastructure and cultural conditions. There is little or no collaboration with Indigenous healers, capacity building of the local (Indigenous) health care system, education of resident lay health monitors, or extensive and lasting infrastructural development. The article recommends reorientation of delivery to prioritize local health care infrastructure development.

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The Anthropologist as Witness: Humanitarianism between Ethnography and Critique

Cited by 26 publications

References 7 publications

Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic: humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic: humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

Underlying premises in medical mission trips for Madiha (Kulina) Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon

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