See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/321827677

Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Article  in  Medicine Anthropology Theory | An open-access journal in the anthropology of health illness and medicine · December 2017
DOI: 10.17157/mat.4.5.477

CITATIONS READS
6 1,166

2 authors, including:

Darryl Stellmach
University of Tasmania
24 PUBLICATIONS   170 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Darryl Stellmach on 15 January 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 ARTICLES

Anthropological approaches to
medical humanitarianism
Isabel Beshar and Darryl Stellmach

Abstract
Despite broadly shared interest in the welfare of ‘precarious lives’, medical anthropology and
medical humanitarianism are too often in tension. In this survey, we sketch a history of the
two disciplines, then track three major patterns through which anthropologists approach the
analysis of medical humanitarian efforts. Our three patterns frame medical anthropology as:
1) a critique of medical humanitarianism and its ties to colonialism and globalization, 2) a
translation of medical humanitarianism and its associated lexicon, 3) and a reform of medical
humanitarianism from the inside out. In highlighting the individual strengths of these three
approaches, we argue for the value of medical anthropology – as both a mindset and a
method – in health and humanitarian emergencies.

Keywords
medical anthropology, medical humanitarianism, global health, applied anthropology,
suffering slot

Medicine Anthropology Theory 4, no. 5: 1–22; https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.4.5.477

© Isabel Beshar and Darryl Stellmach, 2017. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
2 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Introduction
What possible form and effect does an anthropological presence have on medical
humanitarian crises?1 International medical actors, such as the World Health Organization
(WHO) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), have recognized a role for anthropologists in
navigating responses to health emergencies, but this role has yet to be fully defined
(Abramowitz et al. 2015, 330; Brown et al. 2015, 1). This is despite broadly shared concerns
for engagement with human suffering and the pain of the human condition (Redfield 2013,
5–6; Ticktin 2014, 274–77), which can be characterized as a convergence of professional
sentiments.

Anthropology and medical humanitarianism are both distinguished by internal heterogeneity,

making for sometimes-awkward cross-disciplinary encounters; one can never quite be sure
whether the other will share or reject one’s own perspectives. The literature on the
‘anthropological approach’ to medical humanitarian crises is expansive and well theorized,
yet for this reason it lacks a common, accessible narrative to pull together a diverse body of
work. Such heterogeneity has been problematic for related fields as well. Historians Davey
and Scriven (2015, 113), for example, state that ‘[w]riting on humanitarian history is a
booming occupation’ characterized by a ‘depth, innovation and complexity’ that refuses to
cleave to ready patterns or overviews. While the diverse nature of humanitarianism and its
scholarship is not easy to encompass with generalities, certain patterns emerge.

In an attempt to summarize anthropological approaches within and in relation to medical

humanitarian agencies, this article asks two related questions: how have anthropologists

1 Photographer’s note (image included in online version): ‘Three years after the beginning of the
conflict, Leer and Mayendit counties are greatly affected by the ongoing violence and the
longstanding clashes between governmental and opposition forces. Civilians are on the first line of
the conflict and the ongoing violence has a very clear impact on the ability for the population to
access basic and secondary medical care and other basic services. The population has been locally
displaced multiple times; and many people had fled the area completely. In July, following clashes in
Leer County, the population again had to flee and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had to evacuate
international teams from both Leer and Thonyor. In September MSF set up a decentralised basic
healthcare programme to continue to reach the population and provide them with primary healthcare
in their villages. Through a network of community health workers, community health promoters, and
women health promoters, who live as part of the affected population, MSF teams have been able to
continue to provide healthcare. These community health workers are trained in treating the most
common morbidities, such as respiratory tract infections, malaria, water-borne diseases, etc. They
stay with the community and are able to move with the communities if the population needs to
move, thus continuing to provide healthcare. MSF resupplies them with medical supplies and
provides ongoing supervision and training through supporting international teams.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 3

engaged with institutions and action in the context of medical humanitarianism, and how
might such engagement look in the future? To develop our analysis, we undertook a survey
of relevant materials in medical anthropology. Building on a recent review by Ticktin (2014),
which surveys the growing field of the anthropology of humanitarianism, and the
conclusions in Fassin’s (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, we evaluated
works drawing from both anthropological and medical humanitarian sources, including but
by no means limited to Anthropological Theory, Annual Review of Anthropology, Medical
Anthropology Quarterly, Somatosphere, Disasters, Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, Violence,
and Politics and Humanitarian Action. In doing so, we applied a working definition of ‘medical
humanitarianism’ as proposed by Abramowitz and Panter-Brick (2015, 1) in their recent
volume, Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice: ‘the field of biomedical, public
health, and epidemiologic initiatives undertaken to save lives and alleviate suffering in the
conditions of crises born of conflict, neglect or disaster’. To this definition we added that
medical humanitarianism is often a self-attributed label, a personal designation and category
of action that responders may invoke, in part, as a moral appeal. In our understanding,
humanitarianism places the human, and suffering as a human universal, as core concerns
(Fassin 2012, 9; Redfield 2013, 39–42; Ticktin 2014, 273). This puts medical
humanitarianism in sharp contrast to other forms of international health intervention that
may seek, for example, to maximize the productive capacity of a population or buttress a
health system against pathogenic threat (Lakoff 2010, 66; Elbe 2011, 849).

This does not prevent a diverse array of actors from invoking humanitarian rhetoric – in
other words, moral concern for human suffering – to justify actions that have motives quite
distinct from saving life and reducing suffering. Thus, as others have noted, the 2003 military
intervention in Iraq was characterized, in part, as a humanitarian campaign (Fassin 2012,
189–231; Gilman 2012, 173–74). This highlights overlaps in goals and means between
medical humanitarianism and the arenas of geopolitics, global economics, global health,
disaster management, and international development. Yet, because of the preeminent
emphasis on human suffering, humanitarian responses to emergencies are not wholly
convergent with other forms of response to health crises, and may differ with regards to
timescales, moral stakes, and media visibility (Lakoff 2010, 66–70, 74–75). (For these
reasons, our literature search was confined to ‘medical humanitarianism’ and excluded
material on global health, disaster management, and international development, except where
it used ‘humanitarianism’ as a keyword).

As a moral and political undertaking, humanitarianism recognizes the sanctity and dignity of
human life, and the universality of both basic needs and suffering. Emerging in parallel with
the rise of industrial capitalism, humanitarian action is the organized, collective practice of
compassion. As a concept it began to take shape in the mid-eighteenth century but would
come into its own in the nineteenth century (Barnett 2011, 49–50). In the rapid social and
4 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

technological transformation of industrializing Europe, the word came to be associated with

a variety of compassionate societies and committees for the relief of human suffering
(Barnett 2011, 50–60). During these early decades, the International Committee of the Red
Cross (founded 1863) provided medical care and supplies to battlefield wounded (Barnett
2011, 76–81). For most of the nineteenth century the humanitarian designation was
simultaneously applied to issues of prison reform, slavery, and employment conditions; it
wasn’t until the Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1929, and 1949 that a humanitarian
‘sensibility’ would be codified internationally and formally protected (Haskell 1985, 339).
International humanitarian law attempted to regulate the conduct of war and provided a
protected space – if imperfectly realized in practice – for civilian actors to assist those
directly affected by conflict. In these spaces of exception, humanitarian actors were
attributed political neutrality and immunity from military aggression (Abramowitz and
Panter-Brick 2015, 9–10; Gordon 2015, 187–88).

Humanitarianism in its presently recognized form broadly means relief in times of crisis,
particularly as prosecuted through transnational organizations and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) in particular. For better or worse, medical humanitarianism views
human crisis through the clinical gaze, framing human suffering as pathology amenable to
medical intervention (Scott-Smith 2014, 23–25) and directly imprinted on body and psyche
(Fassin 2000, 2005, 372; Ticktin 2011, 254). This has led to an anthropological critique of a
tendency towards medicalization, and thus subordination, of lived experiences in the name
of biomedicine, a politically fraught expression of compassion (Fassin 2012, 99–101).

There has historically been a breadth of anthropological literature on humanitarian action. In

addition to large projects by professional historians (Barnett 2011; Davey and Scriven 2015;
see also ODI 2015) and practitioners (Kent 1987; Terry 2002; Magone et al. 2011),
anthropologists have written on the origins (both historical and ideational) of medical
humanitarian action (de Waal 1997, 65–85; Fassin 2012, 1–17; Redfield 2013, 35–66; Ticktin
2014, 274–76). There is much work on the anthropological response to issues of famine,
food security, and communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS, to name a few (see Oliver-Smith
1996, as well as Henry 2005, for comprehensive reviews). In the last decade, however, there
has been a rise in the literature focused on the anthropological position, or approach, to the
act and rhetoric of intervention itself. It is not what anthropology investigates in the
humanitarian sphere but how. Ticktin (2014, 274, 281–82), for example, has broadly framed
anthropologists as allies of humanitarian ambitions, critics of unintended consequences, and
analysts of an amorphous social phenomenon; Abramowitz, Marten, and Panter-Brick (2015,
3–4) have gone even further, undertaking a poll to assess aggregate views of the perspectives
of anthropologists working in medical humanitarian contexts. Both studies argue that
anthropologists must actively engage individual humanitarian practitioners, agencies, and
issues, regardless of whichever conceptual stance they adopt.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 5

Our survey reveals three major strands of discourse on the intersection of anthropology and
humanitarian action, which we term ‘critique’, ‘translation’, and ‘reform’. We argue medical
anthropology has worked to critique humanitarian action, particularly how the field has
become tied to capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. We suggest this approach has
sometimes proved isolating, and we examine a second stream of anthropological work that
works to translate and reframe medical humanitarian lexicons and ideologies. We finish by
describing a third, emerging body of anthropological work that seeks to reform medical
humanitarianism from inside out.

These categories are not exhaustive, nor are they discrete: as the survey reveals, they may
intersect, cross-pollinate, and flow into one another depending on context and time. In that
sense, our analysis offers a spectrum, rather than strict divisions. Our hope is that this
discussion challenges a view that oftentimes seems to pit humanitarian practitioners and
academic anthropologists against each other (Minn 2007; Ravelo 2015). Indeed, in observing
exchanges between these streams, we believe that whatever distinctions remaining between
the two are further blurred.

The maturing of medical humanitarianism and medical

anthropology
Tracing intersections and approaches of medical anthropology to humanitarianism requires
knowledge of their complex histories, and how these have given rise to present-day
institutional structures and politics. As the above histories reveal, medical humanitarianism,
as contemporarily defined, had a violent birth, emerging in the nineteenth century out of
military combat, disaster, and war to become an important social force of considerable size
and scope (Bass 2008, 11–29). Today, the largest humanitarian agencies have annual
operating budgets in the billions; for example, Save the Children’s budget in 2015 was more
than US$2 billion (Save the Children 2016). Such agencies frequently act as entrenched
conglomerates (European Commission 2015, 1). They are fundamental to intra- and inter-
country management not only of wars and disasters but also of diverse international crises
that emerge, seemingly unanticipated, only to be handled with patterned regularity and
predictable rhetoric (Calhoun 2004, 377–80). Indeed, the actions of self-declared medical
humanitarian agencies cross boundaries of global health, human rights, international
development, and political peacekeeping. Naturally, no single agency acts in all these sectors.
The mix of activities demonstrates the heterogeneous and fundamentally contested nature of
the humanitarian mantle; a wide variety of actors may claim humanitarian motives but
undertake action in fundamentally different spheres.
6 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

In pace with this far-reaching growth, the field has become professionalized, developing
frameworks to standardize humanitarian practice, support institution building, and supply
scholarship and instruction. In the late 1980s, with the support of the European
Commission for LifeLong Learning, European Union member states launched initiatives
concerned with the quality and accountability of humanitarian work and established new
postgraduate degrees and training in international humanitarian action (Brun and Attanapola
2014, 1; Walker et al. 2010, 2223–25). Initiatives like the Code of Conduct for NGOs and
the Humanitarian Accountability Project attempted to standardize and professionalize
humanitarian work (Walker 2005, 323–27). Yet, these developments remain entrenched in a
Euro-American schema. According to Abramowitz and Panter-Brick (2015, 7), the
professionalization of the medical humanitarian impulse has become a ‘substantial stand-
alone industry’ distinct from volunteerism yet still embedded in a liberal ethic of ‘giving back’
and ‘doing good’. What remains to be seen is how this impulse survives its own explosive
growth, given concerns that a shallow emphasis on ‘doing something’ may potentially lead to
substandard delivery of care (Abramowitz and Panter-Brick 2015, 7). In the words of
Dijkzeul and Wakenge (2010, 1141), the swell in the ‘role and number of humanitarian
actors’ demands ‘scholarly attention’.

In conjunction with internal challenges to coherence that result from rapid growth, medical
humanitarian action also faces external threats. Perhaps most pressing for practitioners is a
perceived diminution of respect and recognition for the broad medical and humanitarian
mission. While humanitarian ‘spaces of exception’ have been extensively theorized and often
attributed with social and moral force (see, among others, Agier and Bouchet-Saulnier 2004,
303–04; Redfield 2005, 340–44; Fassin 2012, 151–54, 181–99), such spaces, when they exist
at all, are difficult to establish and maintain in practice (Allié 2011, 1–5). Because while
attacks against humanitarian and medical personnel in wartime are not new – humanitarian
and medical impartiality have never guaranteed immunity despite the dictates of the Geneva
Conventions, and the list of targeted attacks against health care facilities in the past century is
long – recent events seem to indicate that humanitarian and health care activities are
increasingly under threat as targets of war. From 2011 and onward, there has been a sharp
jump in both the frequency and flagrancy of deliberate attacks against medical humanitarian
facilities (Baker and Brown 2015, 4–7; WHO 2016, 4–5, 7). At the present moment, long-
standing international norms, both of medical and humanitarian neutrality and the threat of
international opprobrium, appear to have lost sway over many state and nonstate armed
actors.

The development of medical anthropology tracks a parallel timeline to medical

humanitarianism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, studies of medicine by
anthropologists were typically enveloped within broader studies of cultural and social
traditions, at times confining medical anthropology to the study of the ways that the ‘other’
Medicine Anthropology Theory 7

dealt with issues of sickness and health (Inhorn and Wentzell 2012, 2). But in the latter half
of the twentieth century, medical anthropology carved its own niche. Medicine’s intersection
with issues of race, gender, and inequality, as well as the increased involvement of
anthropologists in international health work and clinical settings in the name of soft
diplomacy during the Cold War, energized the discipline (Inhorn and Wentzell 2012, 6–7).
Anthropologists Strathern and Stewart (1999, 3) track what they call ‘a circular migration’ –
‘from the jungle to the city, and back again’ – such that medical anthropology became an
investigation not only of other cultures and healing practices but also of their own. The
development of critical medical anthropology in the 1990s, with its social constructionist
understanding of disease and its political economy understanding of power, further
popularized the discipline’s approach. However, like medical humanitarianism, the
effectiveness of the method posed its own threat: to date, anthropology has been criticized
for taking ‘healthy self-consciousness too far, inadvertently casting itself as a discipline
suspicious of collaboration and cross-industry reciprocity’ (Harragin 2012, 4).

Be that as it may, medical anthropology and humanitarianism continue to intersect. Both

emerged from postcolonial concerns in a moment when neoliberalism, human rights, and
democratic individualism were ascendant values. Both have thrived in a postnational, post-
Cold War era characterized by the privileging of individual enterprise and cultural
reductionism of the West. And both have embraced and continue to simultaneously embrace
and criticize aspects of these values. Working in similar physical and discursive spaces,
medical humanitarianism and anthropology have had interests, goals, and contexts that have
at times met at points of complementarity and others at points of tension. Ultimately, it is
this historical, material, and ideational relationship that enables, but also complicates, a
survey of the literature of the two disciplines.

Anthropology as critique
This bisecting history has helped produce three categories of disciplinary intersection. The
dominant form of anthropological discourse on medical humanitarianism at present is that
of critique. This approach calls on anthropologists to evaluate, interpret, and analyze NGOs
and humanitarian actors as they would any other institution of power and influence. Rather
than defer to appeals regarding the sanctity of human life and the moral imperative to aid
people in distress (which leads to claims of humanitarian ‘exceptionalism’), this work
approaches these claims face on, problematizing the impact of morally motivated
interventionism.
8 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Numerous case studies track humanitarian missteps, in both practical and ideological
arenas.2 Ticktin (2014, 277–81) provides a thorough summary of work in this vein.
Anthropologists have critiqued medical humanitarian projects for their unintended
consequences, low standards of care, limited local input, weak oversight, and more (see, for
example, Harrell-Bond 1986; Escobar 1995; Malkki 1995, 1996; de Waal 1997; Fisher 1997;
Macrae 2002; Harragin 2012; Redfield 2013). Anthropologists have also criticized medical
humanitarianism in broader swathes, particularly when it is conceptualized as a project with
neoliberal, capitalist impulses. In part informed by work on the anthropology of
development, which was influenced by Ferguson’s (1990) work on aid in Lesotho,
humanitarian action began to be reasoned ‘in terms of an organized system of power and
practice which has formed part of the colonial and neo-colonial domination of poor
countries by the West’ (Lewis 2005, 3).

Early examples of this framework are perhaps best represented by Pandolfi’s (2000, 2003)
work analyzing medical humanitarian agencies in postwar and postcommunist Albania and
Kosovo. In her evaluation of the ‘right to interfere’ in the name of ‘emergency’, she
describes the disappearing boundaries between medical and military intervention, at times
referring to it as a mobile ‘humanitarian-military apparatus’ (Pandolfi 2003, 496–97). She
characterizes humanitarianism by its state-like functions, identifying a new form of
sovereignty at the intersection of biopolitics and ‘bare life’, ultimately resulting in the
reduction of subjective individuality and the influx of diagnostic and numerical categories
based on humanitarian management (Pandolfi 2003, 499).3

In subsequent years anthropologists published widely read critical studies: Redfield’s (2005,
2013) retrospective ethnographies of MSF, Fassin’s (2012, 1–2) critique of the humanitarian
epistemology of ‘moral sentiments’ with regards to the status of immigrants in France, and
Nguyen’s (2010) commentary against the unintentional making of new markets and
economies among both HIV/AIDS patients and their ART therapies on the part of the

2 This is not to say that humanitarian actors and agencies themselves have not engaged in a tradition of
self-critique. According to Davey and Scriven (2015, 115), medical humanitarianism ‘cannot be
accused of an unwillingness to reflect on its performance, be it through formal processes of research
and evaluation or the collect decompression of a bar-side lament’. Examples can be found in the
work of Vaux (2001), Terry (2002), and recent multilateral projects, including the United Nations
Intellectual History Project and Global History of Humanitarian Action Project (Ralph Bunche
Institute for International Studies 2011; ODI 2015).
3 Although some authors contest this assertion – such as Dunn (2012, 1–2), who argues that the reach
and nefarious nature of humanitarian ventures are dangerously overstated – the notion of
humanitarianism as subversion through compassion has had influential effect.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 9

humanitarian agency. In these contexts, the logics of what Fassin (2012) calls ‘humanitarian
reason’ expose new vulnerabilities, mark new terrains, and gain control over new bodies.

More recently, this work has found itself intertwined with the field and politics of global
health. In turn, anthropologists have articulated what they see as the ‘global health machine’
(Gaines 2011, 87) and an emerging ‘NGO industrial complex’ (Adams 2013, 76–79). Such
machinery has been well-documented in a wide variety of phenomena, such as medical
volunteerism, which Berry (2014, 347) has criticized for focusing more on the student
résumé than the provision of medical care; pharmaceutical investment, which Parker and
Allen (2014) suggest assumes tyranny over the monitoring and evaluation processes required
of most humanitarian projects; the application of the ‘economic gaze’ to matters of health,
wherein ‘the body is constructed as having little to no value outside of its role in the global
economy’ (Sridhar 2011, 1909); and the default to a ‘one-size-fits-all model’ and erasure of
local specificities in the ‘scale-up’ of global health interventions (Adams et al. 2014, 182–83).

This ‘anthropology as critique’ approach has deep historical roots in anthropology’s

disciplinary preoccupations, as seen in the overwhelming amount of literature we found
dedicated to this thread of discourse. It is well established that anthropological knowledge
contributed to European colonial dominance, as is the fact that European power enabled
anthropological practice, thoroughly influencing its methods, discourses, and central
concerns (Asad 1991, 315). It is this problematic historical relationship with state power that
makes many anthropologists justly skeptical of large-scale institutional influence, particularly
when deployed among disenfranchised people. Fassin and Pandolfi (2010, 16, 20–22) imply
that social scientists should resist being used as accomplices in larger humanitarian projects
or agendas, especially when any form of intervention is anthropologically understood as a
political play or implicit military action. Critical neutrality is both a role and a method in
anthropology. But this stance can be taken too far: circumspection can become
overwrought; fear of being used can become fear of being useful. This dynamic – perhaps
best reflected in Kleinman’s (1982, 112) mock dilemma of an anthropologist constantly
being asked ‘Whose interest does this professional stranger support?’ – is bound up in the
critique approach to medical humanitarianism.

Anthropology as translation
Anthropology’s role as external commentator can and has been perceived as isolationist and
counterproductive (Abramowitz and Panter-Brick 2015, 8; Ticktin 2014, 283; Tol et al. 2012,
33; Harragin 2012, 3–5). Some anthropologists have rejected this viewpoint on the premise
that it hampers collaboration and characterizes anthropologists as armchair spectators,
trapping them in a ‘cul-de-sac of critique’ (Ticktin 2014, 283). According to Abramowitz and
Panter-Brick (2015, 8), scholarly critiques of medical humanitarian reason are necessary but
10 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

sometimes ‘fail to convey the real-time exigencies of humanitarian experience and the range
of internal debates within humanitarian networks’. Tol and colleagues (2012, 33) suggest that
these criticisms appear to function as fodder for ‘academic debates without relevance for
practice’.

A second stream of anthropological work has emerged out of this criticism. We argue that
anthropology as translation favors an approach that investigates and privileges cross-
disciplinary discussion between anthropological and humanitarian actors. With ‘translation’,
we allude to Callon (1986) and Latour (1986), who conceptualize translation as a process
through which meanings, claims, and contexts come to occupy new spaces and change
foundational ground. Translation is not only interpretation from one language or discipline
to another; rather, it is a process by which languages and disciplines are made to cohere, and
in the process create new hybrids. In particular, we favor Latour’s (1986, 268) definition, in
which translation results in a continuously infinite process of producing ‘something
completely different’. In this definition, anthropological work on medical humanitarianism is
not about interpreting the field for lay understanding but about producing a new discourse
within which medical humanitarianism can be imagined in critical, creative, and diverse ways.

For example, Marcus (2010) argues that anthropology should engage all actors working in a
medical crisis. In a nod to Scheper-Hughes’s (1995, 414–15) famous rejection of
‘anthropologists as spectators’, Marcus (2012, 362) calls on anthropologists to ‘modestly
witness’ the conditions they are studying. For Marcus and Scheper-Hughes, anthropologists
are not reporters but actors and negotiators.4 This work places heavy emphasis on issues of
communication and articulation. According to this literature, ‘anthropology as translation’
helps position human suffering in a way that avoids the norms of communication and
engagement that ‘tend to make pain into abstraction’ (Marcus 2010, 371). This is not to
evoke what has sometimes been termed and critiqued as the ‘suffering slot’: which, Robbins
argues, situates vulnerability as a ‘privileged object of attention’ (2013, 450) with ‘a
universalistic quality’ (ibid., 454) that anthropologists can categorize neatly to presume wider

4 Marcus’s call for anthropologists to ‘witness’ has clear parallels to the humanitarian commitments of
neutrality or témoignage (translated as ‘bearing witness’), as is typically invoked by MSF (2016; see also
Redfield 2005 on MSF as ‘a less modest witness’). This is particularly the case because témoignage does
not just imply watchful observation, but also the obligation and responsibility to speak on behalf of
those in danger. In that sense, humanitarian actors, like anthropologists, are also negotiators:
operating in a simultaneous cycle of creating – and then sacrificing – ‘neutral’ humanitarian spaces
(Barnett 2011, 224). This interpretation of témoignage turns MSF’s own moniker (‘without borders’) on
its head, positioning humanitarian actors precisely at the borders – between observation and action,
outside and inside – not ‘without’ them.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 11

understanding.5 Rather, ‘anthropology as translation’ forces anthropologists to step out of

imagined molds, enabling new forms that bypass norms or universality and instead celebrate
distinctions and locality. In the words of Fassin (2012, 245), this work means ‘straddl[ing] the
line between outside and inside . . . to be located “at the frontiers”’.

Translation work has, in part, been operationalized to reframe the narratives or linguistic and
conceptual tropes that humanitarian actors may use. For instance, Redfield (2013, 14, 29–34)
evaluates shaky underpinnings of the ‘states of emergency’ that legitimize a ‘crisis’; Harragin
(2012, 3) interrogates the insufficiency of ‘short-term, humanitarian contracts’ in light of
more long-term, existing infrastructural realities; and Feldman and Ticktin (2010, 1–5)
interpret the practical implications of the humanitarian premise of ‘humanity’. ‘Sovereignty’
as a status of independent statehood or actorhood has been similarly unpacked, perhaps
most notably by Pandolfi’s (2000) application of Appadurai's (2003) ‘mobile sovereignty’ but
also more recently by Abramowitz’s (2015) ethnography of MSF’s withdrawal in Liberia,
Good and colleagues’ (2015) work on post-tsunami interventions in Indonesia, and
Gordon’s (2015) analysis of the complexities and contradictions of medical medicine
inherent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa may be the most recent foregrounding of
anthropology as translation. Ebola’s Ecologies, an interdisciplinary analysis edited by
anthropologists Lakoff, Collier, and Kelty (2015), and the introductory chapter of Packard’s
(2016) A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples both
examine how the Ebola outbreak forged new logics, practices, and rhetorics among its many
and diverse actors. In Ebola Ecologies, the Ebola outbreak is seen as a product of failed
‘administrative imagination’ that neither categorized nor conceptualized of Ebola adequately;
to Packard (2016, 2), the global North’s understanding of Ebola ‘represented examples of
cultural modeling’ that ‘deflected attention from other, more fundamental causes of the
event’. But both works acknowledge that the epidemic fostered new formulations in health
systems management, pharmaceutical research, and multilateral engagement. Describing the
process of Ebola vaccine trials instituted during and after the crisis, Nading (2015)
comments on the ‘contingent, speculative, “chimeric” nature of contemporary global health’;
while commenting on the Ebola ‘watchdog’ groups formed in communities where the
infection had spread, Packard (2016, 331) discusses the local and foreign organizing that
came together to privilege ‘capacities for self-help’ and ultimately slow the disease’s progress.

5 Trouillot ([1991] 2003, 18) was the first to coin the term ‘slot’ in reference to anthropological tropes,
faulting anthropology for choosing as its disciplinary penchant ‘the savage, the primitive . . . the
other’, arguing that the discipline’s survival depended on breaking past this limited niche and narrow
object of inquiry.
12 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Here, it is new imaginations, even some failed ones, that deserve anthropological
investigation. As Biruk (2014, 7–8) writes, ‘anthropology [can] take objects in, reframe them,
and re-generate knowledge in a new way that excavates the structures and logics that make
them’.

Anthropology as reform
A final stream of anthropological thought seeks not to criticize medical humanitarianism or
translate its ideologies but instead to reform the discipline itself. As humanitarian agencies
grow in size and complexity and engage with new actors and professionals, anthropologists
have pushed for research that acts with, but not within, archetypical frameworks of
humanitarian response. While the smallest of the three at present, this discourse promises to
grow in the near future, as more anthropologists engage directly and more robustly with
humanitarian agencies.

This third body of work demands anthropologists assume a more transformative role; in the
words of Harragin (2004, 325), an anthropologist working in South Sudan, ‘It is time it
[anthropology] realized that [excessive] introspection risks failing to engage with global
forces that will sweep on with or without anthropological insights’. Ultimately, this literature
pushes not for criticism nor for hybrid productions but for a ‘seat at the table’ for
anthropologists engaging in humanitarian work (Abramowitz et al. 2015, 330). The focus on
participation is key here. As Feierman and colleagues (2010, 123) assert in a piece on medical
humanitarian programs, ‘Anthropologists . . . have the potential to play an important role in
both mediating and studying flows of knowledge’. Abramowitz (2014) argues, in this same
vein, that ‘many more anthropologists of West Africa are being invited to write commentaries
on the current outbreak. But this does not go far enough’ (emphasis in original). This
argument for practice is part of a broader demand for engaged anthropology (Fassin 2012;
Eriksen 2006).

Anthropology as reform has the potential to establish a new discursive and professional
space, one in which anthropology is not supplementary but a partner in its own right. Here,
the focus is on how anthropology might help produce new norms or paradigms within and
for humanitarian action. Adding nuance to Abramowitz’s ‘seat at the table’ offers a
productive starting point: anthropology as reform is not a particular kind of temporal or
professional role (in other words, follow-up commentary vs. contemporaneous original
research) but rather a way of seeing that can alter how humanitarian crises are perceived and
addressed. By virtue of method, anthropology works against the essentialism and
reductionism that can be pernicious in humanitarian discourse, wherein people can be
reduced to biology or statistics. The work of anthropology makes humans coherent within
simultaneous contexts of individual, social, and ecological worlds; it unites empirical
Medicine Anthropology Theory 13

experience, historical knowledge, and moral subjectivity, and holds these in productive
tension (Latour 2014, 13–14). When practiced well, anthropology is an ‘evidence-based field
science’ that is simultaneously relational, reflexive, and inclusive (Nyamnjoh 2015, 59–60).
An anthropological lens on crisis can change the perception of causation, needs, and wants.
By extension, this can change the nature of the humanitarian encounter itself.

While some examples of anthropology as reform may already be emerging in medical

humanitarian organizations (see, for example, the recent ethnographies of Stellmach 2016
and Véran et al. 2017), this phenomenon is perhaps most evident in medical anthropological
work on global health. Because anthropologies of global health exhibit considerable
disciplinary and practical overlap with medical humanitarianism, a quick summary may
indicate how an anthropology of medical humanitarianism can be an anthropology of
reform.6

While the exact meaning of ‘global health’ is contested (Koplan et al. 2009; Lakoff 2010;
Fassin 2012; Garrett 2013), we use the definition articulated recently by geographer Herrick
(2016, 674): global health ‘involves the transfer of knowledge and resources [and] a variety of
efforts to act on and reduce the global burden of disease, and a particular concern for and
financial investment in the infectious disease triumvirate of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and
tuberculosis’. Of course, as Herrick (2016, 674) herself acknowledges, this simple definition
is complicated by the diverse and complicated assemblage of disciplines, actors, initiatives,
and agendas working in the global health sphere.

At present, writings on global health seem to be the most conducive to an anthropology of

reform. Abramowitz (2014) has taken perhaps the most practical approach, writing of ten
tangible actions that anthropology can undertake in public health emergencies, including
detecting and identifying latent local capabilities, generating innovative ways of
communicating among new and diverse actors, and pushing for funding from government
bodies. Emphasized here are the tools and avenues through which anthropology provokes a
departure from normalcy. Others (Guyer et al. 2010; Erikson 2012; Sangaramoorthy 2012)
recognize the ways that anthropology can participate in traditional approaches to monitoring
and evaluation in order to ‘provide various levels of accountability for activities or policies’
(WHO 2004, 4). According to Biruk (2014, 348), institutionally necessary data, while
expected to be ‘clean, accurate, precise’, and a fixed representation of a problem at hand, is

6 Anthropologies of global health are one example among many. For example, applied anthropologists
and anthropologists of development have also contributed key insights into how anthropologists can
work within global institutions. See Mosse 2013.
14 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

in fact complex, messy, and uncertain – full of a kind of ‘noise’ that Abramowitz (2014)
argues is uniquely suited for anthropological analysis.

Perhaps most accessible to the reader is the approach taken by Adams and colleagues (2014,
179–80), who borrow from the ‘slow food movement’ to emphasize the need for ‘slow
research’ in global health. Like the organic slow food movement, Adams and colleagues
argue for a combination of long-term anthropological research on local particularities with
the ‘fast’ qualities of emergency relief and information acquisition characteristic of
contemporary global health. They urge caution against ‘anticipatory modes of engagement’ –
the quickening of assumptions and conclusions – calling instead for a ‘pause before eating’
and ‘a moment to contemplate’ what is before or ahead (Adams et al. 2014, 187–88). The
authors conclude: ‘Slow research is not necessarily opposed to “fast” research, but it is
opposed to what might be identified as a new normal. Slow research is a response, addition,
and possible alternative to the newest normative trends’ (Adams et al. 2014, 180). This also
suggests how anthropologists might react to the speed and ethical complexity of medical
humanitarian crises: not to lose one’s method in the rush of emergency, but rather to double
down on method, adapting the technique to the context (Stellmach 2016). Resident in
institutions that simultaneously comfort and oppress (as so many institutions of modernity
do), anthropologists’ awareness of power dynamics, both institutional and interpersonal, can
help us negotiate a path between co-option and refusal to participate for fear of co-option.

It is worth reiterating that anthropology as reform is not about fitting anthropology into an
existing global health or humanitarian apparatus. As anthropologist and sociologist Pigg
(2013, 127) argues, ‘in the face of intensifying demands on ethnographers to subsume their
insights to ever narrower, utilitarian goals . . . it is important to recognize . . . the unique
character of ethnographic praxis’. In other words, anthropology as reform pushes for new
sources of evidence that are not constrained by standardized regulations and historical form.
Ultimately, as Pigg (2013, 133) argues, the hope is to position anthropology ‘in the very
midst of the making of global health as it – whatever “it” is – unfolds’.

Conclusion
In this survey, we have argued that three anthropological approaches – critique, translation,
and reform – have typically framed the intersection of anthropology and medical
humanitarian action. To do so, we detailed the overlapping values and histories of medical
anthropology and humanitarianism, highlighting how disciplinary origins feed into
contemporary norms of engagement. We have also examined the typologies of
anthropological participation, suggesting that ethnography can offer a unique framework by
which to understand health and medical issues in the context of humanitarianism.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 15

We do not wish to privilege or prioritize one approach over others, but instead to identify
and further extrapolate three axes upon which humanitarian action can be evaluated. Each
category has an appropriate time and place, and individual anthropologists may switch
between each of the three modes as circumstances merit. Medical humanitarianism will
continue to shift in direction and purpose, and whether by critique, translation, or reform,
anthropologists should take care to purposively entangle – and disentangle – these threads of
action. Only then will anthropological ways of knowing continue to grow in value.

About the authors

Isabel Beshar is a medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine. She received
her MPhil in medical anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a
2014 American Rhodes Scholar. She previously worked as a consultant at Global Health
Strategies, where she helped coordinate emergency response management of vector-borne
diseases and women’s health.

Darryl Stellmach divides time between academic and applied roles, as a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Sydney and as anthropology implementer for the London
office of the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). A former field manager for MSF,
Darryl assists with the integration of anthropologists and anthropological research
techniques into the agency's field teams. A Commonwealth doctoral scholar, Darryl's 2016
dissertation undertook an ethnography that followed MSF aid practitioners in South Sudan
as they responded to that country's emergent civil war and subsequent nutritional crisis. The
work is available at the Oxford research archives (www.ora.ox.ac.uk/).

References
Abramowitz, Sharon. 2014. ‘Ten Things That Anthropologists Can Do to Fight the West
African Ebola Epidemic’. Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, 26 September.
http://somatosphere.net/2014/09/ten-things-that-anthropologists-can-do-to-fight-
the-west-african-ebola-epidemic.html.
Abramowitz, Sharon. 2015. ‘What Happens When MSF Leaves? Humanitarian Departure and
Medical Sovereignty in Postconflict Liberia’. In Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of
Practice, edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, 137–54.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812291698-009.
Abramowitz, Sharon, Kevin L. Bardosh, Melissa Leach, Barry Hewlett, Mark Nichter, and Vinh-
Kim Nguyen. 2015. ‘Social Science Intelligence in the Global Ebola Response’. Lancet
385, no. 9965: 330. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(15)60119-2.
16 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Abramowitz, Sharon, Meredith Marten, and Catherine Panter-Brick. 2015b. ‘Medical

Humanitarianism: Anthropologists Speak Out on Policy and Practice’. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly 29, no. 1: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12139.
Abramowitz, Sharon, and Catherine Panter-Brick. 2015. ‘Bringing Life into Relief: Comparative
Ethnographies of Humanitarian Practice’. In Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of
Practice, edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, 1–20. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Adams, Vincanne. 2013. ‘Evidence-Based Global Public Health: Subjects, Profits, Erasures’. In
When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health, edited by Joao Biehl and Adriana
Petryna, 54–90. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Adams, Vincanne, Nancy J. Burke, and Ian Whitmarsh. 2014. ‘Slow Research: Thoughts for a
Movement in Global Health’. Medical Anthropology 33, no. 3: 179–97.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2013.858335.
Agier, Michel, and Françoise Bouchet-Saulnier. 2004. ‘Humanitarian Spaces: Spaces of
Exception’. In In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’: Violence, Politics, and Humanitarian Action, edited
by Fabrice Weissman, 297–313. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Allié, Marie-Pierre. 2011. ‘Introduction: Acting at Any Price?’ In Humanitarian Negotiations
Revealed: The MSF Experience, edited by Claire Magone, Michaël Neuman, and Fabrice
Weissman, 1–16. London: Hurst & Company.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. ‘Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational
Geography’. In The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, edited by Setha M.
Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, 337–49. Blackwell Readers in Anthropology.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Asad, Talal. 1991. ‘Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology
of Western Hegemony’. In Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic
Knowledge, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., 314–24. History of Anthropology 7.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Baker, Elsie, and Widney Brown. 2015. Doctors in the Crosshairs: Four Years of Attacks on Health
Care in Syria. New York: Physicians for Human Rights.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/doctors-in-the-crosshairs.pdf.
Barnett, Michael N. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Bass, Gary. 2008. Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Berry, Nicole S. 2014. ‘Did We Do Good? NGOs, Conflicts of Interest and the Evaluation of
Short-Term Medical Missions in Sololá, Guatemala’. Social Science & Medicine 120: 344–
51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.006.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 17

Biruk, Crystal. 2014. ‘Ebola and Emergency Anthropology: The View from the “Global Health
Slot”’. Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, 3 October.
http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/ebola-and-emergency-anthropology-the-view-from-
the-global-health-slot.html.
Brown, Hannah, Ann H. Kelly, Almudena Marí Sáez, Elisabeth Fichet-Calvet, Rashid
Ansumana, Jesse Bonwitt, N’Faly Magassouba, Foday Sahr, and Matthias Borchert.
2015. ‘Extending the “Social”: Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Viral
Haemorrhagic Fevers’. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diease 9, no. 4: e0003651.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003775.
Brun, Catherine, and Chamila Attanapola. 2014. Professionalisation of Humanitarian Work: The
Norwegian Case. European Universities on Professionalization on Humanitarian Action
(EUPRHA). http://hamap.eu/upload/2015/03/euprha-lcp-norway.pdf.
Calhoun, Craig. 2004. ‘A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of
Cosmopolitan Order’. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 41, no. 4:
373–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X.2004.tb00783.x.
Callon, Michel. 1986. ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the
Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’. Sociological Review 32, no. S1: 196–223.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00113.x.
Davey, Eleanor, and Kim Scriven. 2015. ‘Humanitarian Aid in the Archives: Introduction’.
Disasters 39, no. s2: s113–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12150.
de Waal, Alex. 1997. Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Dijkzeul, Dennis, and Claude Iguma Wakenge. 2010. ‘Doing Good, but Looking Bad? Local
Perceptions of Two Humanitarian Organisations in Eastern Democratic Republic of
the Congo’. Disasters 34, no. 4: 1139–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
7717.2010.01187.x.
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2012. The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia 3,
no. 1: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2012.0005.
Elbe, Stefan. 2011. ‘Pandemics on the Radar Screen: Health Security, Infectious Disease and the
Medicalisation of Insecurity’. Political Studies 59, no. 4: 848–66.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00921.x
Erikson, Susan. 2012. ‘Global Health Business: The Production and Performativity of Statistics
in Sierra Leone and Germany’. Medical Anthropology 31, no. 4: 367–84.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2011.621908.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
European Commission. 2015. ‘European Commission Press Release: Record EU Humanitarian
Budget Adopted for 2016’. News release, 16 December. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_IP-15-6336_en.htm.
18 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Fassin, Didier. 2000. ‘Entre politiques du vivant et politiques de la vie: Pour une anthropologie
de la santé’. Anthropologie et sociétés 24, no. 1: 95–116. https://doi.org/10.7202/015638ar.
Fassin, Didier. 2005. ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies
in France’. Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3: 362–87.
https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.3.362
Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Fassin, Didier, and Mariella Pandolfi. 2010. ‘Introduction: Military and Humanitarian
Government in the Age of Intervention’. In Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of
Military and Humanitarian Interventions, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, 9–
25. New York: Zone Books.
Feierman, Steven, Arthur Kleinman, Kathleen Stewart, Paul Farmer, and Veena Das. 2010.
‘Anthropology, Knowledge-Flows and Global Health’. Global Public Health 5, no. 2:
122–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441690903401338.
Feldman, Ilana, and Miriam Ticktin. 2010. ‘Introduction: Government and Humanity’. In In the
Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, edited by Ilana Feldman and Miriam
Ticktin, 1–26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power
in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fisher, William F. 1997. ‘Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices’. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 439–64. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.439.
Gaines, Atwood D. 2011. ‘Millennial Medical Anthropology: From There to Here and Beyond,
or the Problem of Global Health’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 35, no. 1: 83–89.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-010-9203-x.
Garrett, Laurie. 2013. Existential Challenges to Global Health. New York: Center on International
Cooperation, New York University.
http://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_1015_0.pdf
Gilman, Nils. 2012. ‘Preface: Militarism and Humanitarianism’. Humanity: An International Journal
of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, no. 2: 173–78.
https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2012.0009.
Good, Byron J., Jesse Hession Grayman, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. 2015.
‘Humanitarianism and “Mobile Sovereignty” in Strong State Settings: Reflections on
Medical Humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia’. In Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies
of Practice, edited by Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, 155–75.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gordon, Stuart. 2015. ‘The British Military Medical Services and Contested Humanitarianism’.
In Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice, edited by Sharon Abramowitz and
Catherine Panter-Brick, 176–90. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 19

Guyer, Jane I., Naveeda Khan, Juan Obarrio, Caroline Bledsoe, Julie Chu, Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, Keith Hart, et al. 2010. ‘Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier’.
Anthropological Theory 10, no. 1–2: 36–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610365388.
Harragin, Simon. 2004. ‘Relief and an Understanding of Local Knowledge: The Case of
Southern Sudan’. In Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael
Walton, 281–307. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Harragin, Simon. 2012. Methodology: Informing L2GP with Insights from Anthropology. Copenhagen:
Local to Global Protection. http://www.local2global.info/wp-
content/uploads/Methodolog_paper_final.pdf.
Harrell-Bond, Barbara E. 1986. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford: Oxford
University Press Oxford.
Haskell, Thomas L. 1985. ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1’.
The American Historical Review 90, no. 2: 339–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/90.2.339.
Henry, Doug. 2005. ‘Anthropological Contributions to the Study of Disasters’. In Disciplines,
Disasters and Emergency Management: The Convergence of Concepts, Issues and Trends from the
Research Literature, edited by David McEntire. Emittsburg, MD: Federal Emergency
Management Agency.
https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/aemrc/booksdownload/ddemtextbook/.
Herrick, Clare. 2016. ‘Global Health, Geographical Contingency, and Contingent Geographies’.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106, no. 3: 672–87.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1140017.
Inhorn, Marcia, and Emily Wentzell. 2012. ‘Introduction: Medical Anthropology at the
Intersections’. In Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms and Futures,
edited by Marcia Inhorn and Emily Wentzell, 1–22. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Kent, Randolph C. 1987. Anatomy of Disaster Relief: The International Network in Action. London:
Pinter Publishers.
Kleinman, Arthur. 1982. ‘The Teaching of Clinically Applied Medical Anthropology on a
Psychiatric Consultation-Liaison Service’. In Clinically Applied Anthropology: Anthropologists
in Health Science Settings, edited by Noel J. Chrisman and Thomas W. Maretzki, 83–115.
Culture, Illness and Healing series, vol. 5. Dordrecht: Springer.
Koplan, Jeffrey P., T. Christopher Bond, Michael H. Merson, K. Srinath Reddy, Mario Henry
Rodriguez, Nelson K. Sewankambo, and Judith N. Wasserheit. 2009. ‘Towards a
Common Definition of Global Health’. Lancet 373, no. 9679: 1993–95.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60332-9.
Lakoff, Andrew. 2010. ‘Two Regimes of Global Health’. Humanity: An International Journal of
Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1, no. 1: 59–79.
https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2010.0001.
Lakoff, Andrew, Stephen J. Collier, and Christopher Kelty. 2015. ‘Introduction: Ebola’s
Ecologies’. Limn, no. 5. http://limn.it/introduction-ebolas-ecologies.
20 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Latour, Bruno. 1986. ‘The Powers of Association’. Sociological Review 32, no. S1: 264–80.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00115.x.
Latour, Bruno. 2014. ‘Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of
What Is to Be Studied’. Distinguished Lecture, American Anthropological Association
Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 6 December. http://sector2337.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/06/Latour_Anthropocene.pdf.
Lewis, David. 2005. ‘Anthropology and Development: The Uneasy Relationship’. In A Handbook
of Economic Anthropology, edited by James G. Carrier, 472–86. Cheltenham, UK: Edward
Elgar.
Macrae, Joanna. 2002. ‘Analysis and Synthesis’. In The New Humanitarianisms: A Review of Trends in
Global Humanitarian Action, edited by Joanna Macrae, 5–18. London: Overseas
Development Institute. https://www.odi.org/resources/docs/293.pdf.
Magone, Claire, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman. 2011. Humanitarian Negotiations
Revealed: The MSF Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees
in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and
Dehistoricization’. Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3: 377–404.
https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050.
Marcus, George. 2010. ‘Experts, Reporters, Witnesses: The Making of Anthropologists in States
of Emergency’. In Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian
Intervention, edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, 357–77. New York: Zone
Books.
Médecins Sans Frontières. 2016. ‘About Us: We Speak Out’. Updated 31 October.
https://www.msf.org.uk/advocacy-and-temoignage.
Minn, Pierre. 2007. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Humanitarianism’. Journal of Humanitarian
Assistance, 6 August. https://sites.tufts.edu/jha/archives/51.
Mosse, David. 2013. ‘The Anthropology of International Development’. Annual Review of
Anthropology 42: 227–46. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155553.
Nading, Alex. 2015. ‘Ebola, Chimeras, and Unexpected Speculation’. Limn, no. 5.
http://limn.it/ebola-chimeras-and-unexpected-speculation/.
Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. 2010. The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of
AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2015. ‘Beyond an Evangelising Public Anthropology: Science, Theory and
Commitment’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33, no. 1: 48–63.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2015.1021214.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony. 1996. ‘Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters’. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 303–28. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.303.
Medicine Anthropology Theory 21

Overseas Development Institute (ODI). 2015. ‘Global History of Modern Humanitarian

Action’. ODI: Shaping Policy for Development. https://www.odi.org/projects/2547-global-
history-modern-humanitarian-action.
Packard, Randall M. 2016. A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pandolfi, Mariella. 2003. ‘Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and the Humanitarian
Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo’. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies
10, no. 1: 369–81. http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijgls/vol10/iss1/13.
Parker, Melissa, and Tim Allen. 2014. ‘De-Politicizing Parasites: Reflections on Attempts to
Control the Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases’. Medical Anthropology 33, no. 3:
223–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2013.831414.
Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 2013. ‘On Sitting and Doing: Ethnography as Action in Global Health’. Social
Science & Medicine 99: 127–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.07.018.
Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. 2011. ‘United Nations Intellectual History
Project’. http://www.unhistory.org/.
Ravelo, Jenny Lei. 2015. ‘Post-Ebola, What Work Awaits Anthropologists?’ Devex: Do Good. Do
It Well, 15 September. https://www.devex.com/news/post-ebola-what-work-awaits-
anthropologists-86876.
Redfield, Peter. 2005. ‘Doctors, Borders and Life in Crisis’. Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3: 328–
61. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.3.328.
Redfield, Peter. 2013. Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2013. ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3: 447–62.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12044.
Sangaramoorthy, Thurka. 2012. ‘Treating the Numbers: HIV/AIDS Surveillance, Subjectivity,
and Risk’. Medical Anthropology 31, no. 4: 292–309.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2011.622322.
Save the Children International. 2016. ‘Our Finances and Annual Review’. Save the Children
International. https://www.savethechildren.net/about-us/our-finances.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. ‘The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant
Anthropology’. Current Anthropology 36, no. 3: 409–40. https://doi.org/10.1086/204378.
Scott-Smith, T. 2014. ‘Control and Biopower in Contemporary Humanitarian Aid: The Case of
Supplementary Feeding’. Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 1: 21–37.
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu018.
Sridhar, Devi. 2011. ‘Health Policy: From the Clinical to the Economic Gaze’. The Lancet 378,
no. 9807: 1909. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61829-1.
Stellmach, Darryl. 2016. ‘Coordination in Crisis: The Practice of Medical Humanitarian
Emergency’. DPhil diss., University of Oxford.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c81d8b4a-4e73-4bbb-b66f-7c84885ab9b8.
 22 Anthropological approaches to medical humanitarianism

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela J. Stewart. 1999. Curing and Healing: Medical Anthropology in Global
Perspective. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Terry, Fiona. 2002. Condemmed to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. ‘The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising
Sexual Violence’. Gender & History 23, no. 2: 250–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
0424.2011.01637.x.
Ticktin, Miriam. 2014. ‘Transnational Humanitarianism’. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 273–
89. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030403.
Tol, Wietse A., Vikram Patel, Mark Tomlinson, Florence Baingana, Ananda Galappatti, Derrick
Silove, Egbert Sondorp, Mark Van Ommeren, Michael G. Wessells, and Catherine
Panter-Brick. 2012. ‘Relevance or Excellence? Setting Research Priorities for Mental
Health and Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Settings’. Harvard Review of Psychiatry
20, no. 1: 25–36. https://doi.org/10.3109%2F10673229.2012.649113.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. (1991) 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vaux, Tony. 2001. The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War. Abingdon, UK: Earthscan.
Véran, Jean-Francois, Beverly Stringer, and Doris Burtscher. 2017. ‘Anthropology in
Humanitarian Situations: An Overview of MSF Experience’. Unpublished manuscript.
Walker, Peter. 2005. ‘Cracking the Code: The Genesis, Use and Future of the Code of Conduct’.
Disasters 29, no. 4: 323–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0361-3666.2005.00295.x.
Walker, Peter, Karen Hein, Catherine Russ, Greg Bertleff, and Dan Caspersz. 2010. ‘A Blueprint
for Professionalizing Humanitarian Assistance’. Health Affairs 29, no. 12: 2223–30.
https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.1023.
WHO (World Health Organization). 2004. ‘Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit’. Geneva: World
Health Organization.
http://www.who.int/hiv/pub/epidemiology/en/me_toolkit_en.pdf?ua=1.
WHO. 2016. ‘Attacks on Healthcare: Prevent, Protect, Provide’. Geneva: World Health
Organization. http://who.int/hac/techguidance/attacksreport.pdf?ua=1.

View publication stats