Transcending the Ethical Dilemma of Christian Humanitarianism: American Medical Missionaries at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

Wintrup, James

doi:10.1080/00141844.2019.1696856

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…This passage is central to the idea that ‘the individual’s relation to God is determined … at the point of his relation to the neighbour’ (Critchley, 2007: 51; see also Løgstrup, 1997). For many American missionaries at Matamba Mission Hospital, this Christian moral injunction also offered a language for describing their understanding of medical competence and care (see Wintrup, 2019).…”

Section: Seeing Patients As Christ-likementioning

confidence: 99%

“…When missionaries returned to their compound after working at the hospital, they shared such stories and told each other about what they had ‘seen’ in the course of their work. But they did not only ‘show’ one another, but also family members, friends and fellow church members back in the United States – with whom they communicated extensively during their time in Zambia (see Wintrup, 2019). Indeed, many missionaries described feeling an obligation to tell people at home what they had ‘seen’ in Zambia.…”

Section: Seeing Patients As Faithfulmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, I once heard Hannah reprimand a young Zambian nurse by saying, 'But you are supposed to be a Christian!' (see also Bornstein, 2005;Wintrup, 2019). Unsurprisingly, many Zambian staff members came to resent being judged as uncaring and this created frictions in their relationships.…”

Section: Being 'Alive' To Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique

Wintrup

2021

Critique of Anthropology

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This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.

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Section: Seeing Patients As Christ-likementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Seeing Patients As Faithfulmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique

Wintrup

2021

Critique of Anthropology

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“…As I have been attempting to show in this article, bangelo and banyama are more similar than we might initially imagine. Humanitarian action, like malevolent action, offers 'little scope for reciprocity' (Keane 2016, 257; see also Wintrup 2019).…”

Section: Giving Taking and Postcolonial Humanitarian Biomedicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking with vampires and angels: the ambivalent afterlives of Christian humanitarianism in rural Zambia

Wintrup¹

2020

History and Anthropology

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During the course of fieldwork at a Christian mission hospital in southern Zambia, I discovered that vernacular healers in the surrounding rural area were being visited by 'angel spirits' (bangelo) who offered them efficacious advice on how best to treat the patients under their care. According to the healers who encountered them, these angel spirits physically resembled white people (bakuwa), they dressed in white clothing, and their behaviour was inherently unpredictable. In this article, I consider what the presence of these angel spirits can tell us about moral attitudes towards humanitarian biomedicine in the region. But rather than focusing on these angel spirits alone, I situate them alongside a different non-human actor that has also been strongly identified with humanitarian biomedicine in southern Africa: the munyama or 'vampire'. By describing the behaviour of the human and non-human actors who have been historically associated with medical humanitarianism in southern Zambiavampires, angels, and European and American medical missionaries -I argue that it is possible to better understand why people in the region, from the mid-twentieth century to the present-day, have developed such a morally ambivalent attitude towards humanitarian biomedicine.

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Relational Harm: On the Divisive Effects of Global Health Volunteering at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

Wintrup

2024

Medical Anthropology

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Transcending the Ethical Dilemma of Christian Humanitarianism: American Medical Missionaries at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

Cited by 3 publications

References 54 publications

Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique

Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique

Speaking with vampires and angels: the ambivalent afterlives of Christian humanitarianism in rural Zambia

Relational Harm: On the Divisive Effects of Global Health Volunteering at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

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