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

Abstract

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.

Ethical Endeavours

“…on dis/enchantments produced through the research ethics systems that govern experimental paediatric medicine, see Addison 2022). Most of the articles focused on challenges of ethnography, such as (im)possibilities of translation (Lebner 2022;Taylor 2022), doubts, uncertainties and moral obligations connected to the fi eldworker positionality (Kaell 2022;Pina-Cabral 2022b;Wintrup 2022), or how to deal with and write about ambivalent attitudes towards interlocutors (Rakopoulos 2022b;Wintrup 2022). Here, like in other fi elds, authors advocated for humane, but realistic, ethical ideals that can accommodate rather than a priori foreclose the complexity of social interactions that can develop in the context of research projects.…”