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ABSTRACT
After arriving to volunteer at a rural hospital in Zambia, many short-term American missionaries began to doubt whether the Christian character of their work was recognisable to Zambian patients and health professionals. In this article, I argue that these missionary doubts were a result of what Webb Keane has recently called ‘the ethical dilemma of humanitarianism’, a term he uses to describe the lack of mutual ethical recognition in humanitarian encounters. After showing how missionaries experienced and articulated a distinctively Christian version of this ‘dilemma’, I demonstrate how they were able to transcend it by identifying other people who could properly recognise the Christian character of their work: namely, their families, friends and church members back ‘at home’ in the United States. In conclusion, I suggest that more attention should be paid to the political importance of various forms of domestic ethical recognition in sustaining humanitarianism in practice.
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to Harri Englund, Joana Nascimento, Martha Wintrup and the three anonymous reviewers for offering valuable comments on different versions of this paper. My thanks also to the participants at departmental seminars at Brunel and Manchester who provided stimulating and helpful responses to earlier forms of this paper – and many thanks to Isak Niehaus and Tony Simpson for inviting me on those occasions. Thanks finally to Ed Pulford, John McDaid, Steve McCutcheon, and Edward Christopher Sheeran for the inspiration and encouragement they have offered over the years.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The name of the town, hospital and all personal names used here are pseudonyms.
2 The year of fieldwork took place between 2014 and 2015 and involved a subsequent month of fieldwork during August 2016.
3 Although Chitonga is the most widely spoken language of the Southern Province of Zambia, there are several distinct dialects that – while more or less mutually intelligible to native speakers – pose difficulties for non-fluent speakers. Furthermore, hospital staff members from other provinces often spoke Chibemba and Chinyanja (as well as English) in their interactions with one another. Despite being able to follow conversations and get by in many settings, I was not able to conduct detailed interviews fluently in the language on my own. With the help of research assistants, I was able to follow and record interviews and seek clarification about certain phrases or concepts that were of particular importance.
4 The material here draws on open-ended interviews with 20 short-term missionaries.
5 In line with the argument advanced here about the importance of the domestic contexts that shape humanitarian practice, it is worth pointing out here that the rise of Christian missionaries in recent decades is related to legislation passed in the United States. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, contained provisions for ‘Charitable Choice’, which enabled religious organisations to receive government funding. President George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under an executive order in 2001. This was created to increase the remit of faith-based organisations in the provision of social services at home and abroad (see Clarke Citation2006: 837; Hefferan and Fogarty Citation2010).
6 A few of these visitors were medical students. In this sense, they were also ‘clinical tourists’ (Wendland Citation2012) who can be situated among the many medical students who volunteer in the global south as a way of gaining clinical experience (see also Sullivan Citation2016).
7 For a autobiographical account of an American medical missionary who contracted Ebola in Liberia see Brantly et al. (Citation2015).
8 See https://www.samaritanspurse.org/our-ministry/about-us/ (accessed December 5th 2016).
9 In late 2016, this was 25 hospitals in Africa, 3 in Asia, 7 in Latin America, and 1 mission hospital in Papua New Guinea. See https://www.samaritanspurse.org/medical/mission-hospitals/ (accessed December 5th 2016).
10 In colonial Tanzania, as Peter Pels has written, ‘Big [mission] stations … were often economically self-sufficient communities led by an all-male European staff that set itself off from its surroundings by an architecturally enclosed space, like a monastery’ (Citation1999: 87). Economic self-sufficiency looks different today (when missionaries can acquire their supplies from supermarkets) but the aspiration to create an enclosed space remains.
11 This interesting distinction was brought to my attention by Penny Harvey.
12 Whether these missionaries actually did possess a greater degree of ‘medical competence’ is not my concern here, although there are reasons to think that these missionaries may not have been as competent as they thought they were. For some of these reasons, see Wendland, Erikson and Sullivan (Citation2016).
13 Indeed, this introduced some tension and inequality into the relationships of Zambian staff members as some were seen to be given privileged treatment by the missionaries, while others were marginalised.
14 These translators were recruited through the Methodist church and paid privately by the missionaries themselves. They could, therefore, end up being very well paid. For an account of the importance of translation in missionary medicine in colonial Zambia see Kalusa (Citation2007).
15 For similar descriptions of treatment options in the regional anthropological literature see Brown (Citation2010: 76); Geissler and Prince (Citation2009: 620–623); Hannig (Citation2017: 134–136); and Mogensen (Citation2005: 214).
16 This is a more complicated issue than I can explore here. As Harri Englund describes in Malawi, the word for ‘healer’ includes ‘morally neutral herbalists and immoral sorcerers’ (Citation2011: 84). The same was true in Zambia, but the basic point here is that patients’ understanding of the relation between Christianity and healing was more complicated than the missionary identification of non-biomedical forms of healing with ‘witchdoctors’ and sinfulness.
17 Naomi Haynes notes, similarly, that in Chibemba the verb ‘to choose’ (ukusala) is also synonym for ‘giving preferential treatment’ (Citation2017: 88) and demonstrating ‘favouritism’ (Citation2017: 109).
18 The term bangelo was introduced into the Southern Province of Zambia with the arrival of Christian missionaries in the early twentieth century. Unlike certain other Christian concepts – for instance God (Leza), Lord (mwami), or heaven (kujulu) – there was no sufficiently similar pre-existing Chitonga term that missionary translators of the Bible could expand to accommodate the new Christian concept of ‘angels’. The word takes its root from the English ‘angel’ (-ngelo), with the ba- and mu- prefixes (which denote the plural and singular forms, respectively) being used for the class of nouns which includes people and large animals. Elsewhere, I have compared the term bangelo with other words used to describe outsiders who have historically offered biomedical care – e.g. ‘vampires’ (banyama) – in order to suggest that the detached position of these outsiders has been interpreted as both morally unsettling but also potentially advantageous (see Wintrup Citation2017).