In the face of the world's disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. Didier Fassin draws on case materials from France, South ...Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. He traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices — what he terms "humanitarian reason"— and shows in vivid examples how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence. Deftly illuminating the tensions and contradictions in humanitarian government, he reveals the ambiguities confronting states and organizations as they struggle to deal with the intolerable. His critique of humanitarian reason, respectful of the participants involved but lucid about the stakes they disregard, offers theoretical and empirical foundations for a political and moral anthropology.
In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global AIDS crisis—the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic in ...South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period.
There is, on the one hand, life that flows from a beginning to an end, and, on the other hand, life that constitutes human singularity because it can be recounted. We may term them “biological life” ...and “biographical life”. Life expectancy measures the length of the former; a life story relates the richness of the latter. Only by acknowledging both can the inequality of lives be comprehended. They should be conceived of as being both distinct and connected: distinct, because the paradox of French women shows that a long life is no guarantee of a good life; connected, because the experience of African-American men stands as a reminder that a devalued life is a damaged life. This also raises the question of refugees and migrants.
Emmanuelle SAVIGNAC : Didier Fassin, peut-on considérer – ainsi que nous avons été tentés de le faire en sollicitant votre regard pour ce numéro de Terrains/Théories - la mise en pratique de la ...méthode ethnographique dans d’autres milieux que celui stricto sensu académique comme un pan de ce que vous décrivez comme « l’ethnographie publique » ? Je pense ici à la mobilisation de l’ethnographie au sein d’autres disciplines et activités que les sciences humaines et sociales : études de commerce,...
At a glance, 'borders' and 'boundaries' may seem synonymous. But in the real (geopolitical) world, they coexist as distinct, albeit overlapping entities: the former a state's delimitation of ...territory; the latter the social delineation of differences. The refugee crisis in Europe showed how racial and ethnic boundaries are often instrumentalised to justify the strengthening of state borders - regardless of the cost in human life. But there are other, less tragic, examples that illustrate this overlapping as well, and ultimately demonstrate that the oft-differentiated spheres of borders and boundaries are best understood through their relationship to one another. Deepening Divides explores this relationship from many distinct perspectives and national contexts, with case studies covering five continents and drawing on anthropology, gender studies, law, political science and sociology for a truly interdisciplinary collection.
The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased ...constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.
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Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the Collège de France on this topic, ...as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigations conducted in France and South Africa on how life and lives are treated in our world.
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8.
Of Plots and Men Fassin, Didier
Current anthropology,
04/2021, Volume:
62, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In a time when conspiracy theories seem to be flourishing, generally receiving dismissive reactions, this article conversely tries to take them seriously and to consider what they may tell us about ...contemporary societies. Whereas philosophical discussions turn around the specific definition and delimitation of these theories, anthropologists acknowledge their existence and inscribe them in a broader interpretive complex that includes witchcraft, gossip, rumors, and urban legends. In order to account for their current success, it is necessary to study their felicity conditions on both the emitting and receiving sides by combining cognitive and contextual approaches. The case of the conspiracy theories developed around AIDS in South Africa shows how history can inform their comprehension and reveal the sometimes fine line between paranoid fantasies and actual plots. A final reflection cautions about the increasing tendency, in the social sciences, to assimilate social critique and conspiratorial thinking, using the latter to delegitimize the former.
Whether through traditional law or modern torture, the body has always been a privileged site on which to demonstrate the evidence of power. But for immigrants, the poor, and, more generally, the ...dominated--all of whom have to prove their eligibility to certain social rights--it has also become the place that displays the evidence of truth. In France, as immigration control increases, asylum seekers are more and more submitted to the evaluation of their physical sequels and psychic traumas, as if their autobiographical accounts were not sufficient. In this article, we show how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) deal with the dilemmas posed by this situation, how they develop protocols standardizing their expertise, and how their medical authority progressively substitutes itself for the asylum seekers' word. In this process of objectification, it is the experience of the victims as political subjects that is progressively erased.
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Este artículo plantea una reflexión crítica sobre la llamada «crisis de los refugiados» de 2015 en Europa a partir de una reformulación del concepto de economía moral que problematiza discursos y ...prácticas de asilo. Propone primero una concepción histórica del uso y significado de las categorías de refugio y asilo que nos permita además explorar los cambios en la representación de los individuos involucrados y en la legitimidad social de sus reivindicaciones. Para ello se analiza la evolución del derecho al asilo en Europa desde una multiplicidad de lentes —etimológica, histórica y geográfica— como preámbulo al estudio de su declive en las últimas décadas. El artículo concluye que las decenas de miles de personas que cruzan el Mediterráneo desde África y el Oriente Medio en búsqueda de protección no han creado una «crisis», sino que revelan una situación que ya existe desde hace varias décadas: el retiro progresivo de los países europeos de sus compromisos adquiridos con la Convención de Ginebra de 1951.
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