Front and Back Covers, Volume 22, Number 5. October 2006

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 22 issue 5Front coverKayapo men of Brazilian Amazonia dance at a meeting of all Kayapo villages held in March 2006 with the aim of forging a united movement against the encroachment of agribusiness and large‐scale development projects into the Xingú river valley. Up to the time of this meeting the widely dispersed Kayapo communities had never joined together as a single political organization under a common leadership. That they were able to do so at this meeting owed much to their ability to draw upon their shared tradition of collective ritual dance performances, which serve as the principal means of reproducing the social and political structures of their separate villages. At the meeting, held at the Kayapo village of Piaraçu on the Xingú, members of rival communities with mutually suspicious leaders joined in dances such as this one, drawn from the ritual for war, that expressed their solidarity in opposition to the common external threat. For the general audience, periodic interludes of dancing also provided a dramatic way of showing solidarity with one another and jointly expressing support for the orators, who were mostly leaders of the different communities. The meeting closed with a new ritual created for the occasion that began with a collective dance and culminated in a rite symbolizing the new level of common chiefly authority and leadership, encompassing Kayapo society as a whole, that had been created at the meeting.Back coverCOMPETITIVE HUMANITARIANISMThe back cover of this issue shows a detail from a map of ‘Humanitarian actors involved in tsunami‐related activities in Sri Lanka’. This excerpt lists but a few dozen of the many hundreds of agencies competing to provide relief in the wake of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in December 2004.In most disasters, a major problem facing relief agencies is a lack of resources. In the case of the 2004 tsunami, however, agencies were forced into competition with each other for effective distribution of an embarrassment of riches. Yet this distribution had to be in line with international standards, and needed to meet the requirements of those who had donated to the various appeals in other parts of the world and had specific ideas of what constituted relief. The result was an over‐concentration on the visible and the photogenic rather than the arguably more important work of rebuilding institutions and social networks.As well as needing to meet international standards, relief agencies were subject to the bureaucratic requirements that they should expend their resources in an accountable fashion. Their slow reaction opened the way for a plethora of small and inexperienced organizations (and individuals) to enter the relief business. The aid they dispensed was often poorly directed and technically inferior, but the visibility of their operations prompted an easy criticism of the more ponderous activities of the larger relief organisations.While ready availability of resources marked out the tsunami relief effort from most other disasters, what seems to characterize aid operations in the wake of such disasters is a high degree of competition between relief agencies, and a continual call for a greater degree of co‐ordination between relief organizations. Yet competitive pressures mean that co‐ordination is unlikely to be attainable over more than the short term.From an anthropological point of view the following paradox is worthy of study: while philanthropy can be seen as the antithesis of self‐interest, philanthropic organisations are inherently part of a self‐interested, market‐orientated social order. What starts out as a ‘free gift’ from the public of Europe, Asia or elsewhere ends up as a commodity in the marketplace of competitive humanitarianism.