Abstract
While recognizing that ‘volunteering for refugees’ is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, this article will discuss how we can ethnographically explore the everyday humanitarian practices of volunteers as shaped in intrinsic ways by their mode of being in the world as ethically concerned human beings. Building on recent scholarship within the anthropology of humanitarianism in which local and everyday versions of humanitarian practice are foregrounded, we wish to further the understanding of everyday volunteer practices through establishing a lens of temporality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews among small-scale volunteer networks and NGOs in Greece and in Northern Europe working in response to the refugee influx to Europe since 2015, we suggest three different modalities of volunteering among non-professionals, which we designate: temporality of crisis, which concentrates on the impulse to help as an immediate response to a critical moment in time, temporality of care expressing the asymmetrical presences in the field of volunteering and temporality of reflexivity, which highlights ambivalence and doubt as intrinsic to the volunteer practices. In this article, we aim for a provincializing of everyday humanitarian practices and explore humanitarianism ‘from the ground’ and in specific locations and times.
Highlights
When refugees and migrants arrive in Europe, they meet border police interrogating them, medical personnel testing them, and asylum caseworkers interviewing them
Scholars within the field of anthropology of humanitarianism have critically examined the imbalanced power dimensions inherent in humanitarian acts (Ticktin, 2015); humanitarian practice has been studied as a form of governance and critiqued for its lack of fighting societal inequalities (Fassin, 2012; Ticktin, 2015; 2016)
Recognizing that the ‘meaning of “politics of humanitarianism” cannot be determined a priori’ (Weiss, 2015, p. 289), we ethnographically investigate ‘grassroots’ forms of humanitarianism in situ, and importantly, we explore the temporal effects of humanitarianism from the perspectives of the volunteers
Summary
When refugees and migrants arrive in Europe, they meet border police interrogating them, medical personnel testing them, and asylum caseworkers interviewing them. 277) in her dissatisfaction with how ‘some of these accounts present the political and ethical effects of humanitarian governance as outcomes of an inherent structural problem of humanitarian logic, suggesting that certain political manifestations (the maltreatment of refugees, militarized interventions, arbitrary and unjust distinction between worthy and unworthy victims, and the creation of “states of exception”) are the inevitable outcome of this ethical tradition.’ As she argues, the form of critique is more philosophical than anthropological, and similar to her experience (Weiss, 2015), it does not settle well with our fieldwork experience. In this article we discuss humanitarianism as pursued by volunteers in grassroots organizations and networks founded during or shortly ahead of the summer of 2015 in response to the refugee influx to Europe They engaged in activities that were humanitarian: providing food, clothes, advice, and language classes and youth and children’s entertainment in an effort to cater for present, urgent needs. Taking the calls for ethnographic explorations of small-scale humanitarianisms, in plural, situated and local versions, we further the scholarship of decentering humanitarianism by focusing on the temporal effects of its different but related modalities
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