On Missionary and Emergency Imaginaries
from Part I - Genealogies and Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2019
This chapter seeks to recover forgotten ideological and structural causes behind humanitarianism, ones which have been eclipsed by its association which the fraught aid industry, the white saviour syndrome, and the general ineffectiveness of sentimentality when it comes to humanitarian action. Distinguishing between the worlds of “missionary” and “emergency” humanitarian expression (with histories dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, originating separately in discourses of reform and abolition, and that of crises such as natural disaster and war), the authors show how these two strands present widely different narratives and concepts of suffering, innocence, temporality, witnessing, evidence, and so on.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.