Disasters, development and humanitarian aid: new challenges for anthropology

This tenth issue of the CE.R.CO.’s Quaderni stems from an international conference held at Bergamo University in 2009 and attempts to overcome the customary “division of labour” separating development-related issues from those concerning emergency. Despite different purposes and temporalities of action, emergency and development have in a certain sense become hybridized and juxtaposed, if not at a programmatic level, then often in the contexts where the intervention takes place. This volume is intended to accompany, from an anthropological perspective hinging on the experience of fieldwork, the process of translating into practice styles of intervention and action strategies that are rapidly making headway in the field of international aid. The scholars involved in the conference made an in-depth analysis of several issues: the dynamics underlying the “regime of exception” that characterizes current humanitarian emergencies; the political, cultural, and emotional processes that trigger disastrous circumstances when human communities are caught in vulnerable positions; the evolution of cooperation policies as an attempt to respond to criticism of Development advanced by both academics and practitioners ‒ such as South-South cooperation, decentralized cooperation, or the use of home town associations, migrant remittances and microcredit programmes as engines of local development. In the light of these considerations, the volume wishes to highlight the opportunity to move from what has been labelled “anthropology of development and humanitarian aid” to what can be named “anthropology on public services”. Today, anthropological approaches and ethnographical methods are increasingly important in the public sector and in organizations as diverse as they can be. Accordingly, the difficult relationship between “pure” academic and the “impure” applied anthropology should be re-read to cope with the question of anthropological skills and methodologies appropriate to new working environments, issues of ethics and responsibility, a comparison with the world of those who design, propose and implement action in applied contexts, and how anthropology is perceived by these “other worlds” (practitioners, central and local governments, other institutional and social actors). What emerges from this discussion is that engaging anthropology in development and emergency as well as in public services and social change, raises methodological, epistemological and ethical questions which must be addressed.