ABSTRACT
A whole mass of information known by the members of the humanitarian community never appears in the overview reports on acute needs. The data on vulnerability are purified, selected, and aggregated such that they are silent on a whole suite of information on inequalities. The resulting statistics on “vulnerability” might be overdetermined by the intrinsic logic of the humanitarian field. The egalitarian fiction can be found at all levels of humanitarian action. This ethics regulated the relation between surveyor and surveyed in Cameroon: The “beneficiaries” of humanitarian aid all participated in the surveys in a “voluntary” and “equal” manner. In 2010, a new food crisis affected the Sahelian region of Cameroon, and the government decided to update its national protocol for handling malnutrition. The great crises that have given rise to the construction of new humanitarian knowledge were also wars of propaganda – the war in Biafra, the famine in Ethiopia, the genocide in Cambodia, and the genocide in Rwanda.
