ABSTRACT
The editors of this book are insider Médecins Sans Frontières anthropologists, believers in the core values of the organisation and committed to its mission to ‘save lives’ under extreme situations. As such, we first locate the book in relation to the critical anthropology of humanitarian action, but we also express the need to displace the argument as a way to make space for an anthropology in humanitarian situations, which constitutes the object of this book. We acknowledge the relevance and even the necessity to question a ‘humanitarian reason’ based on unstable moral feelings (Fassin), and in a postcolonial moment, the necessity to shake humanitarian action from the premise of what ‘human’ means in the concept of humanitarianism itself. However, we think that this critical tradition does not account for the way humanitarian action really happens at field level, in face-to-face situations, at the very moment when struggles for survival meet operational strategies and deadlocks to assist populations in critical events. An anthropology in humanitarian situations is indeed conceptually and methodologically needed to allow us, as embarked MSF anthropologists, to reflect on our practice. We then locate ourselves within the MSF apparatus, problematising the challenges of applied social sciences within a dominant biomedical environment. The eight ethnographies that constitute the core of the book are presented as an invitation to join us in the analytical discussion we feel necessary to think of the humanitarian relation as a pragmatic to resist the massive production of ‘bare lives’ in the age of the Anthropocene.
