ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the narrative that those in the Global South are “used to death.” This often takes two forms: either, those in the developing world are characterized as being accustomed to loss, thus experiencing less pain, or their vocal mourning practices, such as wailing, are depicted as primitive. The chapter focuses on the politics of this story of everyday death in the Global South, and what impact this has on those who die “quietly,” particularly from preventable disease, and particularly on what gets assumed about death-making when mortality rates are focused on as a measure of human development and human security. The chapter then focuses on disease, as a way to think about how this impacts global humanitarianism. Specifically, it analyzes the way in which preventable disease in the developing world is not conceived of as a crisis and theorizes that much of this has to do with the way disease, and death from disease, is treated as banal in the developing world, while it is considered preventable and extraordinary in the developed world. This story of death-making renders certain deaths ordinary and deemed unworthy of global attention, while others become points of crisis.
