Crisis works

What do anthropologists have to say about crisis, the buzzword of our times? Howdoes the discipline most known for radical suspicion towards global notions approachone of the most universalised and universalising words today? How does the anthropo-logical response to modernity’s eternal love affair with crisis navigate between outrightrejection and creative engagement with its ethnographic and theoretical potential? Thetitle of this review essay encapsulates both a rapidly proliferating trend in anthropologytoday, i.e. ethnographic research on crisis, and the chief approach adopted by most ofthese works, i.e. crisis as constitutive of new subjectivities and power formations. Threerecently published (2013) books taken together offer a kaleidoscopic view of thedifferent perspectives and challenges facing the inchoate anthropology of crisis.

In this review I will draw on class discussions in a homonymous course, which Itaught last autumn at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and AfricanStudies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York. In Crisis Works weapproached crisis not just as a modern category of thought, but rather as an emergingfield of expertise, an advanced technology of government and a rewarding ethnographicchallenge. In the course I selected these three books as core readings, not only becausethey are representative of a contemporary anthropology of crisis but also because theystudy classical crisis cases (natural disasters, disease epidemics, financial meltdowns,respectively) from different points of view (affected communities, medical doctors,expert and lay analysts) and based on a variety of methodological and theoretical frame-works (marketisation, humanitarianism, narrativisation). Hence, this review is writtenboth from the perspective of an interested reader and an engaged teacher elicitingstudent insights and responses to the readings.

D i sa s t e r ma r ke t s

Markets of Sorrow, Labours of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (DukeUniversity Press 2013), Vincanne Adams’s ethnography of post-Katrina New Orleans,serves as a fitting introduction to the anthropology of crisis and disaster for new-comers, both due to her adept handling of a highly mediatised catastrophe and theeasily accessible writing style of the book. Markets of Sorrow tellingly describes theaftermath of a natural disaster as it is characterised by the advent of what the authorcalls an ‘affect economy’, which encompasses the ‘business of social suffering’ on onehand and the ‘philanthrocapitalism’ of faith-based civil society organisations on theother. Keeping always an eye on the privatisation of state relief services, the routes of

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2014) 22, 4 479–486. © 2014 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 479doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12090

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corporate and government money and the entanglement of entrepreneurs, banks,insurance companies, state agencies and civil society organisations with humanitarian-ism and relief efforts, this post-disaster ethnography applies at a smaller scale thecritical framework that Naomi Klein described as ‘disaster capitalism’. Adams is amedical anthropologist, hence perhaps her focus on suffering – both in her eloquenteffort to show how it turns into lucrative business and in her conscious choice to giveabundant space to the often desperate voices of the victims. In that sense, Adamsfollows the tradition of an engaged (and denunciatory) anthropology pioneered byNancy Scheper-Hughes and Paul Farmer.

Most of the book is divided between first-hand testimonies of people who sufferedduring and after Katrina and second-order analyses of new forms of structural inequal-ity provided by the author. Couched in a Marxist language with biopolitical overtones,Adam’s concepts are simultaneously arguments – ‘affective surplus’, ‘venturephilanthropy’, ‘business of social suffering’ – positing that one more disaster of almostequal intensity took place in New Orleans after Katrina. Both disasters are far from‘natural’ – Adams considers the term inadequate, because long-term mismanagementand neglect have heavily contributed to the catastrophic results in the first place.

Placing the frustration of those affected (perhaps exceedingly) centre stage, Adamsbuilds her story mainly by drawing on interviews with the victims and short fieldworkstays in their city. This is ultimately the crucial element of the book: namely herprioritising of the political aim to denounce global neoliberalism on behalf of the af-fected people on the ground over a deeper contextual understanding of the local strug-gles and solidarities that go beyond widespread accusations of neglect and profiteeringby state and corporations respectively. In other words, Adams – in following theneoliberal takeover of relief efforts – runs the risk of treating New Orleans in similarways to those that she denounces, namely as a powerless local site in which powerfulglobal projects (and projections) are applied.

Having said that, the strong feature of the book is the identification of new formsof knowledge, labour and power around the expanding ‘affect economy’. Themilitarisation of emergency as part of the US national security doctrine, theprivatisation of state services, the moralisation of the disaster relief – turning it fromcivil right to moral duty, all of these fundamental changes open the way to new fieldsof expertise and forms of subjectivity that call for further anthropological investigation.Thus, hurricane victims have to become ‘Katrina savvy’ in order to overcome themounting bureaucracy that stands in the way of the equitable recognition of need;army generals have to develop specialised skills for humanitarian operations; charitieshave to learn to do business-like book keeping and to compete with corporations forgovernment funds on relief. Those affected are expected to become self-entrepreneurialand market-visible, but must also appear needy, indebted and self-accusatory in theeyes of the donors. Powerful technologies and practices, such as opaque debt regula-tions and home value programmes, Sisyphean negotiations with insurance companiesand loan agencies, moralised relationships with church-run charities are constitutiveof the ‘techno-morals’ (Kosmatopoulos 2014a) of the post-disaster reconstruction.

Seeing how these practices work while still listening to the voices of those affectedby their widespread application convincingly complicates concepts such as affect, state(failure) and even natural disaster. Thus within disaster capitalism, affect is becoming afield of investment, but also a vehicle to provide free labour where the state has with-drawn; yet, the state does not withdraw completely. On the contrary, in Katrina the

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state was the main vehicle through which public money was transferred into privatehands and both eventually produced what Adams calls a ‘privately organised, publiclyfunded bureaucratic failure’ (2013: 7). Therefore, any claim of ‘failure’ must betreated with care, given that the failure of some is the profit of others. Finally, indisasters such as Katrina, the sustained rhetoric of disasters as ‘natural’ phenomenaenables their political causes to be overlooked and the effects of disastrous policieson environment, social security and population protection to be either minimisedor silenced (2013: 15).

AltogetherMarkets of Sorrow is an important contribution to the studies of crisis andinequality in the United States today, not least because it strongly links these two notionswith one another. Surely, the book’s clear focus on the security–business–faithcomplex wants to serve as a wake-up call to the contemporary changes in thegovernment of care and relief at a global scale. Writing it from the point of view of thevictims comes as a convenient emotional auxiliary to this aim, as is often the case inethnographies of suffering.

Human i t a r i a n d i l emmas

If Markets of Sorrow leaves the reader with feelings of partisanship and moral outrage,Life in Crisis – The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University ofCalifornia Press 2013), Peter Redfield’s ethnography of Medecins Sans Frontieres(MSF), reads as the distilled outcome of a constant and cautious reflection that enhancesdoubt and undermines any potential partiality. It is not by chance, after all, that Redfieldtells the story of one of the most influential global humanitarian organisations mainlythrough the political and ethical dilemmas that MSF encountered since its inception inthe early 1970s in Paris. Redfield suggests the ethnographic study of MSF as a responseto this research question: ‘What would it mean to build a framework for action aroundan ethic of life, understood medically and cast on a global scale?’ (2013: 1). In his pursuitof answers, Redfield produced a fine-grained ethnography of an important global institu-tion, a well-studied partial history of medical humanitarianism and a reflective treatise inethics from an anthropological point of view; altogether, an essential enrichment to thegrowing and important body of literature initiated by anthropologists (and critics) ofhumanitarianism, such as Didier Fassin and Miriam Ticktin.

The book is divided into three main parts, realistically reflecting the story andconvincingly corresponding to the argument. Part 1, ‘Terms of Engagement’, sets theoverall stage by introducing the institutional, moral and historical foundations ofMSF. Here, Redfield presents his chief theoretical framework of ‘minimal biopolitics’,echoing Foucault in the focus on the biological welfare of the population as the objectof government. Part 2, ‘Global Ambitions’, describes the main contours of the longexpansion of MSF in a geographical and institutional sense, which brought about theconsolidation of global hegemony in the field but also the proliferation of the practiceof ‘moral witness’, which encapsulates the Doctors’ chief ethical stance vis-à-vis atroc-ities and humanitarian crises. Part 3, ‘Testing Limits’, further elaborates on the majordilemmas and challenges facing MSF, such as the need of a constant presence in thefield because of chronic diseases, such as HIV-AIDS, and the ‘problem of triage’, acontinuous effort to reconcile the principle of humanitarian aid for all in need withthe omnipresent scarcity of resources.

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Throughout the book, crisis is treated as an ongoing and open-ended ethnographicquestion, premised on the ancient Greek double meaning of the word, according towhich crisis entails both a critical situation and a crucial decision upon it. ‘MSFcouldn’t survive without the word “emergency”’, writes Redfield (2013: 14), anddemonstrates how the application of the word prompts MSF to prioritise the presentover the past and the future, and to operate both within a presupposed state of ruptureand an imperative need for action (2013: 14). In this sense, humanitarianism as it isunderstood by MSF has come to define itself through exception and disaster and notthrough development.

Notwithstanding this unquestionable ethico-institutional framework, all kinds ofdilemmas capture the attention of the ethnographer. Redfield tells the story of theMSF’s evolving through what he calls the ‘shifting dreams’ of the contemporary aidworld and the ‘lines of tension’ running through its vision (2013: 2). In particular, heshows how MSF has been constantly confronted with diverse versions of limits,borders and critical decisions, and eventually how the responses to them have pavedthe way for the organisation’s global success, but often also paralysis and division.Thus, the historical origins of the Doctors are marked by a crucial decision to choosethe moral mission of saving lives over the political project of changing the world. Lateron, the dilemma resurfaced over the organisation’s aporia of neutrality vis-à-vis statesand other global players, such as the Red Cross (ICRC). The book shows eloquentlyhow the moral aim of saving lives and the declared practice of ‘bearing witness’ faceconstant practical and political limits. On the face of these limitations the ethnographerfollows closely the members of the organisation in their struggle to redefine the ethicaland operational framework, mainly relying on what they regard as high moralstandards and an institutional tradition of self-reflection and open dialogue.

Notwithstanding the ethnographer’s meticulous focus on limits and border-crossings regarding the organisation under study and his early promises to ‘examineintervention’, ironically the ethnography itself remains often within the institutionalborders of the Doctors Without Borders – thus often telling the story almostexclusively from within (and often from the perspective of the upper organisationalechelons). As a result, we rarely get insights from the possible effects of MSF policieson populations and places. Even in cases in which the ethnographer has venturedoutside the offices of the organisation (e.g. camps in Uganda), there is hardly any infor-mation about how the receivers of the aid think about it. Perhaps the self-critical modusoperandi that MSF prides itself on is enabling the ethnographer to disable his owncritical take on the institution under study. However, given the critique of humanitar-ianism and compassion as an ethical principle and the application of ethics in favour ofpragmatism (Asad 2014), one would expect to hear more about the consequences ofMSF’s ‘minimal biopolitics’ on populations and places.

This internal perspective might have influenced the way that the author representsinstances of doubt and dissent within the organisation, which are given less gravity thantheir potential political effects and stakes. For example, the controversy over theAfghanistan mission in the 1980s is discussed in a matter-of-fact manner that leavesthe reader with the suspicion that the ethnographer has taken on face value the claimsof those who stay behind. Redfield similarly treats the thorny issue of decolonisation,with which MSF has been frequently confronted both internally and externally. Thishighly political and ethical issue is treated briefly (and rather insignificantly) in sixout of the book’s 247 pages.

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Perhaps conscious of this potential critique, Redfield posits from the very begin-ning that his guide for telling the MSF story is the ‘Bildungsroman’ – the Romanticnovel of self-formation (2013: 3). His approach is ‘largely descriptive’, producedthrough the practice of simply following his ‘chosen group’s passage through the worldof practice’ (2013: 2). Notwithstanding the conceptual – and contextual – bias thatsheds a rather heroic light on MSF, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Peace, therewarding part of this choice is the impressive range of material provided. Redfieldhas put massive work into this ethnography, with numerous visits to exhibitions,meetings, conferences and field projects in Central Africa; in-depth analyses of reports,handbooks, policies and newsletters; comprehensive interviews with current and retiredmembers of the organisation. In this undertaking he has been fortunate to study anorganisation with a strong internal culture of textual production, which goes far beyondthe proliferation of codes of conduct and manuals of operation as many global organisa-tions have it. After all, strong internal democracy and the possibility given to members toexpress themselves openly about the strategic or practical decisions of the organisation aremajor elements that differentiate the MSF from the UN or the ICRC.

Teaching Life in Crisis to a diverse class including both undergraduates in anthro-pology and in other disciplines gave me the chance to discuss with them the merits andadvantages of both meticulous in-depth fieldwork and contemporary social theory.Redfield’s work is a product of erudition and reflection. The absence of universalclaims and denunciatory statements matches nicely with his sober narrative style. Forsome of my students, however, this choice produced an altogether (too) sympatheticportrait of the organisation, which reflects the ethnographic focus on the internaldebates as they are represented by powerful players within the organisation.

Expe r t na r r a t i v e s

Janet Roitman’s Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press 2013) is written – as the rallyingtitle suggests – in the format of a manifesto. The declared aim of the book is to makea strong argument against the concept of crisis – the ‘primary enabling blind spot forthe production of knowledge’ (2013: 25). To do this, Roitman embarks on an ambitiousenterprise that is risky both conceptually and stylistically, seeking to provide the readerwith a sort of philosophically inspired commentary on the diverse narratives aroundthe financial crisis of 2008/9. Roitman’s material is mostly – if not exclusively – textual.How do crisis authors structure their texts? What kinds of forms of veridiction arethere? These are the research questions that guide her semantic inquiry. At the centreof this method is her differentiation between what she calls first- and second-orderobservations, thus the investigation of how and why we all make so easily the leap fromfirst-order observations, such as ‘there is no money’ to second-order observations,such as ‘this is a crisis’. Situating herself at the interface of these and other dividing lines(academic and popular crisis narrations is another one), the author seeks to observe theblind spot of second-order observation and to ‘erase or at least lighten these lines’(2013: 15).

Roitman’s conceptual critique of crisis begins with Martin Luther King, Jr. andBarack Obama, who both derived from crisis a strongly transcendental and experientialmeaning. However, most of the book features theories and research by fellowacademics, on whose work Roitman relies heavily to make her argument. Thus, the

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historian Reinhard Koselleck takes on a protagonist role in the story – covering morethan 15% of the book and providing an elaborate genealogy of crisis/critique, as well ashis argument on the separation of morality and politics. Further influential authors inthe political economy and financial crisis, such as David Harvey, Martha Poon, GretaKrippner and Daniel Parrochia, are called on to provide primary research material.This is arguably the shakiest ground on which the author walks in the book. The exper-imental style of a ‘second order narrative’ often oscillates between an obscure languageand a missing ethnographic context. Perhaps a more substantial link to her ownprevious work on financial markets in Africa could have offered a profound contextand a juxtaposed text at the same time. In fact, Roitman makes this connection whenshe refers to her work in Africa in order to refer to how the continent often appears‘as an ontological category of thought under the sign of crisis’ (2013: 157). Alas, thispromising reference takes no more space than a short footnote.

Overall, Roitman successfully makes the argument that expert claims to crisis andlay accessions to those claims serve not radical change, but rather the affirmation oflongstanding principles in the economy and in the polity altogether (2013: 16). In otherwords, crisis is ‘business as usual’ (Calhoun and Derluguian 2011) that is oftenoverlooked by the proliferation of what Bloor (1991) called ‘the sociology of error’.This particular kind of sociology begins with the question ‘What went wrong?’ andas such it is shared by a wide-ranging array of – often conflicting – interpretationsand traditions, such as neoliberals, neo-Keynesian, Marxist, cultural studies. Thesociology of error – alternately, the sociology of deviation – orients us towards possiblesources, roots and causes of crisis, a term that is posited without question or doubt.Roitman shows how this grand scheme of distortion proliferates among expert andlay narratives alike and as a result it engenders certain narrations, but it also enablesand forecloses various kinds of questions that pertain not only to the systemic featuresof world economy, but also, and essentially, to moral (dis)placements.

Although she doesn’t venture into the morality of debt and indebtedness today,her account on the construction of debt as an asset class is highly suggestive. Herethe book is at its best, with lots of empirical material and close observations on thecomplex workings of financial mechanisms. Thus, instead of the usual suspects, suchas ‘irrational speculation, corrupt culture, erroneous policy, faulty regulation, defectivemodels, missed forecasting, or systemic failure and underlying contradictions’,Roitman shows how what we really have is the ‘production of positive – or, better,practical – knowledge such that the claim to crisis becomes a particular (political)solution’ (2013: 24).

This passionate manifesto against crisis ends up re-writing the history of thesubprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8 by highlighting the deeper systemic changes inthe economy that have been normalised during the past decade or so. In the end, shesuggests – albeit reluctantly – to investigate ‘risk’ as the basis of crisis in our world today.To many today, risk is the permanent peril (2013: 96). Here again she is drawing onsecondary material to argue that risk today is governed (and produced) via managementtechniques and as such is highly productive for the proliferation of ideals of opportunity,performance, gain and value (2013: 101). By asserting that ‘financial devices are not usedin contexts; they create contexts’ (2013: 102), she is resolutely adopting the deconstruc-tionist sociology of economic knowledge pioneered by Michel Callon.

In the end, Roitman rightly wishes to relate her insights to the recent movementsthat rose against the crisis, such as those of Occupy. In sync with these movements,

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she asserts that in terms of morality – i.e. which actors should bear the burden of afading prosperity – ‘we still ask the same questions’ (2013: 112). Yet Roitman iscorrectly adamant in her push to disassociate the organic analogy between crisis andcritique, arguing that we must be able to observe how economy works without beingburdened by grand – and unquestioned – moral judgements. Her last disclaimer, thatto many people today there is real crisis, serves to caution against the dropping ofthe concept altogether if it serves to describe real experiential conditions.

Conc l u s i o n : mo r a l i t y r e t u r n s

Disaster markers, humanitarian dilemmas and expert narratives undoubtedly constituteessential facets of the contemporary landscape of crisis and disaster. Anthropologicalworks that scratch the surface of post-disaster relief, medical humanitarianism and crisisnarratives keep the discipline in sync with the task of providing innovative, rigid andhighly relevant research. Notwithstanding the differences in the ways the authorsapproach their topics, all of them retain a strong ethnographic focus on practices, devicesand technologies through which knowledge, labour, biopolitics and capital are re-organised during and after crises and disasters. All of them place at the centre of the inquirythe ‘technopolitics of crisis’ (Kosmatopoulos 2014b), such as in Redfield’s close investiga-tion of the refugee camp, the armband, the global kit, Roitman’s second-order examinationof financial products, and Adams’ rather loose exploration of bureaucratic regulations.

Interestingly, all of them share a rather reluctant attitude towards assuming thestatus of a field specialist. Thus, Redfield admits not to be a ‘specialist by training’,while Adams announces that she deliberately excluded all ‘local’ elements (such asmusic, religion, history), so her story can be taken for its universality. Finally, Roitmanconsciously takes the position of the second-order observer. Can this coincidence makeus conclude that crisis per se is in fact inaccessible to ethnographic research? It seems infact that exploring more or less organised responses to crisis by all kinds of lay peopleand experts constitutes thus far the bulk of the anthropological intervention. Finally, itmay not be by chance that all these works adopt a particular stance on morality. WhileRedfield takes the moral principles of the MSF at face value, Roitman and Adamssubmit morality to (neoliberal or emancipatory) politics. No doubt, the return ofmorality in current anthropological debates is manifested also in these ethnographiesof crisis. However, any morality returns have yet to yield crisis ethnographies from aradical Nietzschean perspective, in which contemporary morality is not merely theproduct of the (techno-)politics of crisis, but its very origins.

Nikolas KosmatopoulosÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Collège des Humanités)CM Building 2 274, Station 10CH-1015Lausanne, Switzerlandnikolas.kosmatopoulos@epfl.chAlso Visiting fellow at ICTA, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

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ReferencesAdams, V. 2013.Markets of sorrow, labors of faith: New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.Asad, T. 2014. ‘Reflections on violence, law, and humanitarianism’, Critical Inquiry (http://

criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/reflections_on_violence_law_and_humanitarianism/) Accessed 7 Sep-tember 2014.

Bloor, D. 1991. Knowledge and social imagery, 1st edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Calhoun, C. and G. Derluguian (eds.) 2011. Business as usual: the roots of the global financial meltdown,

vol. 1. New York: NYU Press.Kosmatopoulos, N. 2014a. ‘The birth of the workshop: technomorals, peace expertise and the care of

the self in the Middle East’, Public Culture 26: 529–58.Kosmatopoulos, N. 2014b. ‘Sentinel matters: the techno-politics of international crisis in Lebanon (and

beyond)’, Third World Quarterly 35: 598–615.Redfield, P. 2013. Life in crisis: the ethical journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkeley, CA: University

of California Press.Roitman, J. 2013. Anti-crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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