Transcending the Ethical Dilemma of Christian Humanitarianism: American Medical Missionaries at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

Abstract

After arriving to volunteer at a rural hospital in Zambia, many short-term American missionaries began to doubt whether the Christian character of their work was recognisable to Zambian patients and health professionals. In this article, I argue that these missionary doubts were a result of what Webb Keane has recently called ‘the ethical dilemma of humanitarianism’, a term he uses to describe the lack of mutual ethical recognition in humanitarian encounters. After showing how missionaries experienced and articulated a distinctively Christian version of this ‘dilemma’, I demonstrate how they were able to transcend it by identifying other people who could properly recognise the Christian character of their work: namely, their families, friends and church members back ‘at home’ in the United States. In conclusion, I suggest that more attention should be paid to the political importance of various forms of domestic ethical recognition in sustaining humanitarianism in practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.