Vernacular Humanitarianism

Abstract

Vernacular HumanitarianismVernacular humanitarianism refers to aid provided by various local actors in tune with their socio-historically specific ideas of humanness, as a response to an emerging need that cannot be adequately addressed through conventional channels of help.It encompasses practices of helping that follow the universal humanitarian logic, but in a different form to the international humanitarian organizations.A range of new terms has been offered recently to analyze these small-scale practices of helping.For instance, Anne-Meike Fechter and Anke Schwittay (2019: 1769) speak about "citizen aid" and "grassroots humanitarianism" in order to encompass "forms of aid and development … which are not orchestrated by large donors or aid agencies, but are initiated by ordinary citizens, from the Global North and South."Elisa Sandri (2018) suggests that volunteers helping the refugees in France who refused any financial or other support from the international aid agencies and national governments enacted "voluntary humanitarianism."Darragh McGee and Juliette Pelham (2018) discuss "grassroots humanitarianism" in the context of the Calais "Jungle" in France as an alternative to the large-scale, professionalized forms of aid delivery.Katerina Rozakou (2017) writes about "solidarity humanitarianism" in Greece, referring to the work of the volunteers who helped the refugees and, in doing so, established a clear opposition between their solidary and self-reflective work and that of the professional humanitarian and state workers.Alexander Horstmann (2017) discusses "everyday humanitarianism," which emerged at the intersection of grassroots, local, and international humanitarian practices after a violent conflict in Myanmar.The term vernacular humanitarianism was also coined (Brković 2017) as a way to capture under the same conceptual umbrella the diverse forms of helping that combine local notions of gift, duty, and responsibility with a universalizing claim to aid humanity.A good example of this is an orphanage in India that was "at once, a realm of Hindu dan; a form of nonreciprocal giving that does not demand a return; a site of state welfare, where citizens enjoyed certain rights; and a place where volunteers responded to social obligations and

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 — 14 citations exist upstream.

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