The Politics of Catastrophe: Coping with ‘Humanitarianism’ in Post-tsunami Sri Lanka

Abstract

Understood as a generous offering to a distant and suffering ‘Other’ (Boltansky, 1999), the phenomenon of international donations to Sri Lanka after the tsunami can be seen as an emblematic expression of humanitarian gifting, cast in the charitable and philanthropic idiom of disinterested solidarity. However, what really unfolded in the country was a ‘competitive humanitarianism’ expressed on various levels (Stirrat, 2006). On one hand, it was a competition involving different social sectors within each donor country in an ostentatious race to give;¹ on the other hand, it produced a massive spectacle of damage in the affected areas as a local strategy to capture aid. As Stirrat argues, competitiveness among NGOs was measured more in terms of how and where to spend the most money in the least amount of time rather than how to obtain the money in the first place. It was this particular quality of the gifting — simultaneously macroscopic and ambivalent — that inspired my ethnographic work in the wake of the tsunami. My aim was to follow the ‘social life of the gift’ (Stirrat and Henkel, 1997) in its passage through each link of the ‘brokerage chain’ that connects a hypothetical donor to its final beneficiary in the disaster zone (Lewis and Mosse, 2006).