Joint Seminar of the Disaster and Risk, Migration and Mobility, and Conflict Clusters @ CSPS:
Humanitarian Confessions: Ethnography, Autobiography, and the Locations of Religion in Aidland – Dr. Philip Fountain
Discussants: Philip Quarles van Ufford (Emeritus Professor VU) and Bram Jansen (Lecturer WUR)
International aid and development interventions during and after humanitarian crises can be studied as more than practical emergency measures. Several authors perceive of the environment of such interventions as related to cultures of aid, introducing notions such as Peaceland (Autesserre 2014), and Aidland (Apthorpe 2011). Philip Fountain, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, explores aspects of these cultures of aid in a joint seminar of the Disaster and Risk, Migration and Mobility, and Conflict Clusters @ CSPS on 4 July, 15:00-16:30 in Orion B3016. Click here to register for this event.
In his presentation Philip Fountain will discuss how Humanitarian autobiographies provide compelling windows for analysing the locations of religion within the international aid and development sector. Free from the genre constraints of fundraising appeals or development scholarship, religion and spirituality are frequently given considerable space in these narrations, in multiple different ways. These thick narrations present valuable spaces for reconsidering the cultural dynamics of Aidland. This paper examines the ‘confessions’ of humanitarians in books such as Three Cups of Tea, Emergency Sex, and Zen Under Fire. The critical study of autobiography is especially productive when the texts are brought into conversation with ethnography.
Philip Fountain is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has published extensively on religion, development and humanitarianism. His books include: Political Theologies and Development in Asia: Transcendence, Sacrifice and Aspiration, edited with Giuseppe Bolotta and R. Michael Feener (Manchester University Press, 2020); The Mission of Development: Religion and Techno-Politics in Asia, edited with Catherine Scheer and R. Michael Feener (Brill; 2018); and The Service of Faith: An Ethnography of Mennonites and Development (forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Centre for Space, Place and Society 