Abstract
This chapter aims to illustrate the epistemological importance of the researcher’s emotional reflexivity in ethnography conducted among vulnerable groups exposed to humanitarian interventions. I draw upon my research on the everyday experience and identity processes of children who live in the slums of Bangkok and who are supported, as disadvantaged “slum children” (dek salam), by several local and international aid organizations. In the first part of this chapter, I will retrospectively analyze my first humanitarian encounter with the dek salam. I will specifically show how reflexively investigating my feelings of a priori pity towards the slum children helped localize these feelings’ historically and culturally specific origin in a western political framework—a humanitarian ethos of compassion—and, ultimately, helped me avoid an ethnocentric interpretation of these children’s emotional experiences. In the second part of the chapter, by means of ethnographic case studies, I will show the role of “humanitarian emotions” in molding specific patterns of inter-affective interaction between sympathetic social operators and pity-seeking slum children. Finally, I will stress the scientific and ethical importance of the ethnographer’s scrutinizing his or her affective experience in order to identify the subtle, yet important, differences among the multiple and interconnected polarities and sources of both the researcher’s and local social actors’ emotional lives.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I look at emotions as a polythetic class of bio-cultural, inter-subjective events, which vary according to ethnographic contexts, and are co-produced by both the ethnographer and local social actors. For a conceptual discussion on emotions, see chapter “Introduction: Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography” to this volume.
- 2.
As Calhoun (2008) notes, the term “humanitarian” was first used in the early nineteenth century to describe a theological position stressing the humanity of Christ, and subsequently efforts to alleviate suffering or advance the human race in general.
- 3.
The UN identifies a slum household “as a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area lacking one or more of the following: (1) Durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions. (2) Sufficient living space, which means not more than three people sharing the same room. (3) Easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price. (4) Access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared by a reasonable amount of people. (5) Security of tenure that prevents forced evictions” (United Nations 2006).
- 4.
The wai has its origin in the Indic Anjali Mudra and is present, in similar versions, in several Asian countries (Anuman 1963).
- 5.
Within the Thai hierarchical social system, social interactions are terminologically mediated by the use of linguistic markers of status (big/small people, phu-yai/phu-noi; elder brothers/younger brothers, phi/nong) that refer back to a vocabulary of power. Phu-noi are not only children but also, more generally, anyone relating to big people (phu-yai). Children in relation to parents, laity to Buddhist monks, as well as citizens to the state’s representatives, are phu-noi who must demonstrate obedience, respect, and gratitude to phu-yai (Bolotta 2014, 2016).
- 6.
Several scholars have observed the mystification of reality produced by depreciative categorical definitions of disadvantaged children. Glauser (1997) and Panter-Brick (2002), for example, have deconstructed the category of “street children,” explaining how this label tends to flatten a huge variety of cases into a one-size-fits-all political concept, which tends not only to distort the children’s family and social situations, but also to cover up the economic and political roots of their marginality.
- 7.
This happens even more in the presence of substantial economic and power differences between the helpers and the helped. Sociologist Richard Sennett’s book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality is an important contribution on these hierarchies in the context of US American welfare policy. In describing his upbringing in the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1940s Chicago, Sennett (2004, p. 13) has pointed out: “The project denied people control over their own lives. They were rendered spectators to their own needs, mere consumers of care provided to them. It was here that they experienced that peculiar lack of respect which consists of not being seen, not being accounted as full human beings”.
- 8.
The terms Westerners or “Western social workers,” just like dek salam, are problematic because they could rigidly suggest the existence of something like a homogenous and essentialized category of people. In western contexts, instead, ideas such as childhood, giving, and suffering might vary according to a multiplicity of factors including class, gender, and individual trajectories. Nevertheless, the majority of the international NGO social operators I came to know in Bangkok are Caucasian, Euro-American, middle-class professionals for whom the compassionate ethos constituted a unifying (although individually differently modulated) moral and emotional framework.
- 9.
The political value of western discourses on ‘victimized’ children have been recently documented by several anthropologists in different contexts of the Global South: see, for example, the works by Vignato (2012) in Indonesia, Cheney (2013) in Uganda, and myself (2017a, b) in Thailand. These studies show how such discourses, and the correlated image of children as “victims,” could be strategically used and appropriated by the subjects of humanitarian policies.
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Acknowledgments
I owe special thanks to the protagonists of this chapter, the children I’ve been doing research with in the slums of Bangkok. Being a (participant) witness to their life trajectories is a tremendous privilege. I would like to thank the section editors of this volume for their thoughtful suggestions and comments during the composition and revision of this chapter. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of this volume Thomas Stodulka, Ferdi Thajib, and Samia Dinkelaker for their invaluable insights and editorial dedication to the project.
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Bolotta, G. (2019). Making Sense of (Humanitarian) Emotions in an Ethnography of Vulnerable Children: The Case of Bangkok Slum Children. In: Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., Thajib, F. (eds) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_4
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