In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care
Editor(s): Ilana Feldman & Miriam Ticktin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Print Length: 392 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Social Science, Political Science
Area: Global, Rwanda, Africa, Equatorial Africa
Topic: Humanity, Humanitarian Action & Humanitarianism, Ethics & Morality, Governance, Threat, Care, Globalization, Crimes against Humanity, Peace, Ecology & Climate, Environmental Justice, Social Justice, Justice, Human Rights, Biopolitics, Politics & Power, Race, Ethnic & Ethnicity, Children & Childhood, Media & Narratives, Inheritance, Dehumanization, Medicine & Healthcare, AIDS, Community, Mortality, Equality & Inequality, Experimentality
Scientists, activists, state officials, NGOs, and others increasingly claim to speak and act on behalf of “humanity.” The remarkable array of circumstances in which humanity is invoked testifies to the category’s universal purchase. Yet what exactly does it mean to govern, fight, and care in the name of humanity? In this timely collection, leading anthropologists and cultural critics grapple with that question, examining configurations of humanity in relation to biotechnologies, the natural environment, and humanitarianism and human rights. From the global pharmaceutical industry, to forest conservation, to international criminal tribunals, the domains they analyze highlight the diversity of spaces and scales at which humanity is articulated.
The editors argue that ideas about humanity find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security. As a site of governance, humanity appears as both an object of care and a source of anxiety. Assertions that humanity is being threatened, whether by environmental catastrophe or political upheaval, provide a justification for the elaboration of new governing techniques. At the same time, humanity itself is identified as a threat (to nature, to nation, to global peace) which governance must contain. These apparently contradictory understandings of the relation of threat to the category of humanity coexist and remain in tension, helping to maintain the dynamic co-production of governance and humanity.
“Most of the chapters in In the Name of the Humanity raise more questions than answers, but this makes it an ideal book both for courses on human
rights and globalization and for scholars working on human rights, humanitarian interventions, and globalization more generally. The accounts are remarkably balanced, neither cheerleading for globalization under the name of humanity nor pushing a relentlessly bleak image of globalization as neoliberalism.” — Jonathan Simon, Political Theory
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Government and Humanity — Ilana Feldman & Miriam Ticktin
When Humanity Sits in Judgment: Crimes against Humanity and the Conundrum of Race and Ethnicity at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda — Richard Ashby Wilson
Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace — Liisa Malkki
Narrative, Humanity, and Patrimony in an Equatorial African Forest — Rebecca Hardin
Inhumanitas: Political Speciation, Animality, Natality, Defacement — Allen Feldman
“Medication is me now”: Human Values and Political Life in the Wake of Global AIDS Treatment — Joāo Biehl
Environment, Community, Government — Arun Agrawal
The Mortality Effect: Counting the Dead in the Cancer Trial — S. Lochlann Jain
Inequality of Lives, Hierarchies of Humanity: Moral Commitments and Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarianism — Didier Fassin
The Politics of Experimentality — Adriana Petryna
Stealth Nature: Biomimesis and the Weaponization of Life — Charles Zerner
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Ilana Feldman is a cultural and historical anthropologist who works in the Middle East. She is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Her research has focused on the Palestinian experience, both inside and outside of historic Palestine, examining practices of government, humanitarianism, policing, displacement, and citizenship. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Source: https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/ilana-feldman
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Miriam Ticktin is a Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Miriam’s research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity, although her current research is more interested in imagining and opening the way to new political formations. She has written on immigration, humanitarianism, and border walls in France and the US, and how bodies and biologies are shaped by gender, race and class.
Source: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/miriam-ticktin
More from Miriam Ticktin in this library, click here.