CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Berbec-Chiritoiu, Anamaria |
|---|---|
| Title | Title |
| Summary | Much of the striving critique of humanitarian interventions keeps a keen focus on the macro politics of this topic. In this thesis, I present an ethnographic account of such an intervention done in the aftermath of a violent event with ethnic overtones in a village in Transylvania. I analyze how, building on bureaucratic testimonies of the irreducibly intimate experience of trauma, notions such as compassion or compensation become disembedded from their contexts, causing suspicion, reifying the feeling of injustice, and feeding into an overall commoditization of trauma. By looking at how the subjects of the intervention reproduce the administrative language in which their experiences have been translated by civic entrepreneurs, at how they store their testimonies in documents and “declarations”, and at how the body is employed as ultimate evidence to reclaim the compassion of an abstract governance, I argue that this repertoire of mimicry comes to function as a distorted reflection of the humanitarian governance which sought to address the case. |
| Supervisor | Rabinowitz, Dan; Naumescu, Vlad |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/berbec_anamaria.pdf |
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