Witnessing and filling the pain: an ethnography of an humanitarian device
Palestine. Humanitarian device. Witness. Archive.
This dissertation intends an ethnography of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a humanitarian Programme created by the ecumenical organization World Council of Churches (WCC). It understands this Programme as part of a humanitarian device, namely its governmental techniques and procedures aimed at “saving vulnerable population” and the humanitarian discourse produced in this environment, which will compose the circuit of solidarity and humanitarian aid in Palestinian territories. This dissertation proposes and ethnography of this gesture of “compassion”, taking as its figure the “ecumenical companion” within the WCC/EAPPI, and focusing on the witness and archive categories. It investigates how this initial willingness to “soften other’ suffering” arises among Brazilian candidates for EA, and the mechanics through which it captured by a larger complex of so-called humanitarian organizations, in which the WCC/EAPPI is inserted. Thus, I intend to analyze two central elements in the action and configuration of this device. I propose, on the one hand, to analyze the governance techniques and operations practiced by Brazilian EA’s, as well as to investigate the motivation of the travel to Palestine, their experiences, impressions, trajectories, commotions and discourse as part of what the anthropologist Didier Fassin (2012) called humanitarian reason. And, on the other hands, the humanitarian witness under the production of an archive/documents that intends to erect a truth about what happens in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). The collection of information from the written testimonies, including images, statistics tables, maps, etc., condenses a given view of the reality lived by the Palestinian, namely the production of an archive that claims to be a truth about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.