Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh’s coastal communities. This article presents a medic...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2014
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Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/104146 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/19453 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and
the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005,
just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh’s coastal communities. This
article presents a medical humanitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while
working for a large aid agency in post-conflict Aceh from 2005-2007. In December 2005, the
agency faced the first test of its medical and negotiation capacities to provide psychiatric care to
a recently amnestied political prisoner whose erratic behavior upon returning home led to his rearrest
and detention at a district police station. I juxtapose two methodological approaches—an
ethnographic content analysis of the agency’s email archive and field-based participantobservation—
to recount contrasting narrative versions of the event. I use this contrast to
illustrate and critique the immediacy of the humanitarian imperative that characterizes the
industry. Immediacy is explored as both an urgent moral impulse to assist in a crisis and a form
of mediation that seemingly projects neutral and transparent transmission of content. I argue that
the sense of immediacy afforded by email enacts and amplifies the humanitarian imperative at
the cost of abstracting elite humanitarian actors out of local and moral context. As a result, the
management and mediation of this psychiatric case by email produced a bureaucratic model of
care that failed to account for complex conditions of chronic political and medical instability on
the ground. |
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