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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Main Author: Grayman, Jesse Hession
Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
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
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1041462020-03-07T12:10:42Z Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia Grayman, Jesse Hession School of Humanities and Social Sciences Sociology 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. Accepted version 2014-05-26T03:04:06Z 2019-12-06T21:27:29Z 2014-05-26T03:04:06Z 2019-12-06T21:27:29Z 2014 2014 Journal Article Grayman, J. H. (2014). Rapid response: Email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia. Social Science & Medicine, in press. 0277-9536 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/104146 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/19453 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.04.024 en Social science & medicine © 2014 Elsevier. This is the author created version of a work that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier. It incorporates referee’s comments but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, structural formatting, may not be reflected in this document. The published version is available at: [DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.04.024]. 10 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Sociology
spellingShingle Sociology
Grayman, Jesse Hession
Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
description 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.
author2 School of Humanities and Social Sciences
author_facet School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Grayman, Jesse Hession
format Article
author Grayman, Jesse Hession
author_sort Grayman, Jesse Hession
title Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
title_short Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
title_full Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
title_fullStr Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
title_full_unstemmed Rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia
title_sort rapid response : email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in aceh, indonesia
publishDate 2014
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/104146
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/19453
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