Review Article

NIKOLAS KOSMATOPOULOS

Crisis works

What do anthropologists have to say about crisis, the buzzword of our times? How
does the discipline most known for radical suspicion towards global notions approach
one of the most universalised and universalising words today? How does the anthropological response to modernitys eternal love affair with crisis navigate between outright
rejection and creative engagement with its ethnographic and theoretical potential? The
title of this review essay encapsulates both a rapidly proliferating trend in anthropology
today, i.e. ethnographic research on crisis, and the chief approach adopted by most of
these works, i.e. crisis as constitutive of new subjectivities and power formations. Three
recently published (2013) books taken together offer a kaleidoscopic view of the
different perspectives and challenges facing the inchoate anthropology of crisis.
In this review I will draw on class discussions in a homonymous course, which I
taught last autumn at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African
Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York. In Crisis Works we
approached crisis not just as a modern category of thought, but rather as an emerging
eld of expertise, an advanced technology of government and a rewarding ethnographic
challenge. In the course I selected these three books as core readings, not only because
they are representative of a contemporary anthropology of crisis but also because they
study classical crisis cases (natural disasters, disease epidemics, nancial meltdowns,
respectively) from different points of view (affected communities, medical doctors,
expert and lay analysts) and based on a variety of methodological and theoretical frameworks (marketisation, humanitarianism, narrativisation). Hence, this review is written
both from the perspective of an interested reader and an engaged teacher eliciting
student insights and responses to the readings.

Disaster markets
Markets of Sorrow, Labours of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Duke
University Press 2013), Vincanne Adamss ethnography of post-Katrina New Orleans,
serves as a tting introduction to the anthropology of crisis and disaster for newcomers, both due to her adept handling of a highly mediatised catastrophe and the
easily accessible writing style of the book. Markets of Sorrow tellingly describes the
aftermath of a natural disaster as it is characterised by the advent of what the author
calls an affect economy, which encompasses the business of social suffering on one
hand and the philanthrocapitalism of faith-based civil society organisations on the
other. Keeping always an eye on the privatisation of state relief services, the routes of
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corporate and government money and the entanglement of entrepreneurs, banks,

insurance companies, state agencies and civil society organisations with humanitarianism and relief efforts, this post-disaster ethnography applies at a smaller scale the
critical framework that Naomi Klein described as disaster capitalism. Adams is a
medical anthropologist, hence perhaps her focus on suffering both in her eloquent
effort to show how it turns into lucrative business and in her conscious choice to give
abundant space to the often desperate voices of the victims. In that sense, Adams
follows the tradition of an engaged (and denunciatory) anthropology pioneered by
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Paul Farmer.
Most of the book is divided between rst-hand testimonies of people who suffered
during and after Katrina and second-order analyses of new forms of structural inequality provided by the author. Couched in a Marxist language with biopolitical overtones,
Adams concepts are simultaneously arguments affective surplus, venture
philanthropy, business of social suffering positing that one more disaster of almost
equal intensity took place in New Orleans after Katrina. Both disasters are far from
natural Adams considers the term inadequate, because long-term mismanagement
and neglect have heavily contributed to the catastrophic results in the rst place.
Placing the frustration of those affected (perhaps exceedingly) centre stage, Adams
builds her story mainly by drawing on interviews with the victims and short eldwork
stays in their city. This is ultimately the crucial element of the book: namely her
prioritising of the political aim to denounce global neoliberalism on behalf of the affected people on the ground over a deeper contextual understanding of the local struggles and solidarities that go beyond widespread accusations of neglect and proteering
by state and corporations respectively. In other words, Adams in following the
neoliberal takeover of relief efforts runs the risk of treating New Orleans in similar
ways to those that she denounces, namely as a powerless local site in which powerful
global projects (and projections) are applied.
Having said that, the strong feature of the book is the identication of new forms
of knowledge, labour and power around the expanding affect economy. The
militarisation of emergency as part of the US national security doctrine, the
privatisation of state services, the moralisation of the disaster relief turning it from
civil right to moral duty, all of these fundamental changes open the way to new elds
of expertise and forms of subjectivity that call for further anthropological investigation.
Thus, hurricane victims have to become Katrina savvy in order to overcome the
mounting bureaucracy that stands in the way of the equitable recognition of need;
army generals have to develop specialised skills for humanitarian operations; charities
have to learn to do business-like book keeping and to compete with corporations for
government funds on relief. Those affected are expected to become self-entrepreneurial
and market-visible, but must also appear needy, indebted and self-accusatory in the
eyes of the donors. Powerful technologies and practices, such as opaque debt regulations and home value programmes, Sisyphean negotiations with insurance companies
and loan agencies, moralised relationships with church-run charities are constitutive
of the techno-morals (Kosmatopoulos 2014a) of the post-disaster reconstruction.
Seeing how these practices work while still listening to the voices of those affected
by their widespread application convincingly complicates concepts such as affect, state
(failure) and even natural disaster. Thus within disaster capitalism, affect is becoming a
eld of investment, but also a vehicle to provide free labour where the state has withdrawn; yet, the state does not withdraw completely. On the contrary, in Katrina the
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state was the main vehicle through which public money was transferred into private
hands and both eventually produced what Adams calls a privately organised, publicly
funded bureaucratic failure (2013: 7). Therefore, any claim of failure must be
treated with care, given that the failure of some is the prot of others. Finally, in
disasters such as Katrina, the sustained rhetoric of disasters as natural phenomena
enables their political causes to be overlooked and the effects of disastrous policies
on environment, social security and population protection to be either minimised
or silenced (2013: 15).
Altogether Markets of Sorrow is an important contribution to the studies of crisis and
inequality in the United States today, not least because it strongly links these two notions
with one another. Surely, the books clear focus on the securitybusinessfaith
complex wants to serve as a wake-up call to the contemporary changes in the
government of care and relief at a global scale. Writing it from the point of view of the
victims comes as a convenient emotional auxiliary to this aim, as is often the case in
ethnographies of suffering.

Humanitarian dilemmas
If Markets of Sorrow leaves the reader with feelings of partisanship and moral outrage,
Life in Crisis The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University of
California Press 2013), Peter Redelds ethnography of Medecins Sans Frontieres
(MSF), reads as the distilled outcome of a constant and cautious reection that enhances
doubt and undermines any potential partiality. It is not by chance, after all, that Redeld
tells the story of one of the most inuential global humanitarian organisations mainly
through the political and ethical dilemmas that MSF encountered since its inception in
the early 1970s in Paris. Redeld suggests the ethnographic study of MSF as a response
to this research question: What would it mean to build a framework for action around
an ethic of life, understood medically and cast on a global scale? (2013: 1). In his pursuit
of answers, Redeld produced a ne-grained ethnography of an important global institution, a well-studied partial history of medical humanitarianism and a reective treatise in
ethics from an anthropological point of view; altogether, an essential enrichment to the
growing and important body of literature initiated by anthropologists (and critics) of
humanitarianism, such as Didier Fassin and Miriam Ticktin.
The book is divided into three main parts, realistically reecting the story and
convincingly corresponding to the argument. Part 1, Terms of Engagement, sets the
overall stage by introducing the institutional, moral and historical foundations of
MSF. Here, Redeld presents his chief theoretical framework of minimal biopolitics,
echoing Foucault in the focus on the biological welfare of the population as the object
of government. Part 2, Global Ambitions, describes the main contours of the long
expansion of MSF in a geographical and institutional sense, which brought about the
consolidation of global hegemony in the eld but also the proliferation of the practice
of moral witness, which encapsulates the Doctors chief ethical stance vis--vis atrocities and humanitarian crises. Part 3, Testing Limits, further elaborates on the major
dilemmas and challenges facing MSF, such as the need of a constant presence in the
eld because of chronic diseases, such as HIV-AIDS, and the problem of triage, a
continuous effort to reconcile the principle of humanitarian aid for all in need with
the omnipresent scarcity of resources.
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Throughout the book, crisis is treated as an ongoing and open-ended ethnographic

question, premised on the ancient Greek double meaning of the word, according to
which crisis entails both a critical situation and a crucial decision upon it. MSF
couldnt survive without the word emergency, writes Redeld (2013: 14), and
demonstrates how the application of the word prompts MSF to prioritise the present
over the past and the future, and to operate both within a presupposed state of rupture
and an imperative need for action (2013: 14). In this sense, humanitarianism as it is
understood by MSF has come to dene itself through exception and disaster and not
through development.
Notwithstanding this unquestionable ethico-institutional framework, all kinds of
dilemmas capture the attention of the ethnographer. Redeld tells the story of the
MSFs evolving through what he calls the shifting dreams of the contemporary aid
world and the lines of tension running through its vision (2013: 2). In particular, he
shows how MSF has been constantly confronted with diverse versions of limits,
borders and critical decisions, and eventually how the responses to them have paved
the way for the organisations global success, but often also paralysis and division.
Thus, the historical origins of the Doctors are marked by a crucial decision to choose
the moral mission of saving lives over the political project of changing the world. Later
on, the dilemma resurfaced over the organisations aporia of neutrality vis--vis states
and other global players, such as the Red Cross (ICRC). The book shows eloquently
how the moral aim of saving lives and the declared practice of bearing witness face
constant practical and political limits. On the face of these limitations the ethnographer
follows closely the members of the organisation in their struggle to redene the ethical
and operational framework, mainly relying on what they regard as high moral
standards and an institutional tradition of self-reection and open dialogue.
Notwithstanding the ethnographers meticulous focus on limits and bordercrossings regarding the organisation under study and his early promises to examine
intervention, ironically the ethnography itself remains often within the institutional
borders of the Doctors Without Borders thus often telling the story almost
exclusively from within (and often from the perspective of the upper organisational
echelons). As a result, we rarely get insights from the possible effects of MSF policies
on populations and places. Even in cases in which the ethnographer has ventured
outside the ofces of the organisation (e.g. camps in Uganda), there is hardly any information about how the receivers of the aid think about it. Perhaps the self-critical modus
operandi that MSF prides itself on is enabling the ethnographer to disable his own
critical take on the institution under study. However, given the critique of humanitarianism and compassion as an ethical principle and the application of ethics in favour of
pragmatism (Asad 2014), one would expect to hear more about the consequences of
MSFs minimal biopolitics on populations and places.
This internal perspective might have inuenced the way that the author represents
instances of doubt and dissent within the organisation, which are given less gravity than
their potential political effects and stakes. For example, the controversy over the
Afghanistan mission in the 1980s is discussed in a matter-of-fact manner that leaves
the reader with the suspicion that the ethnographer has taken on face value the claims
of those who stay behind. Redeld similarly treats the thorny issue of decolonisation,
with which MSF has been frequently confronted both internally and externally. This
highly political and ethical issue is treated briey (and rather insignicantly) in six
out of the books 247 pages.
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Perhaps conscious of this potential critique, Redeld posits from the very beginning that his guide for telling the MSF story is the Bildungsroman the Romantic
novel of self-formation (2013: 3). His approach is largely descriptive, produced
through the practice of simply following his chosen groups passage through the world
of practice (2013: 2). Notwithstanding the conceptual and contextual bias that
sheds a rather heroic light on MSF, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Peace, the
rewarding part of this choice is the impressive range of material provided. Redeld
has put massive work into this ethnography, with numerous visits to exhibitions,
meetings, conferences and eld projects in Central Africa; in-depth analyses of reports,
handbooks, policies and newsletters; comprehensive interviews with current and retired
members of the organisation. In this undertaking he has been fortunate to study an
organisation with a strong internal culture of textual production, which goes far beyond
the proliferation of codes of conduct and manuals of operation as many global organisations have it. After all, strong internal democracy and the possibility given to members to
express themselves openly about the strategic or practical decisions of the organisation are
major elements that differentiate the MSF from the UN or the ICRC.
Teaching Life in Crisis to a diverse class including both undergraduates in anthropology and in other disciplines gave me the chance to discuss with them the merits and
advantages of both meticulous in-depth eldwork and contemporary social theory.
Redelds work is a product of erudition and reection. The absence of universal
claims and denunciatory statements matches nicely with his sober narrative style. For
some of my students, however, this choice produced an altogether (too) sympathetic
portrait of the organisation, which reects the ethnographic focus on the internal
debates as they are represented by powerful players within the organisation.

Expert narratives
Janet Roitmans Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press 2013) is written as the rallying
title suggests in the format of a manifesto. The declared aim of the book is to make
a strong argument against the concept of crisis the primary enabling blind spot for
the production of knowledge (2013: 25). To do this, Roitman embarks on an ambitious
enterprise that is risky both conceptually and stylistically, seeking to provide the reader
with a sort of philosophically inspired commentary on the diverse narratives around
the nancial crisis of 2008/9. Roitmans material is mostly if not exclusively textual.
How do crisis authors structure their texts? What kinds of forms of veridiction are
there? These are the research questions that guide her semantic inquiry. At the centre
of this method is her differentiation between what she calls rst- and second-order
observations, thus the investigation of how and why we all make so easily the leap from
rst-order observations, such as there is no money to second-order observations,
such as this is a crisis. Situating herself at the interface of these and other dividing lines
(academic and popular crisis narrations is another one), the author seeks to observe the
blind spot of second-order observation and to erase or at least lighten these lines
(2013: 15).
Roitmans conceptual critique of crisis begins with Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Barack Obama, who both derived from crisis a strongly transcendental and experiential
meaning. However, most of the book features theories and research by fellow
academics, on whose work Roitman relies heavily to make her argument. Thus, the
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historian Reinhard Koselleck takes on a protagonist role in the story covering more
than 15% of the book and providing an elaborate genealogy of crisis/critique, as well as
his argument on the separation of morality and politics. Further inuential authors in
the political economy and nancial crisis, such as David Harvey, Martha Poon, Greta
Krippner and Daniel Parrochia, are called on to provide primary research material.
This is arguably the shakiest ground on which the author walks in the book. The experimental style of a second order narrative often oscillates between an obscure language
and a missing ethnographic context. Perhaps a more substantial link to her own
previous work on nancial markets in Africa could have offered a profound context
and a juxtaposed text at the same time. In fact, Roitman makes this connection when
she refers to her work in Africa in order to refer to how the continent often appears
as an ontological category of thought under the sign of crisis (2013: 157). Alas, this
promising reference takes no more space than a short footnote.
Overall, Roitman successfully makes the argument that expert claims to crisis and
lay accessions to those claims serve not radical change, but rather the afrmation of
longstanding principles in the economy and in the polity altogether (2013: 16). In other
words, crisis is business as usual (Calhoun and Derluguian 2011) that is often
overlooked by the proliferation of what Bloor (1991) called the sociology of error.
This particular kind of sociology begins with the question What went wrong? and
as such it is shared by a wide-ranging array of often conicting interpretations
and traditions, such as neoliberals, neo-Keynesian, Marxist, cultural studies. The
sociology of error alternately, the sociology of deviation orients us towards possible
sources, roots and causes of crisis, a term that is posited without question or doubt.
Roitman shows how this grand scheme of distortion proliferates among expert and
lay narratives alike and as a result it engenders certain narrations, but it also enables
and forecloses various kinds of questions that pertain not only to the systemic features
of world economy, but also, and essentially, to moral (dis)placements.
Although she doesnt venture into the morality of debt and indebtedness today,
her account on the construction of debt as an asset class is highly suggestive. Here
the book is at its best, with lots of empirical material and close observations on the
complex workings of nancial mechanisms. Thus, instead of the usual suspects, such
as irrational speculation, corrupt culture, erroneous policy, faulty regulation, defective
models, missed forecasting, or systemic failure and underlying contradictions,
Roitman shows how what we really have is the production of positive or, better,
practical knowledge such that the claim to crisis becomes a particular (political)
solution (2013: 24).
This passionate manifesto against crisis ends up re-writing the history of the
subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8 by highlighting the deeper systemic changes in
the economy that have been normalised during the past decade or so. In the end, she
suggests albeit reluctantly to investigate risk as the basis of crisis in our world today.
To many today, risk is the permanent peril (2013: 96). Here again she is drawing on
secondary material to argue that risk today is governed (and produced) via management
techniques and as such is highly productive for the proliferation of ideals of opportunity,
performance, gain and value (2013: 101). By asserting that nancial devices are not used
in contexts; they create contexts (2013: 102), she is resolutely adopting the deconstructionist sociology of economic knowledge pioneered by Michel Callon.
In the end, Roitman rightly wishes to relate her insights to the recent movements
that rose against the crisis, such as those of Occupy. In sync with these movements,
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she asserts that in terms of morality i.e. which actors should bear the burden of a
fading prosperity we still ask the same questions (2013: 112). Yet Roitman is
correctly adamant in her push to disassociate the organic analogy between crisis and
critique, arguing that we must be able to observe how economy works without being
burdened by grand and unquestioned moral judgements. Her last disclaimer, that
to many people today there is real crisis, serves to caution against the dropping of
the concept altogether if it serves to describe real experiential conditions.

Conclusion: morality returns

Disaster markers, humanitarian dilemmas and expert narratives undoubtedly constitute
essential facets of the contemporary landscape of crisis and disaster. Anthropological
works that scratch the surface of post-disaster relief, medical humanitarianism and crisis
narratives keep the discipline in sync with the task of providing innovative, rigid and
highly relevant research. Notwithstanding the differences in the ways the authors
approach their topics, all of them retain a strong ethnographic focus on practices, devices
and technologies through which knowledge, labour, biopolitics and capital are reorganised during and after crises and disasters. All of them place at the centre of the inquiry
the technopolitics of crisis (Kosmatopoulos 2014b), such as in Redelds close investigation of the refugee camp, the armband, the global kit, Roitmans second-order examination
of nancial products, and Adams rather loose exploration of bureaucratic regulations.
Interestingly, all of them share a rather reluctant attitude towards assuming the
status of a eld specialist. Thus, Redeld admits not to be a specialist by training,
while Adams announces that she deliberately excluded all local elements (such as
music, religion, history), so her story can be taken for its universality. Finally, Roitman
consciously takes the position of the second-order observer. Can this coincidence make
us conclude that crisis per se is in fact inaccessible to ethnographic research? It seems in
fact that exploring more or less organised responses to crisis by all kinds of lay people
and experts constitutes thus far the bulk of the anthropological intervention. Finally, it
may not be by chance that all these works adopt a particular stance on morality. While
Redeld takes the moral principles of the MSF at face value, Roitman and Adams
submit morality to (neoliberal or emancipatory) politics. No doubt, the return of
morality in current anthropological debates is manifested also in these ethnographies
of crisis. However, any morality returns have yet to yield crisis ethnographies from a
radical Nietzschean perspective, in which contemporary morality is not merely the
product of the (techno-)politics of crisis, but its very origins.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (Collge des Humanits)
CM Building 2 274, Station 10
CH-1015Lausanne, Switzerland
nikolas.kosmatopoulos@epfl.ch
Also Visiting fellow at ICTA, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

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References
Adams, V. 2013. Markets of sorrow, labors of faith: New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Asad, T. 2014. Reections on violence, law, and humanitarianism, Critical Inquiry (http://
criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/reections_on_violence_law_and_humanitarianism/) Accessed 7 September 2014.
Bloor, D. 1991. Knowledge and social imagery, 1st edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Calhoun, C. and G. Derluguian (eds.) 2011. Business as usual: the roots of the global financial meltdown,
vol. 1. New York: NYU Press.
Kosmatopoulos, N. 2014a. The birth of the workshop: technomorals, peace expertise and the care of
the self in the Middle East, Public Culture 26: 52958.
Kosmatopoulos, N. 2014b. Sentinel matters: the techno-politics of international crisis in Lebanon (and
beyond), Third World Quarterly 35: 598615.
Redeld, P. 2013. Life in crisis: the ethical journey of Doctors Without Borders. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Roitman, J. 2013. Anti-crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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