Cultural Anthropology

Massive displacements of people due to political violence and oppression and the sight—on television and in newspapers—of refugees as a miserable “sea of humanity” have come to seem more and more common. If these displacements, and media representations of them, appear familiar, so too does the range of humanitarian interventions that is routinely activated by the movement of people. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the forms typically taken by humanitarian interventions that focus on refugees as their object of knowledge, assistance, and management, and to trace the effects of these forms of intervention at several different levels.