| This thesis concerns humanitarian aid in the context of a natural disaster in El Salvador, and more particularly, the experience of a group of fifty families, victims of the 2001 earthquake, which were involved in housing reconstruction project led by an international NGO. The main objective of this research is to show to what extent the logic of gift-giving, which is often associated with humanitarian assistance in non-conflict situations, is operational or not. Starting off from a short article stating that the humanitarian gift is a perverse gift, I examine the pertinence of this assertion taking into account the two main traditions concerning the notion of the gift: first, the Judaeo-Christian heritage stating that a gift has to be free, disinterested and unilateral, and second, the anthropological understanding of the gift, structured around the triple obligation of giving, receiving and returning, as Marcel Mauss explained it in his famous Essay on the gift.; This thesis contains three parts. After the introduction, where I present various anthropological writings on the subject of the gift starting with Marcel Mauss, the first part, chapters one, two and three, concerns the theoretical foundations behind the ideas of gift-giving and humanitarianism, the birth of international humanitarian assistance and various issues and controversies which characterize it today, especially in situations other than a natural disaster. In the second part, chapters four and five, I present the socio-political context of El Salvador as well as a specific debate on the vulnerability of Salvadorian society to natural disasters. Finally, in the five remaining chapters of the third part, I analyse an ethnographic case-study of post-seismic humanitarian assistance according to the theory of the gift. Chapter six, while presenting the municipality of Armenia, concerns more specifically the emergency period where various actors were put to the forefront. In chapter seven I analyse the post-seismic reconstruction period and explain the particular conceptual underpinnings of a housing reconstruction project led by the German Red Cross for a group of poor families victim of the earthquake. The next chapter is more descriptive, I show various aspects of the day-to-day life on the building site, such as the beneficiaries' world-view and the social relationships between the different micro-groups involved. Chapter nine and ten analyse how the logic of the gift put forth by the NGO representatives, as well as their belief in participatory work to be the means to foster a sense of community, became increasingly unsustainable while the project progressed. These chapters expose various crises and letdowns which characterize life under what I call a humanitarian reconstruction regime. Finally, in the conclusion, I present what this study on contemporary humanitarian assistance may bring to the anthropological theory of the gift. |
