Beware Humanitarian Talk: Standardization and Erasure in Humanitarian Talk

Rethinking Development and Inequality Vol. 3 (2014)

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Beware Humanitarian Talk: Standardization and Erasure in Grantmaking1

Laura S. Jung

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how humanitarian orders of discourse exploit, marginalize, and consti-tute cultural imperialism and thus are institutions of domination and oppression (Young, 1990: 9). Through textual analysis and informant interviews, as well as ethnographic data collected in Hon-duran Garífuna communities at various times between 2009 and 2012, I show how the imposition of one language combined with the systematic erasure of another is a necrolinguistic process that contributes to an erosion of humanity (Mugane, 2005:162). These processes work through linguistic ideologies of “Standard” (Hill, 2008), “professionalism,” and “relevance” to regulate language and style and thus render the humanitarian agents and subjects more legible, or easier to manage, ma-nipulate, and control (Scott, 1998). Humanitarian orders of discourse, or the right way to talk about humanitarian aid, exploit the conditions of existence and the identity of the humanitarian subject, marginalize local ways of knowing and doing, and, constitutes a form of cultural imperialism. Based on evidence presented herein, I maintain that the very mechanisms intended to reduce various forms of inequalities are in fact rooted in the same ideological apparatuses that produce and repro-duce inequality in the first place.

Key Words: Humanitarian aid discourse; Development aid

INTRODuCTION

In this article I explore how humanitarian discourse functions as a kind of necrolinguistic apparatus (Mugane, 2005). The work of necrolinguistics attempts to muzzle local languages (Mugane, 2005) and cultural systems like the testimonio, a rich and powerful Latin American tradition of exposing and denouncing injustices (Beverly, 2004; Kohl and Farthing, 2013; Yúdice, 1991), in favor of stan-dardized or professionalized modes of communication. I argue that standardization of language and 1 I am grateful to my reviewers, as well as Dr. William Leap, Dr. David Lowry, and colleagues at American University, as well as

comments from participants at the 2013 American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago, Illinois, for their feed-

back, insights, and support in the development of this article. Any errors or omissions are the sole responsibility of the author.

Laura S. Jung is a PhD student at the Departament of Anthropolgy, American University. Email: [email protected]

Rethinking Development & Inequality

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style into the official English language of humanitarian aid and control over the power to determine who receives aid or does not establishes humanitarian orders of discourse as a site of necropolitical power and social injustice.

This work draws from informant interviews, grant documents and online sources containing funding information and guidelines, as well as ethnographic data collected in Honduran Garífuna communi-ties at various times between 2009 and 2012. To begin, I discuss the main theoretical concepts and the linguistic methodologies I am using to inform my research. Having established that foundation, I then elaborate on the ways that the humanitarian order of discourse is standardized through grant making and professionalization of aid work and thus erasure of local knowledges. In turn, I address how this process of language standardization affects humanitarian practice and translates into the creation of a legible humanitarian subject.

Following the work of Iris Marion Young (1991), I argue that humanitarian aid discourse constitutes a form of institutionalized domination and oppression and bears the markers of social injustice. Young identifies those markers as exploitation, marginalization, and cultural imperialism. As I show, humanitarian orders of discourse exploit the conditions of existence and the identity of the humani-tarian subject, marginalizing, subordinating and assimilating local ways of knowing and doing into a standardized system of aid giving and receiving, and in so doing constitutes a form of cultural imperialism.

THEORIZING HuMANITARIAN POWER

Humanitarianism, as I understand it, is an idea and a practice through which the welfare of human beings is attended to via aid mechanisms that aim to redistribute resources. Humanitarianism is a system in which its agents – volunteers, bureaucrats, officials, philanthropists and aid workers – establish who is worth saving, who is unworthy, and how resources like technology, medicine, money, food, or shelter get distributed. In this way, humanitarianism is a necropolitical project that exercises the power to control death, and thus a way to control life (Agamben, 2002:3; Foucault, 2010; Mbembe, 2003).

Building on Achille Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics is Mugane’s (2005) theory of necrolin-guistics. Necrolinguistics is “the study of human erasure that stems from linguistic duress”, or being stranded between languages because use of one’s native tongue is restricted (Mugane, 2005: 160). Mugane’s theory suggests that, “in the battle between linguistic imposition and language loss, there is a space within which erosion of humanity takes place” (Mugane, 2005: 160). Necrolinguistics ex-


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tends Achille Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics into the field of language and has implications for what I call humanitarian orders of discourse.

Orders of discourse are particular ways of speaking that characterize institutions like humanitari-anism (Fairclough, 2001). Humanitarian discourse, then, is what humanitarians say and the social context, or where, why, and how they are saying certain things. However, not everyone gets to par-ticipate in this order of discourse in the same way. Rather than creating solutions to inequality and unevenly distributed resources as is claimed, standardization of grant applications and oral witness testimony into prescribed written formats increases access inequality.

The aspects of humanitarian orders of discourse that I address in this study include the necro-linguistic processes of language standardization, interpellation, iconization and erasure, as well as disidentification as a kind of buffer against institutionalized oppression. Grant making involves standardization and what Hill (2008) calls linguistic ideologies. Linguistic ideologies are “sets of in-terested positions about language that represent themselves as common sense, that rationalize and justify the forms and functions of text and talk” (Hill, 2008:33-34). Humanitarian orders of discourse draw from linguistic ideologies to establish the “right way” to talk about aid, development and the recipients of aid. Hill’s (2008: 35) concept of language standardization argues that “standard” is one linguistic ideology that links prestige and correctness. It establishes the appropriate style of speak-ing (or writing) and those who do it correctly attain prestige through demonstrating proper acquisition of “standard”. Those who do not perform the standard or who purposefully choose to challenge the standard are marginalized or relegated to a lower status position.

To anchor Hill’s definition of ideology, Althusser’s (1971) definition is instructive. Ideology, according to Althusser, is “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971: 162). The way the world is represented to us, through humanitarian orders of discourse, for example, “suggests a way of thinking or a perspective saturated with political and economic interests” (Hill, 2008: 34). Mar-Molinero reminds us that language ideology is most com-monly a tool that the dominant use to maintain dominance (2006: 9). Humanitarianism’s political and economic interests concern who is deemed a deserving humanitarian subject and how resources that are tightly controlled get distributed and used, and ultimately who maintains dominance. These interests are particularly important in the process of grant making, or funding certain humanitarian aid projects.

Althusser’s theory of interpellation is also critical. Interpellation is part of the linguistic ideology that determines the “right way” to talk about aid recipients. Humanitarian discourse interpellates, or


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constitutes individuals as subjects (1971: 171). Irvine and Gal (2000) define two ways that hu-manitarian subjects are interpellated. The first is iconization, or “the attribution of cause and im-mediate necessity to a connection (between linguistic features and social groups) that may be only historical, contingent, or conventional” (Irvine and Gal, 2000: 37). Ways of speaking, being, or do-ing, become semi-permanently affixed to a person or group as a way of describing the essence of the person or group. When a humanitarian talks about children living in poverty, for example, or an advertisement from Save the Children International appears during primetime television pro-gramming, the images we see or conjure in our minds are images of young, usually foreign, (usu-ally) children of color and we are invited to imagine them hungry, or sick, or un-housed. We be-gin to link these images with a certain way of being or doing, and that is the work of iconization.

Erasure is the second mechanism through which humanitarian subjects are constructed through humanitarian discourse. Erasure is “the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible” (Irvine and Gal, 2000: 38). Standardization is one way to simplify the sociolinguistic field, or what can be said or communicated, and erase all forms of communication deemed non-standard. Another way to ren-der certain persons invisible is to iconize the ideal humanitarian subject. In so doing, humanitarian discourse names who is worthy of aid and ignores or dismisses, and thus erases, others from the political framework.

In everyday humanitarian talk about recipients of aid, humanitarian agents name aid recipients who then either recognize their subject position, or possibly find ways to resist being constructed as a humanitarian subject. The good humanitarian subject recognizes, accepts, and performs their pre-scribed role. They are able to perform the deserving aid recipient and are thus made legible and are included in the hierarchy of humanitarianism. The bad subject is one who rejects the constructed po-sition of humanitarian subject. Perhaps this person refuses assistance on principle, her actions are perceived to be ungrateful, and she is thus deemed unworthy of aid. In either of these circumstances the intended aid recipient has broken the ideological rules of participation and fails to adequately perform the prescribed humanitarian subject identity.

However, as Michel Pecheux (1975) and Jose Esteban Muñoz (2000) assert, there is a third way that an individual can respond to being interpellated as a humanitarian subject. Individuals hailed as humanitarian subject, rather than fully reject the construction, can rework the subject-form to extract benefits and potentially disrupt the ideological workings of humanitarian discourse (Pecheux, 1975: 159). Muñoz calls this re-formation of identity an “identity-in-difference,” a process of crafting and performing the self (2000:7-8). Disidentification offers a way to identify with one or many identities


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but not be defined, essentialized, or to use Irvine and Gal’s (2000) term, iconized as always and only that identity.

HuMANITARIAN POWER AT WORK

In the following section, I present some cases that demonstrate how humanitarian orders of dis-course exploit, marginalize, and constitute cultural imperialism and thus are institutions of domina-tion and oppression (Young, 1990). Furthermore, these cases show how the imposition of one lan-guage combined with the systematic erasure of another is a necrolinguistic process that contributes to an erosion of humanity (Mugane, 2005). These processes work through linguistic ideologies of “Standard” (Hill 2008), “professionalism”, and “relevance” to regulate language and style and thus render the humanitarian agents and subjects more legible, or easier to manage, manipulate, and control.

The process of standardizing the language of discourse and the ways of knowing and articulating the world amounts to a colonization of the mind, body, and culture (wa-Thiong’o, 1986). Instead of adapting aid to local ways of knowing and doing, humanitarian practice is to erase, flatten, and standardize into the language and knowledge-ways of the aid worker, and more systemically the region from whence aid comes. In order to receive aid one must adopt a certain register of English and change local ways of speaking and instead adopt English language practices and Western processes.

Ways of communication deemed illegible are ignored or erased and replaced with the abrupt, sup-posedly efficient Western mode of iconizing speech (Irvine and Gal, 2000). For example, using the totalizing phrase “Appalachian Mountain Children” to describe youth facing health risks in certain parts of Appalachia homogenizes a large group of people and can negatively affect the intended recipients of aid (Irvine and Gal, 2000:38). In the most extreme cases, iconization and strict adoption of grant maker agendas without consideration of local knowledge and community-based input can result in the direct and serious harm to, or, in the case of certain populations, criminalization of the people that humanitarian agents purport to help.

STANDARDIZING WRITTEN GENRES: GRANT MAKING & GRANT WRITING

Humanitarian aid is a relatively new phenomenon, at least in terms of being practiced in civil society and private spheres. States have long practiced humanitarian aid in the form of responding to fam-ines in ally states or as a way to further political economic agendas in strategically located countries.


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USAID, the US Agency for International Development, has provided foreign assistance, in cash and in kind, to countries around the world since its inception in 1961. But non-governmental humanitar-ian aid, in its contemporary form, is only about 40 years old.2

The rise of this public and private sphere humanitarian aid phenomenon coincided with the disman-tling of government-based welfare projects in the 1970s and 80s during the Reagan-Thatcher era of privatization. The US had already implemented similar projects in so-called developing countries around the world. Implementation of austerity packages in developing countries required states to jettison social service projects in order to receive specific kinds of funding intended for business sector development. This global shift in statecraft transferred responsibility for the provision of social services from state actors to non-state proxies called non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

In order to provide social services, NGOs rely on private funding from individual donors, public fund-ing from foundations (grant makers), or ironically, government or intergovernmental funding (like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, etc.). Governments can fund NGOs who manage the same social services projects the state originally jettisoned for a fraction of the cost. This study is concerned with the way that each of these funding sources contribute to the standardization of humanitarian orders of discourse, and focuses on grant funding in particular.

Grant makers are usually organizations called foundations, established for the sole purpose of fund-ing certain kinds of projects. There are more than 76,600 individual, family, community and corporate foundations in the United States, and together they distributed $46.9 billion to the projects deemed worthy in the US and around the world in 2011 (Foundation Center, 2012). But, as anyone who has ever applied for grant funding will tell you, getting even a dollar of those monies requires mastery of a particular kind of language and the ability to prove the worthiness of need.

That language is primarily English, regardless of the country of origin or, more importantly, the first language of the grant-writer. English language acquisition is therefore the first barrier that grant-seekers face. If the local grant requester cannot read, write, or speak English they must find and of-ten fund translators to have access to grant resources. If that is not a possibility, grant-seekers may be completely denied access to grant funding. Consider Native American languages, or indigenous

2 There are certainly examples further back in history of massive foundations, like Rockefeller or Carnegie that predate

even USAID. However, while these foundations distributed aid to both the US and in the pursuit of scientific endeavors

abroad, there were very few foundations like this and it was much less common, and importantly the funding process

was remarkably different.


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languages in Central and South America or in numerous countries in Africa. Grant requests made in the language spoken by the Garífuna people of Honduras, for example, would be rejected without review. Instead, the Garífuna speaker must learn and adopt English as the language of humanitar-ian business.

Deciding to standardize English for grant applications is not merely an issue of practicality. It is a practice firmly rooted in institutionalized domination and oppression (Young, 1991). Rather than the burden falling upon the entities with economic power to fund the translation of grants written in other languages, the onus has been shifted to the very groups that have limited access to resources in the first place. At the same time a single language and a specialized way of articulating knowledge has been privileged over all other forms of expression.

The Garífuna in particular view the active dismissal of their language as cultural imperialism and an effort to stamp out local knowledge and cultural practice as a matter of post-colonial policy. Garífuna, though recognized by UNESCO as an important but endangered language, is not recognized as an official language by the Honduran government. In essence, the Garífuna are forced to abdicate their native language twice. They must learn Spanish to participate in Honduran society, but in or-der to get funding for their community-built clinic and hospital they must also master English. In this context, insistence on the English language to receive grant funding not only creates an extremely difficult barrier that must be overcome, it also actively imperils an endangered language.

In order to receive a foundation grant or funding from an organization or individual, there are specific patterns of language that organization and its agents must utilize to prove that the organization, its cause, and the people it represents are worthy of aid. US-dominated humanitarian discourse has, therefore, become the rubric for standardizing humanitarian efforts around the globe. And, since hu-manitarian aid funding emanates most significantly from the US, controlling a higher concentration of funds than the next five countries (all European) combined, it is safe to say that the US imposes standardized language around the world (Merry, 2009).

The vocabulary and techniques of humanitarian aid that the US funders, governments, and techni-cal experts deem appropriate are thus uniformly imposed and implemented in distinct political and economic geographies around the world. Failure on the part of the humanitarians to adopt these ethnocentric standards will most likely result in lost funding or no access to funding at all. This im-position is clearly a kind of cultural imperialism and marginalization, both of which Young (1990) identifies as indicators of oppression.


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Assuming the first level language barrier can be overcome, grant seekers must then battle a second form of standardization. Grant seekers must fit into a narrowly defined description of what grant makers designate as worthwhile or valuable. Grant making foundations generally fund one or just a few specific kinds of projects. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, funds specific kinds of literacy programs, agricultural programs, and global health programs. These predetermined programs are indicators of what the Gates Foundation views as necessary to resolve issues like poverty and other forms of inequality. Because the ideological framework of humanitarianism por-trays these efforts as inherently “right” and “good”, ensuring that few will question the ideological process, it is easy to think uncritically about the implications of funder-directed projects.

In predetermining what is worthy of aid, the funder neglects, even excludes, what the target com-munities believe to be necessary for survival or the eradication of inequality. Instead, the US-based foundation imposes what it judges to be appropriate for the humanitarian subject. Rather than serve as a conduit for the grant-seekers working with communities that have identified their own needs, foundations set the agenda for fundable projects. In so doing, grant making organizations require grant seekers to conform to project design and implementation guidelines and erases, or renders non-conforming activities, ideas, or ways of doing invisible (Irvine and Gal, 2000). This standardiza-tion ignores local knowledge, local priorities, and restricts and regulates who can do what and how.

Additionally, each of these programs assumes a certain level of access to initial resources and technology, and the Global Health initiatives must be submitted in English. In so doing, the Gates Foundation contributes to greater class and cultural stratification through the reinforcement and consolidation of hierarchies. Experts are privileged; common knowledge, collective history, non-institutional knowledge need not apply.

Consider for example, the Gates Foundation’s call for proposals to the Program for Emerging Agri-cultural Research Leaders. This grant specifies that only “projects led by MSc [Master of Science] and PhD scientists at national agricultural research institutions and universities in sub-Saharan Af-rica, working in collaboration with other researchers internationally” are eligible to apply (Available from www.gatesfoundation.org, accessed on 15 April 2013). The grant maker assumes that solu-tions to agricultural challenges outside formally educated scientists are not funding-worthy and that only those scientists who are working at a national research institute or university are worth fund-ing. Western scientific knowledge is privileged and alternative ways of knowing are systematically devalued. Further, only those individuals who have access to higher education, and presumably therefore, more capital are granted power.


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There is an additional irony and a layer of exploitation (and therefore oppression) to the grant mak-er’s agenda. The impetus for this specific call for proposals is a concern about levels of hunger and malnourishment that combined affect about 2 billion (roughly a third) of the world’s population. However, the grant maker seeks to fund the agricultural research of certain scientists in countries disproportionately affected by hunger and malnutrition as a result of colonization and erasure of local ways of agriculture that led to the current need for new solutions. Using Western resources, according to Western norms, the foundation seeks to exploit the work of African scientists, to solve a problem that was in great part caused by centuries long Western colonization and domination of the continent. Once again, local, popular ways of knowing are dismissed in favor of Westernized scientific processes, thus reinforcing colonial forms of inequality rather than dismantling them.

A final component of grant making standardization is the actual process of grant writing. It helps here to think of grant writing as a language proficiency test and grant applications as a series of writing prompts that determine how thoroughly a grant writer has learned the language of aid. The grant maker details the criteria – the instructions for the test – and the task of the grant seeker is to meet the language standards described. There are even special books a grant seeker can buy and classes they can take to learn the language better and faster. Titles like The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need (Karsh and Fox, 2009), Perfect Phrases for Writing Grant Proposals (Brown-ing, 2008), or How to Say It: Grantwriting: Writing Proposals that Grantmakers Want to Fund (Koch, 2009), are just a few examples of hundreds of resources that help English-proficient organization bureaucrats learn and use the standardized language of humanitarianism. Tellingly, these books are not as readily available in other languages, creating yet another barrier to equal access to resources.

Take the criteria for the AJ Muste Memorial Institute’s Social Justice Fund as an example of one such proficiency test (Available from www.ajmuste.org, accessed on 5 April 2013). Below is an ex-cerpt from the foundation’s guidelines on submitting a proposal:

What to Expect if You are Invited to Submit a Full Proposal

(updated August 2009)

NOTE: Please do NOT submit a full proposal unless invited to do so by theMuste Institute.

A full proposal (by invitation only) to the Muste Institute’s Social JusticeFund should include:


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1: Narrative:at the top of the page: organization name, project name, contactname, contact info, project timeline and amount requested (theseshould match the information provided in your preliminary application)narrative description of the project, including background, relevance,key objectives, strategies for carrying out the project, etc. (two pages orless);narrative description of the organization, including year founded, briefhistory, decision-making structure and key objectives (two pages or less);

The grant seekers must write a description of their organization and their project in narrative form. They must follow the rules of the narrative, or storytelling, genre (Fairclough, 2001). However, the narratives are further restricted in that the story must include certain pieces of information, and by design exclude certain kinds of information. Though grant makers ask the grant writer to “tell a story”, the requested narrative requires an efficient (that is time and space saving) use of language because it is further limited to just two pages (about 600 words). This is not unique to the AJ Muste Institute.

The Gates Foundation Request for Proposal (RFP) for education-based projects is a 13-page in-structions document that specifies that a proposal submission should be no more than nine pages in length. The RFP provides a format for the proposal and provides instructions for how to write each section. Section I is included below:

Section I: Executive Summary

One pageBe sure to include the name of your organization, how much money you are requesting over two years, and a summary of your goals and project outcomes. Provide high level details of your vision and the primary drivers in your thinking about the work. Highlight anything particularly innovative about your approach. Include a description of how you segment your teachers and how you will ad-dress the teachers in the different segments (CCSS Teacher Networks Call for Proposals, accessed April 5, 2013).

In one page the Gates Foundation wants “high level details” of the grant seeker’s “vision” in addition to a summary of goals and anticipated project outcomes.


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Anyone with experience writing grants may be familiar with this sort of instruction. “That’s just the way it’s done”, is a common refrain heard by the uninitiated when writing grants for the first time. But the assumption that extreme brevity, or standardization is the “right way” to talk about development work belies an ideological apparatus that should immediately inspire the linguistic anthropologist to ask questions. The standardization of language in a formalized process of resource distribution is not just a practical concern as is commonly argued by grant makers, but is also an ideological one. The very mechanisms designed to improve access to resources and close inequality gaps works in a matter-of-fact way to further exacerbate inequality.

The constraints on narrative exemplified in the grant instructions of organizations as small as AJ Muste and as large as Gates Foundation require not only proficiency of the English language, but a highly nuanced understanding of the English language that may exclude many native speakers of English, as well as those whose first language is not English. Furthermore, the ruthless efficiency of language required encourages and even exacerbates the practice of essentializing, or iconizing, people or issues. This written practice then influences the spoken genres within humanitarian orders of discourse and can have detrimental effects.

Recalling Irvine and Gal’s (2000:38) definition, iconization is the process whereby ways of speaking, being, or doing become semi-permanently affixed to a person or a group as a way of describing the essence of that person or group. One example of iconization is how the recipients of aid work for whom grant writers are seeking funding are described in order to draw the interest and funds of the grant maker. One informant3 working with a public health organization that does interstate health advocacy for children explained how the term “Appalachian Mountain Children” has become prob-lematic (author’s notes from interview: 4/26/2013, Washington, DC). The children who are interpel-lated as “Appalachian Mountain Children” by the network of organizations are also being named a “special” or at-risk population.

The mountain range attributed to these children’s identities traverses (mainly) five US states. How-ever, one state, West Virginia, is in the heart of Appalachia. The entire state is situated in the Ap-palachian Mountains. This geographic fact means that the organizations have interpellated every child in the entire state of West Virginia as an “Appalachian Mountain Child”, and thus the entire state as a special-needs group. While there is a much smaller percentage of children who fit into this designated category in the surrounding states of Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina, the language the organizations of the states employed for purposes of grant funding and outreach 3 The names of the interviewee and the organizations for which the interviewee works has been excluded to protect the

interviewees.


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became the go-to phrase for all children living in Appalachia, and thus all children living in West Virginia. According to my informant, this created barriers to service because the individuals interpel-lated as a “special population” resisted the prescribed identity and became unresponsive to public health outreach.

This problematic instance of iconization arose when the organizations needed an efficient way of describing and identifying a “special” population in order to convince funders of their need for finan-cial resources and stay within the formatting requirements for their proposal. Language restrictions like those in grant maker’s guidelines encourage grant-writers to oversimplify because, despite the call for high-level details, the style of language required for grant-writing leaves little space for nu-ance. So instead of describing specific needs for different people living in the Appalachian Mountain region, the organization was forced to generate a brief (three-word) iconizing identifier that then seeped into their everyday inter-organizational speech and conversations to the detriment of the children that they purport to help. Paraphrasing Mugane (2005), the grant-writers suffer a loss of language due to the linguistic imposition of the standardized grant language, and as the case above demonstrates, it can lead to an erosion of humanity.

STANDARDIZING BEHAVIOR AND THE SPOKEN

Thus far, I have discussed how strict rules in grant making work to standardize humanitarian dis-course in written form. As I suggested with the case of “Appalachian Mountain Children”, the rules for the grant-writing genre also influence the rules for other genres within humanitarian orders of discourse. It is to the spoken genres of humanitarian discourse and the performance of humani-tarian that I now turn. In particular I discuss testimonio, a long-standing Latin American oral tra-dition of bearing witness to social, political, and economic injustices (Beverly, 2004). More than simply a narrative account of injustice, testimonio is also the speech-act of the subaltern (Beverly, 2004) and a way to attest to and create one’s own subject position. Beverly explains that testimonio is as powerful as the act of ideological hailing; it begs a response of solidarity (Beverly, 2004). Yúdice (1991) suggests that testimonio is an attempt to reject master discourses and emphasize what has been deemed marginal (21). If these testimonies indeed serve such a function, then the attempts to render them more legible through standardization obscures and dramatically weakens their function.

Here, I draw from the ethnographic work of Winifred Tate (2007) and from preliminary ethnographic interviews I have conducted in the Washington, DC area. While not focused on humanitarian orders of discourse as such, Tate’s work provides a useful lens through which to understand the standard-


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ization of oral genres in these discourses. In Counting the Dead, Tate (2007) explores the culture and politics of human rights activism in Colombia. Tate’s work explores the development of human rights activism and emphasizes the tensions between community or solidarity activism and what she terms “professionalization” (Tate, 2007: 109). She tells a story about a workshop where activists learn the right way to tell the stories of human rights abuses.

What struck me about Tate’s observations was that she was describing the process of standard-izing witness testimony and activism, or to use Scott’s (1998) term, rendering testimony legible. In the process of supposed professionalization, authorized agents of humanitarian discourse, the workshop leaders, were dismissing and erasing ways of knowing, being, and speaking. At the work-shops she attended, the amateur (as opposed to professional) activists were taught how to write a denuncio, or a formal report, and the supposedly proper way to provide witness testimony to media or judicial audiences. These standardized formulas for narrative stand in sharp contrast to traditional methods of reporting and testimonio that are part of the cultural knowledge of community activists.

Tate describes one man’s oral testimonio at a workshop where the task assigned was to write a “proper” denunciation. She remarks that “this narrative with the repetitive cadence and an-gry rhetoric was not the detached language of professional documentation but the political out-rage of a community organizer” (Tate, 2007: 140). This way of speaking is not the “right” way of doing things according to the rules established in the humanitarian orders of discourse. Traditional testimonio is not considered “efficient” and is not legible to humanitarian agents and the entities with whom they collaborate. In order to be heard, the testimonio must be reformatted, made legible, and stripped of its cultural purpose. The testimonio is dismissed, erased, as an appropriate method of activism.

However, the practice of narrative testimonio is a long-standing tradition in Central and South Amer-ica. In February 2012, I attended an encuentro, or conference, in Honduras coordinated by various community organizations to address militarization and ongoing repression in agrarian communities. The purpose of the conference was to impugn the Honduran government and military for the system-atic abuse of human rights, and attest to those abuses, as well as establish strategies for resistance.

Testimonios are so important to community based organizing and manifestations of social justice that the three-day agenda included a half-day of testimonio from two communities that are dispro-portionately affected by military and paramilitary oppression. This conference and the formats it in-cluded, like testimonios, would not be considered “professional” according to the official humanitar-ian order of discourse. This conference and the testimonios presented, are a radical performance of


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the humanitarian agent. Many of the activists in attendance at this semi-clandestine meeting, have attended the kinds of formalized workshops that Tate discusses.

In addition to denouncing a social injustice, testimonios help generate an oral history that validates loss, feelings of anger and grief, and is a genuine demonstration of agency. It builds solidarity and can help energize a social movement. A usually long, impassioned speech that celebrates the indi-vidual or group to whom the social injustice occurred, and sometimes the life of a person or persons (if the injustice culminated in death), characterizes the process of testimonio and denunciation. The narrative also names the injustice, the perpetrators of the injustice, and may or may not include a plea or call for justice. The testimonio itself is a rhetorical call for justice, so an explicit plea is not always necessary.

This culturally based narrative form includes all the same components called for in a “professional,” written denuncio or spoken witness testimony, but it also has several other purposes that standard-ization proscribes. Paraphrasing Irvine and Gal (2000: 38), the linguistic ideology of the legible, professionalized, humanitarian order of discourse is a totalizing vision, and the cultural functions of collective memory and catharsis do not fit and must be ignored or assimilated. Testimonio as a way of doing humanitarian activism is thus delegitimized and marginalized.

However, rather than allow a complete colonization of language, genre, and style through unchal-lenged adoption of the formalized narrative form of denuncio or witness testimony, the activists like those at the encuentro can mobilize traditional testimonio and resist the subordination and erasure of local ways of knowing and doing. In the process of testimonio activists are engaging in disiden-tification. They are reworking the subject-form of humanitarian agent and disrupting the ideological working of humanitarian discourse (Pecheux, 1975). Though these activists might accept the stan-dardized form of humanitarian agent in certain moments, they are able to reassert testimonio, and thus unstandardizable cultural values, at critical moments. This disidentification with the standard-ized, or professionalized activists, allows the activists at the encuentro in Honduras to embrace both narrative forms in order to maximize the possibilities for social justice in their communities.

THE QuEST FOR RELEVANCE

Not only are language and style standardized and made legible in humanitarian orders of discourse in both written and spoken genres, but the work of activists is further manipulated by the linguistic agendas of grant makers. In this section I draw from the work of Sally Engle Merry (2009) and a second interview that I conducted in 2013 with board member of two NGOs in the Washington, DC


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metropolitan areas. Humanitarian organizations require funding to carry out their stated missions. And yet, the funding needed is only forthcoming if the grant writer for the organization can convince the grant maker that the organization conforms to the grant maker’s agenda. Again, I must empha-size the injustice inherent in this approach. The agents of power who control resources are making the agendas, rather than the agents of change that they are supposed to be enabling.

Furthermore, funding usually comes with specific rules attached about what the funds can be used for and how results must be reported. This often creates a desperate situation for organizations seeking funding, not to mention the people both the grantor and the grantees purport to help, that forces them to conduct themselves according to what funders deem “relevant”. To reiterate my ear-lier point, grant makers set aid agendas which affects not only who can get funding for projects, but also impacts the recipients of aid work directly.

In Sally Engle Merry’s (2009) ethnographic work on the dissemination of transnational programs of human rights work she explores the ways that human rights institutions and programs are imple-mented around the world. She provides evidence that the strategies adopted in countries as distinct as China, Hong Kong, Fiji, India, and the US are all strikingly similar, despite the efforts of humani-tarian agents in each country to “indigenize” them to fit local ways of knowing and cultural practice (Merry, 2009: 266-267). Merry explains that local activists around the world attend formalized work-shops conducted by United Nations organization representatives in English, though translated to the local language through an interpreter.

Merry also explains that the training programs are a way for a local organization in India to access funding and accomplish goals otherwise unattainable by similar organizations. The organization runs workshops that discuss “rights and CEDAW [Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination and All forms of violence against Women]” (Merry, 2009: 293). In order to run the workshops the organization “chose to accept donor funds…although it recognized that this compromised its au-tonomy”, but it also meant that the organization could maintain a physical office, employ staff, and provide other kinds of services (Merry, 2009: 293). Organizations that refused external funding had greater independence, but possibly less legitimacy because they do not possess the same symbols of power as the funded organization (Merry, 2009).

Like the additional services enabled by the workshop funding provided to the organization in India, another informant working with public health organizations in Washington, DC, that I will call Jana,4

4 The interviewee’s name has been changed and the names of the organizations with which the interviewee works have

been rescinded to protect the interviewee.


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explains that Services are necessary for people to survive. Social services are allowed to exist [by government and foundations], but there is very little ability to do things from the ground up. Access is only given by the gatekeepers…only what funders think is relevant (author’s notes, interview 4/19/2013, Washington, DC).

While Jana explained that one of the organizations she represents has shifted its mission focus “be-cause of what clients want”, she also says “mission diffusion…is based on what funding is available. So organizations have to shift to stay relevant” (interview 4/19/2013, Washington, DC). Implicit in this narrative is the delicate balance between meeting the stated needs of the community members and fitting the funding criteria. Sometimes the two fortuitously overlap, more often however organi-zations are pressured to shift their agendas that are more representative of community needs closer to the course of action that funders have deemed appropriate solutions to social inequalities.

Again, the approach is a manifestation of cultural imperialism. It is also, I argue, a kind of exploitation that manipulates the communities and organizations seeking funding on their behalf based on their unequal access to resources and power. The grant-makers recognize that a group needs resources, but then flexes its powerful muscle and dictates the circumstances and conditions under which the group can access resources. The balance is left unchanged and grants, which are supposed to im-prove equality and access to resources, in fact reinforce inequality and hierarchies of power.

As Merry’s (2009) example also indicates, funding might mean the difference between having paid staff or exploiting the free labor and intellectual capital of volunteers. Jana explained that of the two organizations for which she is member of the Boards of Directors only one organization has paid staff (of just one person) and the office is at the sole employee’s home. The second organization is entirely volunteer-staffed, which is a badge of honor in the humanitarian aid community. Nonethe-less, it means that aid work, which is the replacement system for government services that were jettisoned in the 1970s and 1980s, is often highly exploited labor.

In both Jana’s case and that of the Indian women’s organization, the organizations are forced to make a choice. The choices are between autonomy or dependence, client desires or funding avail-ability, and reasonable working conditions or unmitigated exploitation. In the ideological framework of humanitarian orders of discourse this is couched in terms of relevance. When faced with the ma-terial realities that these stories describe, one can only wonder about what “relevance” is indexing. Indeed, relevance seems to stand in for “relevant to grant maker agendas”, or by extension state agendas.


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Acquiring funding from a grant maker through successful language use is as much symbolic capital as it is financial capital. As a result there is considerable pressure to buy into the political economic system of humanitarianism or risk being deemed irrelevant. The issue of maintaining “relevance” has to do with conforming to the predetermined agendas of grant makers. Staying relevant may also involve iconizing people and certain situations in order to attract aid. Jana explained that there are “a lot of ‘pretend’ organizations that are part of the rhetoric around human trafficking that is harm-ful to [legitimate organization’s] clients” (interview notes 4/19/2013). Jana told me that the issue of trafficking had become trendy in the area, which resulted in a disproportionate amount of funding available for organizations addressing this issue, as opposed to myriad other concerns. As a result, these “pretend” organizations will use the iconizing rhetoric about rescuing “girls”, or women under the age of 18, that they know grant makers want to hear in order to capture funding. The problem, Jana says, is that “they must be fudging the numbers”, because the organizations she is referring to work in the same areas as the organizations to which she belongs, and “there just aren’t that many ‘girls’ out there” (interview notes 4/19/2013).

Jana was less concerned about the competition for funding than she was about the implications for the people served by the organizations for which she volunteers. Jana explained that the rhetoric on grant proposals, that then works its way into spoken genres, eventually finds its way into legisla-tion that works to criminalize people in the sex work industry and even anyone who associates with people in the sex work industry. The effect of this, according to Jana, is that the people who these “pretend” organizations are supposed to be helping are actually harmed because this language-turned-legislation severely limits their ability to subsist and works to criminalize their bodies.

CONCLuSION

The standardization of English as the language of humanitarian discourse constitutes a site of mul-tiple kinds of social injustice. Rather than work proactively toward eradicating social, political, and economic inequality, the US-dominated field of grant-making in fact redirects wealth into the hands of bureaucrats and experts rather than the intended recipients of aid. The grant-makers, who we might imagine as at the top of a hierarchy, decide who and what is worthy of funding. Those deemed worthy are organizations that act as unelected intermediaries on behalf of those whose circum-stances they exploit in order to win grants.

Inherent in the selection of bureaucrats and intermediaries to manage the grants is the presump-tion of access to important forms of social, economic, and human capital. To write a grant, one must


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have access to a certain level of education and to the desired knowledge. As I have shown, it also means that one must adopt English as a lingua franca, perhaps to the detriment of one’s own lan-guage. One simply is excluded from a piece of the $47 billion in resources seemingly reserved for formally educated, English-proficient organizations that generally have more economic capital than the communities, individuals, or entire countries in the name of which they write grants. The grant makers and the privileged few they select to act as bureaucrats or intermediaries are en-gaged in a kind of cultural imperialism. In the process of standardizing the language of humanitarian discourse, local and popular knowledge are devalued, local languages are erased, and alternative solutions ignored, institutionalizing oppression in an apparatus that is protected by the ideology of standard (Hill, 2008).

An important consequence of this necrolinguistic process is the way that the ideological, iconizing language of the written genres becomes instantiated in the everyday discourse of humanitarian agents. In the case of the testimonio, the power of the testimony and testifier is weakened through distilling their accounts into legible documents. The cultural importance of the testimonio is dis-missed as unimportant and inappropriate, because it fails to conform to the ideology of standard.

In the case of “Appalachian Mountain Children”, or the sex workers in the Washington, DC area, the standardized language of humanitarian discourse most clearly reveals the hierarchy of power inherent in this ideological apparatus. To name and iconize individuals, and to exploit their circum-stances in order to attract economic resources, is a tremendous display of power. The impacts of which, as these two examples demonstrate, can detrimentally affect the lives of those for whom the aid is intended. To some extent, the use of this standardized discourse takes power away from non-humanitarian agents and consolidates it in the hands of the intermediaries or even the grant makers. At the same time, non-humanitarian agents have the power to refuse these interpellations or manipulate them in order to change their circumstances and maximize the benefits of working with the intermediaries.

I maintain that the very mechanisms intended to reduce various forms of inequalities are in fact rooted in the same ideological apparatuses that produce and reproduce inequality in the first place. In its current form the language of humanitarian aid discourse is not emancipatory, and has become ideologically entrenched in everyday humanitarian discourse and practice in such a way that it can-not become emancipatory. For humanitarian practice to impact upon current forms of inequality it is necessary to change the discourse and therefore how humanitarian aid is practiced.


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Beware Humanitarian Talk: Standardization and Erasure in Humanitarian Talk

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