Anne-Meike Fechter

University of Sussex · Department of Anthropology

Within South East Asia, informal, non-state development actors have become more prominent. The case of small-scale, private aid activities in Cambodia offers the opportunity to reflect on how state frameworks and interventions matter for such projects. Typically, theories of how a state encourages its citizens’ pro-social behaviour while retracting...

The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately funded forms of aid and development. It notes the steady rise of these activities, including in the Global South as well as North, such as in the context of the recent Euro...

The stated purpose of development is often characterised by the motivation to ‘help’ – that is, to intervene in the lives of others in supportive ways. This paper argues that this perspective has obscured how development activities are also animated by its twin desire to ‘connect’. While this holds significance for development more broadly, it beco...

A Cambodian town is the site of transnational flows of resources between private donors, and Cambodians in need of assistance. Such forms of ‘citizen aid’, initiated by individuals, constitute a form of resource transfer across borders which falls outside the purview of migration scholars. Unlike remittances, they are not primarily channelled throu...

This article explores the meaning of volunteering among professional aid workers. While they experience disenchantment in their daytime work, volunteering provides them with benefits lacking in their paid jobs. At the same time, a compensatory model does not capture the complex dimensions of this relationship. One motive behind their professional w...

Currently, there is no clearly delineated field that could be described as ‘the anthropology of morality’. There exists, however, an increasingly visible and vocal interest in issues of morality among anthropologists. Although there has been a lack of explicit study, it has become clear that anthropologists have, in fact, been concerned with issues...

This introduction, and the special issue as a whole, consider how the personal and the professional are interrelated, and how they matter for aid work. Taking up Chambers' call for the ‘primacy of the personal', this paper explores why the personal often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is wel...

This paper takes at its starting point public criticism of international aid workers who appear to be ‘doing well out of poverty’. Based on fieldwork in Cambodia, the paper suggests that such public perceptions are mirrored by some aid workers' uncertainties about the moral dimensions of their own and others' lifestyles. Significantly, analyses of...

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of colonial and postcolonial studies have been enriched by nuanced analyses of the ways in which racialised colonial identities (cross-cut by gender, class and sexuality) have been enacted in particular settings. Nevertheless, the quantity and quality of knowledge about the lives of European colonials a...

This paper takes as a starting-point the striking disjunct between the wealth of historical studies on ‘gender and empire’, and a comparative lack of work that examines corresponding issues in the present. I suggest that discussions of gender and global capitalism are shaped by a focus on poor women, producing limited perspectives. The paper asks i...

The British on the Costa del Sol: Transnational Identities and Local Communities. Karen O'Reilly. London: Routledge, 2000. viii. 187 pp., maps, notes, references, index.

Discussions of whiteness often focus on the ‘invisibility’ of whites. I suggest, though, that the situation of whites in non-white environments contributes a crucial dimension to concepts of whiteness. In particular, I examine the case of white Euro-American expatriates living in Jakarta. These corporate expatriates have been posted to Indonesia by...