Aid workers are a beautiful subject for anthropology: they mediate ideas about aid and development and they are the frontline folks that translate programmes into reality. Two books were recently published about them. Anne Meike Fechter and Heathe…

Many years ago, I used to be involved in a network of people studying the Philippines. We had conferences every two years, and over the years we developed quite a strong network. When I moved into the study of humanitarian aid, disasters and confl…

Yesterday was the yearly Africa day – a colourful and interesting event that brings together thousands of people that are based in the Netherlands and feel connected to Africa. Organized by the Evert Vermeer Stichting, it is a gathering of African…

I am experiencing a touch of disaster as I am stranded in Ethiopia and have to wait for the cloud of volcanic ashes to blow away and bother some other part of the world. Of course, I am not really, really affected. Impacts of disaters are usually…

In my last week at Columbia, I was fortunate to attend two events (and make pictures!). I heard Hillary Clinton speak about the American version of the 3-D approach, and today I had the honour of listening to Amartya Sen. Interestingly, both addre…

Do people become selfish or altruist in the face of disaster? The broker online presents a very interesting contribution to this question in a review of “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit. The myth that people become selfish looters afte…

This week was the food summit in Rome. It has passed in almost complete silence. Even though the number of people that goes to bed hungry reaches one billion! The soaring of food prices two years ago was a wake up call to the world. After 25 years…

Columbia offers an amazing amount of seminars, movies and events. This week I saw an ineresting documentary about the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. This band was formed by Reuben Koroma and five other Sierra Leonean musicians who lived in…

I have always known that politics are hypocritical, but sometimes it gets to me nonetheless. I am in New York at the moment, where I spend eight weeks of my sabbatical as guest-lecturer at Columbia University. This week, after it became clear that…

The 1984 famine in Ethiopia is an important landmark of development history, remembered by many for Bob Geldof’s Bandaid (“Feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time”). But did you know that since 1984 every year an average of 5 million peo…