starvation. Many compromises may have been necessary to get to that point. Wider
injustices may well have led to the threat to life, or indeed to the fact that rescue is
an option for some but not others. But for those particular people, on that
particular day, the meaning of rescue can be clear and visceral: live or die. Though
Chapter 2 argued that a conception of humanitarian crisis as merely a certain
quantity of bodies on the brink of death can never sufficiently describe what is at
stake in the conduct of humanitarian politics, it was conceded that the sense of
humanitarian crisis as a threat to bodily survival remains an important practical
basis for conceptualising humanitarian action. It follows that we should take
seriously the idea that the heart of humanitarian action lies simply in the saving of
human bodies.
This characterisation of the object of humanitarian rescue presents serious
advantages. We know roughly how many calories a human body needs to survive
another day, how much blood a body can lose before it expires, what medicine
might cure or manage a fatal disease. This leads to conceptions of life-saving as that
which, very simply, keeps human bodies alive, to be assessed and responded
through scientific and technical expertise. Hence the highly specialist discussions
published, for example, in the journal Disasters , and the authority of the voices of
technical humanitarian organisations, for instance those with particular medical
expertise.^8 A view is taken about what bodies need to stay alive, and then a
discussion is had about how best to enable that. The skills of doctors, nutritionists
etc. can then be brought to bear on the problem. As we saw in Chapter 3, the path
to matching up a person in need with a person in a position to help them is by no
means a simple one. But prior to this problem is a bigger risk to conceptualising
humanitarian action solely in terms of bodily life-saving.
The issue here is the way that the terms of rescue can come to determine an
individual’s humanity, and impose upon her a definition of her own identity so
narrow that it becomes a straightjacket. If, to save a human being (or perhaps even
a wider project of common humanity), it becomes sufficient to save a human body,
8
Disasters. Available at http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0361-3666; accessed
on 18 June 2010.