Reassessing Charitable Affect: Volunteerism, Affect, and Ethical Practice in a Medical Aid Agency

Charitable aid is sometimes characterized as an activity saturated with emotion, in which outpourings of feeling and care draw individual volunteers to the work (Muehlebach 2012, Adams 2013, Malkki 2015, Caldwell 2017). Yet the affective practice of humanitarian care can take different cultural forms, some of which may not appear deeply affecting. Drawing upon ethnographic research with the long-term US volunteers of a faith-based medical aid organization in Minneapolis/St. Paul, this article develops a linguistically and semiotically informed approach to affect in order to deepen understanding of charitable affect as an actively made experience with cultural variability among long-term charitable volunteers, rather than a singular or stable phenomenon. It argues that affective displays are central to a multifaceted ethical practice through which charitable volunteers seek to demonstrate virtuousness in their ordinary aid activities. The article explores how, within the Minneapolis faith-based organization International Health Mission, volunteer commitment is culturally scaffolded or made socially legible through a combination of conversational exchanges, embodied labor practices, and examples of the ethically disfavored course of action. Applying linguistic and semiotic tools to the analysis of charitable aid illuminates the mechanisms through which affect economies are variously realized, contested, and practiced. Though charitable volunteers may seek to demonstrate a sense of duty or care for other people, the ways they culturally exhibit these complex ethical positions may vary substantially. Charitable work can produce the feeling of participating in a shared social contract, of rectifying the inequalities and failures of the state in some cases. This article concludes that the affect practices central to mobilizing such action may not be the same, nor importantly look the same across charitable endeavors