Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières

Notes

Notes Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French in the text and notes are by Renée C. Fox. THE QUESTS: An Introduction 1. “History & Principles—Doctors Without Borders,” www.doctorswithoutborders .org/aboutus/2012 (accessed 12/21/2012). Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières is usually referred to throughout this book by its acronym MSF or, where appropriate , by the abbreviated name of a section—e.g., MSF France; MSF USA, etc. 2. Over the course of the many years during which my study of MSF took place, the research was funded by relatively small grants from the Acadia Institute, the Social Sciences Research Fund associated with the Honorable Walter H. Annenberg Chair in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Nuffield Foundation (in the United Kingdom). 3. For a detailed narrative account of some of my research in Belgium, the Congo, and France, and what it involved ethnographically, see Renée C. Fox, In the Belgian Château : The Spirit and Culture of a European Society in an Age of Change (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994). See also Fox, In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 135–200. 4. See chaps. 7 and 8, which are based on this field research. 5. See Renée C. Fox, “Exploring the Moral and Spiritual Dimensions of Society and Medicine,” in Carla M. Messikomer, Judith P. Swazey, and Allen Glicksman, eds., Society and Medicine: Essays in Honor of Renée C. Fox (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2003), 257–271, at 268; Fox, In the Field, 367. 6. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning (London : Hodder & Stoughton, 2011), 237, 248. Chapter 12 of Rabbi Sacks’s book reflects on “the problem of evil” and the questions of meaning it poses; the quoted words were not intended by Sacks to refer to MSF, but they nevertheless aptly and eloquently articulate key characteristics of its worldview. 7. In the early, exploratory phase of my research, my intention was to study MSF within a framework that would enable me to view it in relation to Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde), another international medical humanitarian organization of French origin, which was established in 1980 as a consequence of a split within MSF between members of its founding and next generations (for a detailed account of the genesis, dynamics, and consequences of this split, see chap. 2). After doing a significant amount of participant observation in the New York office of Doctors of the World, 276 Notes to Pages 4–6 conducting face-to-face interviews with members of Médecins du Monde in Paris, and a field trip to visit the organization’s program with homeless children in Saint Petersburg, Russia, I decided that even if I made Doctors of the World a comparative case secondary to MSF, I would be undertaking more than I could realistically handle. Nevertheless, the research that I did on Doctors of the World illuminated not only certain aspects of MSF’s history but also some of its characteristics. 8. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz first applied the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s concept of “thick description” to what Geertz regarded as the defining characteristics of “doing ethnography”—to the kinds of cultural data that are gathered, and how they are inscribed, analyzed, and interpreted by social scientists conducting ethnographic research. See Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture ,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 9. See chaps. 4, 5, 10, and 11. In Greece, I was assisted in this field research by Nicholas Christakis, and in Russia, by Olga Shevchenko, both of whom are U.S.-based sociologists. Christakis (who is also a physician) has Greek origins, and Shevchenko, Russian ones. I had the privilege of teaching each of them when they were studying for their PhDs in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. 10. This was the case, for example, with regard to my efforts to obtain charts or diagrams of MSF’s evolving organizational structure and to identify and enter into communication with the webmaster for the “blogs from the field” that I analyze in chap. 1, and with the member of MSF who drew the cartoons at its “La Mancha” meeting that I describe in chap. 6. I finally did succeed in obtaining this information and making these contacts...