Caring Duties, Moral Obligations: The Social Life of Biomedicine in the Protestant Missions of Suriname.

• In Event: Obliged by Powerful Others: Reciprocity and Obligation in Indigenous South-America

Abstract

Based on long-term fieldwork and archival research, this paper traces the history of the establishment of a primary healthcare network called the Medical Mission Suriname (Medizep) among the Trio of southern Suriname from its creation in the mid-1960s until the present day. I will analyse in particular the peculiar ways in which the moral imperative to relieve fellow humans from suffering, which is intrinsic to the historical development of non-governmental medical missions in post-colonial contexts from the 1960s onwards, was used by foreign-based missionary organisations as a powerful negotiating tool to establish relations of exchange and reciprocity with governmental authorities and with ‘isolated, uncontacted’ peoples in Suriname in the years following formal independence from the Netherlands. By referring to recent debates in moral anthropology and in the history of tropical medicine, I will focus on the ways in which social relations between missionaries and the Trio were framed around discourses of care and nurture, and how these discourses created some fundamental ontological misunderstandings on the nature of ‘care’, ‘suffering’ and the definition of the ‘good life’. As I will demonstrate, these misunderstandings were based on differing perceptions of the moral obligations involved in the restoration of health in a sick body, as well as on the role played by alterity and the spirit-world in healing processes in and outside of the missionary health posts.

Author

• Vanessa Elisa Grotti, Oxford University