Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the ownership and appropriation of aid resources, and of anthropological knowledge, in the context of transnational projects to prevent human trafficking and support its ‘victims'. It presents ethnographic material collected between Benin City, in Nigeria, and the Italian city of Turin, where the projects took place.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the ownership and appropriation of aid resources, and of anthropological knowledge, in the context of transnational projects to prevent human trafficking and support its 'victims'. The ethnographic material presented was collected both in Nigeria - mainly in Benin City - and in the Italian city of Turin, between 2006 and 2008. It concerns a series of projects carried out by a small, EU-funded Italian NGO over the last eight years: appropriations include those of the NGO itself, their local Nigerian partners', and their beneficiaries (usually forcedly repatriated women who were identified as 'victims of trafficking' or young women deemed to be 'vulnerable' to being trafficked), but their dynamics acquire a number of distinct traits specific to the types of exchange relationship that are put in place.

In particular, I explore issues of misappropriation or contended appropriation, corruption, trust and accountability within each of these relationships, and interrogate anthropological models of explanation, in the light of transnational flows which challenge cultural boundaries. Accusations of corruption run through the whole spectrum of exchanges, and travel both ways: from donors to recipients and vice-versa, but they also exceed the aid-project boundaries to involve kin relations and other actors. Cultural analyses are also employed in discourses on trafficking and international aid, which can also be viewed as controversial appropriations of anthropological knowledge and question the position of the ethnographer and the type of insight she can and should produce.