Paper Short Abstract:

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Malawian civil servants in disaster contexts, I suggest that the use of humour in state-citizen encounters enables civil servants to acknowledge the inadequacy of their work and the arbitrariness of state care, without losing face and authority.

Paper Abstract:

As one of the poorest countries in the world, the contemporary Malawi state relies on external funding to cover roughly 40% of its budget, with many state services provided by or through non-state organisations. This situation is exacerbated during regularly recurring times of disaster, when additional humanitarian aid is needed to support its population, but also the state itself, to execute its tasks. The Malawi Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) is charged with the overall coordination of disaster governance and humanitarian responses, but a large part of the funding and resources to do so are provided by donors and non-state actors. Moreover, the available resources are always far less than what is needed and also much less than what is demanded by (disaster-affected) citizens. Despite this increasingly desperate situation, I noticed that disaster aid distributions are often marked by humorous exchanges. In this paper, I use humour as a lens to explore interactions between DODMA civil servants and Malawian citizens during times of disaster. I suggest that in using humour in these at times tense encounters, citizens are able to criticise the state and the situation they find themselves in, while civil servants are able to acknowledge and express the inadequacy of their work and the arbitrariness of the state’s ability to provide care, without themselves losing face or authority. This argument is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi with DODMA civil servants at both national and district level between 2019 and 2024.