Paper short abstract:

Exploring the mobilisation of the everyday in humanitarian aid work, this paper will discuss aid work during WWI as an emotional gift economy. I will show how gifts carried emotional and moral significance thereby making it possible to mobilise the everyday.

Paper long abstract:

During WWI, the everyday was mobilised in order to help prisoners of war and it has been described as the great humanitarian awakening (Irwin 2013). In Sweden, where the Swedish Red Cross was responsible for the humanitarian efforts, mobilising the everyday merged into an idea of Sweden as a moral superpower. This paper will discuss humanitarian aid work as an emotional gift economy in order to understand the mobilisation of the everyday. Everyday mobilisation is understood as an emotional practice permeated by moral. Knowing how to perform moral is, as argued by Ahmed, a result of “of moral training” (2010:27) and management of emotions. You learn, Ahmed argues, “to be affected in the right way by the right things” (2010:129). Based on this assumption, I will show how material and immaterial gifts in the Red Cross’s humanitarian aid work carried emotional and moral significance thereby making it possible making it possible to mobilise the everyday. I will focus on three questions: How was it possible to arouse emotional commitment for humanitarian aid work, and thus a stranger in distress?: what was defined as valuable gifts, what could the vernacular offer? and; how was the idea of reciprocity performed by the receiver (in order to maintain the commitment among the “vernaculars”)?