Moving On? The Act of Remembering Humanitarian Aid and the Shaping of Normative Experiences

This essay draws on the experience of 'get-togethers' among veteran field workers recorded in 2016 who recalled work experience from the 1980s-often stressing in their account their memories and the part this period played in their lives. This source can now help us analyse the formation of meaningful experience of the concept of experience. Using further archives of normative processes which drew from 'lessons learnt' and 'experience' to shape the rulebooks of the 1990s' humanitarian aid industry, and using interviews and oral history as well as new archives and diaries, this essay will consider how humanitarians have reflected on normative experiences. The first section of the essay will be devoted to the experiences arising from work in the great refugee camps of the 1980s, where many humanitarians developed their skills. The second section develops from this and considers how camps became the site of norm-setting for many actors and organisations of the humanitarian sector in the 1990s. The third section of the article reflects on the legitimacy arising from field work and humanitarian experience, focusing on the sociability of experience and how this cultural capital was then instrumentalised. The final section ends on the itinerant humanitarian exhibition which was deployed at the end of the presence (2020-21) of one of the largest medical NGOs in Cambodia. Through this Médecins sans Frontières exhibition the essay will reflect on how experience and legitimacy were constructed and finally historicised and memorialized.