This article develops a diagnostic lens to make sense of the still baffling development of a ‘humanitarian marketplace’. Ambivalently hybrid initiatives such as volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility or even fair trade do not strictly obey a distributive logic of market exchange, social reciprocity or philanthropic giving. They engender a type of ‘economy’ that must be apprehended in its own terms. The article argues that the large-scale collaborative effects of such a dispersed market can be theorized without resorting to the classical biopolitical move of simplified agency/holistic reification. The argument proceeds counterintuitively, by appropriating the notion of symbiosis as redefined by contemporary biology, contending through historical contextualization and conceptual work that nature itself offers the best example to grasp spontaneous collaboration among unrelated human beings as a non-automatically balanced and intrinsically political affair that calls for critical management through an ex post facto interventionist policy of selective cultivation.

本文开发了一种诊断镜头，以了解“人道主义市场”仍然令人困惑的发展。志愿旅游，企业社会责任甚至公平贸易等含混不清的举措并没有严格遵守市场交换，社会互惠或慈善捐赠的分配逻辑。它们产生了一种“经济”，必须以其自己的术语来理解。文章认为，可以理论化这种分散市场的大规模协同效应，而无需诉诸于简化代理/整体化的经典生物政治举动。该论点与现代生物学重新定义的共生概念相吻合，是与直觉相悖的，事后干预主义的选择性栽培政策。