This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.

本文对赞比亚的基督教人道主义进行了批判。但它通过参与人类学家的论点来做到这一点，他们已经开始质疑该学科内政治批判的地位。这些人类学家争辩说，批评常常破坏对民族志的理解，因为它有问题地将人类学家定位为能够“揭示”其他人不可见的政治现实的演员。在本文中，我认真对待这些担忧，并试图通过对赞比亚基督教医疗传教士工作的人种学描述来重新考虑批评的做法。关注这些传教士如何互相鼓励，让他们的赞比亚患者在受苦时刻“看到”“像基督一样”和“忠实”，我认为这些“观看”和“展示”的实践类似于某些形式的政治批判。与其“揭开”隐藏的现实，批评也可以被理解为一种“展示”的行为——其目的是鼓励他人“看到”同样的事情在不同的光线下。因此，我在此提出的对基督教人道主义的批评本身就是一种表现方面的行为，部分类似于传教士自己所从事的行为。