INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION: DEBATING RELIGIOUS AND HUMANITARIAN APPROACHES IN NORWAY

A COOPERAÇÃO INTERNACIONAL PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO: PERSPECTIVAS RELIGIOSAS E HUMANITÁRIAS EM DEBATE NA NORUEGA

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the meaning of religious and humanitarian approaches in the field of international cooperation, setting out from a study of Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples. In so doing it describes and evaluates the differences between missionary and philanthropic trends in the debates on indigenous rights, their contribution to the establishment of contemporary Norwegian national values and state building, and their role as key elements in the control and administration of territories and populations. The article concludes by suggesting a number of research directions connected to the understanding of international cooperation as a space for creating a political agenda connected both to policy proposals and to the building of social movements.

Keywords
International cooperation; Indigenous peoples; Missionaries; Philanthropy; Norway

Resumo

O artigo busca analisar o significado da presença de perspectivas religiosas e humanitárias no universo da cooperação internacional para o desenvolvimento a partir do estudo da cooperação norueguesa junto aos povos indígenas. Para isto, qualifica as diferenças entre as correntes cristãs missionárias e filantrópicas em relação ao debate sobre os direitos indígenas e sua contribuição para os processos de afirmação dos valores nacionais noruegueses. Aborda também o modo como tais valores relacionam-se aos processos contemporâneos de formação do Estado pela via da construção de mecanismos de gestão de territórios e populações. Indica, ainda, direções de pesquisa que permitam entender a cooperação internacional como um espaço de criação de pautas políticas associadas tanto à proposição de políticas públicas quanto à construção de movimentos sociais.

Palavras-chave
Cooperação internacional; Povos indígenas; Missionários; Filantropia; Noruega

In this article I adopt the opposite approach to the one used previously in my research on Norwegian international cooperation with indigenous peoples, where I set out from what was observable in Brazil to construct my initial working hypotheses. Here I intend to explore what I managed to observe in Norway concerning the role of Christian missionary and philanthropic organizations in the universe of international cooperation in order to formulate new research questions. In so doing I hope to contribute to our understanding of some of the contemporary processes involved in State formation and nation building (Elias, 1972). Elements of the latter have been identified in fragmentary form in the recent anthropological literature, where authors have tended to emphasize either the contemporary emergence of humanitarian governance (Fassin, 2012), or the presence of multiculturalist proposals associated with neoliberal approaches to government (Hale, 2002; Boccara, 2010). Other topics include the power mechanisms embedded in the actions of the development industry (Hobbart, 1993; Ferguson, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Rist, 1999) or the difficulties of undertaking ethnography in the kinds of elite spaces in which anthropologists themselves are immersed stakeholders (Mosse, 2005). These are just some of the themes to intersect in the wide-ranging and open-bordered area labelled, successively, 'aid for development,' 'assistance for development' or 'cooperation for development' since its formal emergence at the end of the 1940s.

The use of these different ways of qualifying interventions in the development area - 'aid,' 'assistance' or 'cooperation'¹ - has reflected both shifts in the ways in which actions are designed and implemented in this sphere, and the diverse types of actors and perspectives incorporated over time. It also reflects changes in how relations are established between 'donor' countries and the countries targeted by development programs. Describing these phases, each of which is associated with transformations in what I call development grammars, lies outside the scope of the present article.² However, for the purposes of the topic explored here, it should be observed that all these phases include the presence of religious perspectives within a universe typically perceived by the specialized literature as essentially secular and oriented towards concrete objectives, especially economic and technical.

The perception of the presence of actors linked to the religious field in development cooperation was the principal new fact to emerge from my fieldwork in Norway in the 2000s. This research largely involved piecing together a jigsaw of the actors involved in Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples, since there was not a single work in the available bibliographic sources to have specifically examined this topic as a whole. However, in one of those serendipitous moments that sometimes grace ethnographers, near the end of my field stay I happened to attend an event where the full spectrum of actors participating in this universe became vividly clear. The event included presentation of the findings of a technical report commissioned by non-governmental organizations, research centres and university departments involved in Norwegian international cooperation with indigenous peoples.³

This event and the report itself allowed me to check the jigsaw pieces that I had assembled over my six years of research on Norwegian cooperation, dividing my time between Brazil and Norway. They allowed me to spot a gap where the missions should be. This fact might well have implied a serious flaw in my research, were it not for the discovery that they comprise the major 'other' in the area of Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples. Perhaps this was the reason why they had been missing from most of the events linked to cooperation that I had thus far observed, and from the bibliographic records that I had managed to compile on the topic of cooperation with indigenous peoples.

Indeed, the invisibility of the missionaries in this field required some degree of explaining, especially since the report in question had shown that most of the Norwegian cooperation funding allocated to indigenous peoples was being channelled to missionary organizations.⁴ I evoke my feeling of surprise here on stumbling upon this fact at the end of extensive research in order to explain, in part, the reason for this article, which explores theoretical issues and research directions linked to the presence of religious actors in the universe of international cooperation.

At European level, the presence of missions in the international apparatus of development cooperation is not exclusive to Norway. In the Dutch case, for example, recent research similarly describes the transfer of funding from government cooperation agencies to missionary work as a recurrent practice. Scholars largely explain this phenomenon as a consequence of the secularization now taking place in Europe, which has provoked a sharp decline in the membership of Christian churches and, consequently, a fall in the net contributions made by these members to religious missions. This has forced the missionary arm of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN), for example, to turn to Dutch government cooperation agencies to fund its missionary work (Rickli, 2010).

In the Norwegian case, the association of the missionary field with cooperation policies occurred during the formal establishment of the government apparatus in this area, including the creation of the Department of Aid for Development in 1962.⁵ Before analysing the reasons and significance of the religious presence in Norwegian international cooperation, I should again emphasize that I intend to discuss the topic from the viewpoint of a political anthropology interested in contemporary processes of State formation and nation building. Defining the viewpoint adopted here is important, I think, since the focus on missions - and, as we shall see, Christian humanitarian organizations, another actor from the religious universe involved in cooperation with indigenous peoples - could lead readers to expect an analysis of the anthropological debate on religion. This is not what I intend to do, both out of theoretical and methodological choice, and due to an absence of sufficient research data for this purpose at the present point in time. Rather than examining the dynamics of the religious field and its internal discussions, then, I propose an approach that situates this field within a universe composed of a wide variety of actors and political perspectives. Much of anthropological common sense tends to consider this universe as something that merely produces asymmetries and reproduces the mechanisms enabling the expansion of the capitalist system and the cosmologies disseminated in its wake. By contrast, my research on Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples reveals a much more complex and contradictory picture, marked by an intense dispute of interests and views. Very often these conflicts are camouflaged by the common bureaucratic language to which the actors applying for funds from the development 'projects market' have to submit.

When it comes to the Christian schools of thought, this complexity becomes evident in the area of cooperation policies directed towards indigenous peoples. A split can be readily identified between the missionary trend, advocating an assimilationist approach to these peoples, and the Christian humanitarian trend, committed to defending the indigenous right to self-determination, in line with the Norwegian government's support for Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (WTO) of 1989.⁶

MISSIONARY APPROACHES TO COOPERATION

In order to explore the significance of the religious presence in international cooperation, as seen from the viewpoint of the processes involved in State formation and nation building, and that of my own data on the Norwegian case, a number of points need to be clarified. First is the fact that Norwegian development cooperation inaugurated the foreign initiatives of a country uninvolved in the European colonial expansion begun in the sixteenth century. The only group in Norway with experience of working in the 'Third World' were the Norwegian missionaries of Pietist origin, whose first communities had been established in the country in the seventeenth century. However, this does not mean that the Norwegians had no experiences of colonization: they had embarked on conquering the Arctic since the ninth century AD when the Kingdom of Norway was unified by the Vikings. Later, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries when Norway was annexed by Denmark, the Norwegians sent missionaries to Lapland where religious seminaries were set up to convert the Sami (previously known as Lapps by outsiders) and occupy their territories.

The inclusion of the missions in Norwegian cooperation programs from the 1960s gave them a fresh impetus, adding a new channel of funding to the private domestic contributions that had traditionally supported their work. It should be noted that around this time Norway had the largest number of missionaries per capita in Europe, operating from the mid-nineteenth century in Africa and Asia, and, from 1945 onwards, in Latin America too. This fact is largely explained by the strong backing received from private domestic donations. To give an idea of the scale of this support, while the initials funds allocated in 1952 by the Norwegian government to the Fund for India were 10 million krones, the Norwegian missions had around 20 million krones available that same year for its work abroad, all obtained from private donations (Simensen, 2003: 29).

The incorporation of the missions into the structure of Norwegian cooperation was not conflict-free. When the Engen Commission was formed in June 1960 with the remit of defining the institutional profile of Norway's cooperation for development, intense negotiations began between representatives of the missions and the government as part of a broader proposal to include voluntary organizations in the cooperation programs. The debate surrounding the missions was particularly significant in this context. They were the only organizations in Norway with experience of working abroad in activities that bore close resemblance to what was then termed 'aid for development' (utvklingshjelp). They also had a level of accumulated experience that many in the government deemed useful.

The tensions surrounding missionary participation were especially evident in the debates on the 'neutrality paragraph' included in the Engen Commission's proposal: this would, in principle, prevent cooperation activities financed by State funds from becoming mixed with any kind of religious, economic or political interest. This type of limitation expressed the concern that the Norwegian State could become a channel for funding religious conversion in other parts of the world. At the same time, representatives from the missions also had doubts about accepting public funds, fearing that the conditions demanded in return would curb evangelization and benefit only those activities linked to the diaconate - that is, the practical work in the areas of education, health and productive activities typically undertaken by the missions (Dahl, 1986: 7).

In the ensuing debates in the Norwegian Parliament, the viewpoint prevailed that this condition would not impede the participants of voluntary organizations from expressing their beliefs or worldviews while engaged in providing assistance for development. The first contract with these organizations, formulated in 1963, stated that they should not use government funds to promote their own religious or political objectives, or treat the local groups differently depending on the political or religious profile of the latter. After receiving complaints from representatives of the missions, who believed that it would be difficult for them to adhere to this model without compromising their principles, the government modified the terms of the contract. It now merely specified that the organizations had to agree to use public funds on a universal human basis without pursuing their own political or religious interests. In 1971, the paragraph on neutrality was amended again to state that government support could only be provided to activities with local populations when these actions did not discriminate by race, belief or ideology. This formulation, which placed the focus solely on the recipients of the actions, satisfied the missionary organizations, who thereafter felt free to receive funds from the State (Dahl, 1986: 11-12).

Until the mid-1970s, the missions were the main recipients of Norwegian bilateral cooperation funds for voluntary organizations. Between 1975 and 1978, however, the Christian humanitarian organization Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) received 52.9% of those resources while the missionary organizations received just 32% (Dahl, 1986: 15-16). Thereafter the total funds for humanitarian aid organizations, both secular and religious, exceeded the funds for other types of voluntary organizations, although the missions still continued to channel a sizeable portion of funding. However, while most of the non-governmental actors working in the development field depended almost entirely on government funds, the missions always maintained a high percentage of their own funding, assured by their networks of domestic support. At the start of the 2000s, this input was equivalent to almost half the amount received from the government.⁷

Over the years, the public funding of the work of missions in development cooperation was repeatedly questioned by different sectors of Norwegian society, by the media, by academics and, very often, by the evaluation reports of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) itself.⁸ At the start of the 1980s, a report assessing the mission work commissioned by NORAD criticized the development projects implemented by Norwegian missionary societies in Latin America for mixing aid and evangelization. Among other issues, the report cited the "heavy religious pressure" placed on students in mission boarding schools and the lack of any long-term planning for the transfer of project management to local groups, contrary to NORAD's recommendations. The latter criticism was directed in particular at the work of the Pentecostal Foreign Mission (Pinsevennenes Ytre Misjon) with the Guarani indigenous people in Paraguay. The report caused a stir among sections of the Norwegian press, leading the Dagbladet to publish an article in 1983 with the headline 'Scandalous cooperation,' while the Arbeiderbladet dubbed the Minister for Development Cooperation, Reidun Brusletten, the 'Minister for the Missions' (Simensen, 2006: 95).

In this context, it is worth observing that during various periods the main ministerial posts associated with cooperation were in the hands of politicians directly linked to the missionary ranks. As well as Reidun Brusletten, in the 1980s, a member of the Christian Democratic Party (Kristelig Folkeparti: KFP, a.k.a. the Christian People's Party) with a life history linked to the missionary activities of the Pentecostal Foreign Mission (Pinsevennenes Ytre Misjon) (Dahl, 1986), we can also cite Hilde Frafjord Johnson, also a member of the KFP, an anthropologist and daughter of missionaries, who was Norway's Minister of Development Cooperation and Human Rights in the late 1990s.

In fact, the presence of the missions in Norwegian cooperation programs has extended far beyond the appointment of its leaders to government posts or the funding of mission work with public resources. It raises wider questions about the significance of development cooperation and about the 'novelty' of the activities it promoted compared to the kinds of practices implemented earlier in colonial contexts. Here the analysis by Jarle Simensen a Norwegian historian who has specialized in the study of missions and development, mainly in Africa - seems particularly apposite: he shows how the activities of the first Norwegian missions, dating back to the nineteenth century, can be described using the current vocabulary of development cooperation. For instance, he points out missionary practices that correspond to 'integrated rural development,' 'alternative development,' 'school education' and 'promoting health' (understood simultaneously as care for 'body and soul') among other terms associated with the grammar of cooperation, as well as values such as the 'orientation towards poverty,' 'women's liberation' or the defence of 'human rights' which also brought the Norwegian missions closer to the sphere of contemporary international cooperation.

The author likewise highlights the similarity between the concept of 'sustainability,' central to development cooperation nowadays, and the ideas of 'self-help' and 'autonomy' widespread among missionaries, translated into the requirement that the missions had to obtain economic autonomy, funding their activities with their own resources, independent of the funding received from the domestic sphere. Along the same lines, the modern concepts of 'capacitation' and 'institutional strengthening' in the field of cooperation can also be detected in the stimulus given in the missionary field to establishing local churches and training pastors recruited from among the target population, capable of funding their own activities. Despite this emphasis on achieving autonomy, Simensen recognizes the tutelary nature of present-day missionary work and, in this sense, the reproduction of colonial practices by its ranks (Simensen, 2003: 29-32).

So although the concepts of 'self-help' and 'autonomy' were ideals for the missions, most of the local churches linked to the Norwegian missions in the Third World were unable to become independent and meet the requirements for economic autonomy. The three S's cited as a motto of the European missions since the mid-nineteenth century self-finance, self-government and self-propagation would prove to be much more aspirations than realities in the Norwegian case. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the funding from development cooperation breathed new life into mission work, frequently ensuring their continuation in places where the end of colonial rule could have resulted in their immediate expulsion (Simensen, 2006: 93-101).

One of the mission representatives, Øyvind Dahl,⁹ offers a good panorama of the arguments employed in defence of their participation in Norwegian cooperation for development. Firstly, he highlights the fact that it was not just missions that faced problems in implementing the 'neutrality paragraph.' Secular 'technical cooperation,' Dahl argues, was just as lacking in neutrality as the missions when it came to causing radical transformations to the ways of life and values of the populations at the receiving end of funding. Nor are anthropologists spared: just like missionaries, their initial work was marked by Eurocentrism and contaminated by the same civilizing mind-set that made everyone, the author writes, 'children of their time' during the colonial era. Dahl also cites the importance of the scientific contributions made by countless missionaries in the fields of linguistics and the ethnographic description of local cultures, pointing to another of the many cross-overs between anthropology and mission work (Dahl, 1986, 1987, 1989).

The tension generated by the 'neutrality paragraph' between implementing practical projects - the so-called diaconate activities - and evangelization work was by no means a recent phenomenon. In fact it had permeated the entire history of Norway's missions. From the mid-nineteenth century, this tension became a topic of debate among missionaries in the field and religious authorities back home. While the former tended to adopt a 'sociological' perspective, arguing the need to develop practical work with the host communities as a form of attracting them towards evangelization, the latter took a 'diffusionist' approach, sure that the power of the 'Word' was sufficient by itself to convert the unbelievers and that material progress would be a natural consequence of such conversion (Simensen, 2006: 86-87).

Divisions in the Protestant field in the 1960s also revolved around the new meanings being attributed to these practical and spiritual dimensions. When, for example, at the end of the decade, the World Council of Churches (WCC)¹⁰ began to emphasize the social dimension of the Gospel and the need to create a 'secular theology,' heavily swayed by Latin American Liberation Theology, the Norwegian missionary societies decided to withdraw from the organization. The emphasis on the 'orientation towards the world' in detriment to the work of evangelization was unacceptable to the Norwegian missionaries, whose difficulties in participating in the WCC also stemmed from an extremely rigid stance on theological issues, which hindered the dialogue with ecumenical viewpoints. After leaving the WCC, they joined an alternative evangelical organization founded in 1974, in Lausanne, uniting around 3000 missionary organizations from various parts of the world (Simensen, 2006: 94).

In the 1990s, new conditionality policies in the area of human rights and democracy were established by the biggest donors in the universe of development cooperation, essentially linked to the idea of strengthening 'civil society.' In this context the local churches in the recipient countries, created through missionary activity, acquired a new prominence. In many cases, especially on the African continent, they constituted the only nationwide social networks with some degree of solidity, after years of structural adjustments imposed by donor countries which had dismantled the networks linked to the functioning of the State.

In Norway's case, support for local national churches in recipient countries was reinforced at the start of the 2000s when the anthropologist Hilde Frafjord Johnson, linked to the missionary sectors of the Christian Democratic Party became head of the Ministry of Development Cooperation and Human Rights. One of her key initiatives as minister was to promote a seminar on the role played by the national churches of recipient countries in the development of civil society. Organized in conjunction with NORAD and the mission umbrella organization, Bistandsnemnda, in 2002, the seminar was structured around a specific analysis of the situations in the Congo, Cameroon and Ethiopia.¹¹

At this event, national churches were called upon to help strengthen African civil society by promoting democracy, human rights and the population's active involvement in the debate on these issues. The director of NORAD expressed the expectation that national churches would assume greater responsibility as voices speaking out against oppression and engage more actively with other social agents and agents for change, as well as in family planning and the fight against AIDS. NORAD's stance added a new twist to the principle of 'orientation towards the recipient' that had always been one of the historical landmarks of Norwegian cooperation. According to this principle, cooperation actions should be defined by the countries receiving 'aid.' In this case, however, they meant the imposition of directives from a group of researchers supported by NORAD and by the Bistandsnemnda for self-managed African churches: these determined what they had to do to comply with the conditionality policies established in the 1990s by the Norwegian government (Simensen, 2006: 99).

Although the public financing of missions was periodically questioned, this did not necessarily translate as a critique of the missions themselves. Very often, in fact, they were used as a model example to criticize the actions of the official bureaucratic structures in the development field. The commitment and effectiveness of the missionaries, their 'spartan' way of life and their long-term work with the populations concerned were seen as a stark contrast to the luxurious lifestyle and inefficiency of official bureaucracy in the area of international cooperation and its remoteness from the local populations, guided by short-term actions, frequently implemented without even the slightest knowledge of the local contexts. According to Ruud and Kjerland,¹² in the mid-1970s NORAD became recognized as the polar opposite of the missions, even by their political opponents:

It is interesting to note that even the Norwegian political left stressed how the missionaries had something that NORAD and its experts lacked, namely [...] some of our [Norwegian] social ideals. The image of the missionaries living closely with local populations was one of equilibrium, sobriety and other like qualities. [The missionaries] were considered more like idealist ex-pat collaborators who could live among those who needed help and did not do so for their own benefit. This moral critique of NORAD was based on the idea that assistance towards development should be implemented in the name of an altruistic kindness, not something that someone should be paid to do (Ruud & Kjerland, 2003: 58-59, translation from original Norwegian).

Missionary work also draws attention to an aspect seldom made explicit in studies of international cooperation for development: the fact that many of these projects were a direct legacy of the missionary field, which, at least in the Norwegian case, had a strong influence on their configuration. The legitimacy attained in Norway by the work of missionary organizations in the area of international cooperation is also explained by the enduring influence of the Pietist ideals promulgated by Hans Nielsen Hauge in the nineteenth century, still popular today among much of the population. These ideals proposed combining evangelization with enterpreneurial activities (Simensen, 2006: 91).

The Haugean ideal of religious conversion, based on a personal transformation in attitudes made concrete in practical activities, went on to form a key part of contemporary missionary work. In this Norwegian version of the Protestant ethic in the sphere of assistance for development, such actions went beyond the 'technical' to imply an emotional involvement with the target populations too. Not by chance, the emphasis on practical training for life appeared as one of the main objectives in the projects implemented by the missions. Odd Hoftun, the leader of an electrification project in Nepal implanted by Norwegian missionaries, stressed that their primary aim was to create "new attitudes [...] important to strengthening Christian values and at the same time to allowing qualities essential to the functioning of technical work to be acquired: truthfulness (not hiding one's errors), punctuality, precision and discipline" (Simensen, 2003: 224, my italics). All these qualities were considered 'Protestant virtues' by Hoftun, fully echoing Max Weber's theories on the connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

In contrast to the implications of Weber's analysis, however, the influence of the Protestant ethic on Norwegian development cooperation involved not just the operation of the model of the self-made man imbued with an enterprising spirit, but also the input of resources from the State. So while some authors have tended to minimize the impact of the State's support for the missions, others have argued that the 'golden age' of the Western missions was not the colonial period but the era of development cooperation inaugurated after the Second World War (Tvedt, 1995: 139).

Whatever the emphasis given to the amount spent by the Norwegian State on the missions, there is no doubt that the missionary influence in the post-war era was financed to a large extent by the State, meaning that "the missionary organizations, sustained by taxpayers' money, are today active in new spaces, placing more people in contact with the Bible than at any other moment in the past" (Tvedt, 1995: 140).

In the case of indigenous peoples, the debate on the missionary presence in development cooperation revolved especially around the paragraph on neutrality and the government documents defining the role of NGOs in the official structure of development cooperation in Norway. Here it should be recalled that the NGOs channelled most of the funds earmarked for indigenous peoples at the end of the 1990s and during the first half of the 2000s (Daudelin et al., 1998: 42; Haslie & Øverland, 2006: 18).

Examples of the recent debates on these questions occurred following the announcement of Declaration 35, in 2003-2004, presented to the Norwegian Parliament during the government of Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Democratic Party. This Message emphasized a return to providing services rather than promoting democracy and human rights, as defined in the previous Declaration on the NGOs issued by the Labour government of Jens Stoltenberg. This switch in emphasis was interpreted by specialists as symptomatic of favouring missionary work in detriment to the work of secular NGOs. This interpretation derived from the fact that, by using the resources of international cooperation, the missions primarily worked on providing services. The secular NGOs, by contrast, were committed to more political actions, promoting the capacity of the groups targeted by cooperation to organize and mobilize to advance democracy and human rights (Borchgrevink, 2004: 49).

In the case of the projects targeted at indigenous peoples, anthropological criticisms of the Christian Democratic Party's 2003-2004 Message have pointed out the difficulties of assessing the results of NGO work based solely on criteria relating to the 'effectiveness' of the services provided and excluding qualitative dimensions (Borchgrevink, 2004: 53).

It is worth observing that criticisms by anthropologists of how missionary organizations are favoured in cooperation activities with indigenous peoples date back to the 1960s, reflecting a long-lasting opposition between missionaries and anthropologists. At the same time, the fact that a Christian former Minister of Development Cooperation like Hilde Frafjord Johnson is herself an anthropologist indicates that a variety of positions exist within the discipline in Norway concerning missionary work. Once again, we can observe the complexities and multiple dimensions of international cooperation in the country, irreducible to simplistic divisions and explanation.

In all events, though, in the specific case of cooperation with indigenous peoples, the missions have become the paramount 'other' for all the other Norwegian actors in this sector.¹³ They have been absent from the main forums of national debate where the indigenous question has been discussed, in particular the Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, held annually since 2000 at the Sami Studies Centre of the University of Tromsø, which has become a major reference in this area. This absence of the missions can be traced to the historically tense relations with the ethnopolitical movements of the Sami in Norway, the principal guarantors of Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples, and to an agenda not always in line with the country's official agenda for indigenous peoples from the end of the 1980s onward. As we have seen, though, this has not prevented the missions from gaining access to a substantial portion of the funding allocated to indigenous peoples by Norwegian cooperation. This would appear to be one of those inexplicable paradoxes, but can in fact be traced back to factors that considerably predate the period when international development cooperation became formally established after the Second World War.

The existence of tensions between missionaries and other groups involved in Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples does not imply, though, that the values and attitudes associated with the historical work of the missions, inherited from the Pietist and Haugean traditions in Norwegian Lutheranism, have not been absorbed by diverse social groups. As we have seen, these values have become shared nationally by large sectors of the population.

HUMANITARIAN APPROACHES TO COOPERATION

The other area of Christian work with indigenous peoples supported by funding from Norwegian cooperation is represented by the humanitarian trend, whose presence in Norway, like the missions, dates back to well before the landmarks in the creation of the apparatus of international development cooperation after the Second World War. In fact its origin can be traced to the second half of the nineteenth century and the approval of the first international protocols relating to care for the military wounded and sick in war situations, among which we can highlight the Geneva Convention of 1864, which gave rise to the Red Cross. Over time, the scope of the humanitarian organizations was extended from war situations to care for the victims of natural catastrophes as well.

In the specific case of Norway, which founded its section of the Red Cross in 1865, humanitarian activities acquired popularity after the First World War when Fridtjof Nansen, a polar explorer and national hero, worked as director of the High Commission for Refugees of the League of Nations and as head of the Red Cross. When Norwegian development cooperation was institutionally structured in the 1960s, humanitarian assistance activities were incorporated as part of its budget (Simensen, 2003: 233). The latter began to include funding for Norwegian voluntary organizations working in this area, including Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), created in 1945 by the Church of Norway, initially to assist German war refugees after the Second World War.

The inclusion of missionary and humanitarian traditions in Norwegian international cooperation seems to explain, to a large extent, the emergence of what Tvedt described as the 'regime of kindness' associated with the cooperation sphere in Norway from its creation, with its emphasis on values like solidarity, compassion and altruism, presented as values 'typical' of Norwegian identity from the second half of the twentieth century.¹⁴ According to Tvedt, the projection of Norwegian cooperation under this aura of 'kindness' has made it extremely difficult to question, since criticism of any of its aspects can be interpreted as a criticism of the 'desire to do good.' This predominant strategy of legitimization in the self-representation of the Norwegian cooperation system, the author adds, has involved the creation of a particular language with specific concepts and forms of communication. In order to break with the legitimizing power of this language, Tvedt suggests creating new concepts, which enable the familiar to be seen from a new angle, deconstructing this communicative regime and its strategy of self-legitimization (Tvedt, 1998).

Inspired by Flaubert's description of the multifaceted reality of nineteenth-century Egypt and the writer's desire to order what he saw through the laws of perspective, Tvedt in Bilder av 'de andre' (Images of 'the others') (1990) investigated the processes used by Norwegian authorities to fit more than one hundred countries and their immense diversity of cultures, peoples and social systems into the single label of 'underdeveloped countries.' He examined the images and concepts by which this multivariate world was represented as a unity. In other words, Tvedt asks how the process of orientalising the 'Third World' (Said, 1990) had unfolded - that is, how it was essentialized through the presence or absence of particular qualities and characteristics. According to Tvedt, the perspective that impregnated the prevailing contemporary Norwegian images of Asia, Africa and Latin America was precisely one constructed through the apparatus of cooperation for development. Through the latter "a picture of the world [was created] where peoples and countries were not perceived through their own identities, traditions or histories, but through what they were not, initially in the same way that the Norwegian missions organized the world between those who had been evangelized and those yet to receive the Gospel" (Tvedt, 1990:9-10).

Through cooperation for development, the Norwegian state had become "an active member of the process of westernizing the world, from which Norway had been left out when the European royal houses funded the great voyages of discovery and when heads of state in London, Paris and Berlin divided the world among themselves some centuries later" (Tvedt, 1990: 11).

The images of the 'Third World' that took shape during this process - underdeveloped, poor, corrupt, subject to demographic explosion and so on - were accompanied, Tvedt argues, by the construction of the self-image of Norway as a 'donor,' such that a country "with a tiny percentage of the world population, with one of the most homogenous societies in the world, with limited experience and knowledge of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and situated close to the North Pole, became their guide and 'helper' overnight [...]" (Tvedt, 1990:11, translation from original Norwegian).

In the specific case discussed here, Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples, the Norwegian Christian humanitarian organizations, especially Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), have adopted a stance in line with the World Council of Churches (WCC), working in diverse countries of Latin America and Asia in defence of the indigenous right to self-determination, as mentioned earlier. In this context it is worth remembering that the WCC was one of the promoters of the seminar uniting anthropologists and indigenists that resulted in the signing of the Barbados Declaration in 1971, calling for an end to policies aimed at assimilating indigenous peoples and supporting their right to self-determination. But although the NCA is one of the leading channels of funding within the apparatus of Norwegian cooperation, estimating the amount allocated to indigenous peoples in this organization is difficult since funding may be dispersed among other cooperation funding lines, including initiatives in the areas of gender, young people, fighting poverty, and even those specifically addressing humanitarian issues.

Quantifying the cooperation funding earmarked for indigenous peoples is a complex task, not only because of the variety of funding areas that may be allocated to them, but also because of the very complexity of defining and evaluating who is indigenous and who is not within the diverse national spaces where cooperation is implemented. This universe - and this dimension is fundamental to understanding the dynamic in relation to indigenous peoples - encompasses a varied set of transnational agencies. The latter, along with national government bodies, are directly implicated in defining the identity of indigenous groups by means of protocols, agreements, operational guidelines, laws and other documents that influence how these peoples are categorized. This sphere should be read, therefore, as a strategic space for understanding contemporary processes of ethnogenesis and the disputes surrounding classification under the 'indigenous' category.

CONCLUSION

Exploring the universe of development cooperation, including the initiatives targeted at indigenous peoples, has led anthropologists to engage in debates with various other disciplinary fields. Officially instituted at the end of the Second World War, this universe was initially studied by the anthropology of development, which focused especially on the participation of anthropologists in 'applied' experiences with the kinds of development projects run by multilateral development banks, bilateral cooperation agencies and a wide variety of associations generically labelled at some point 'non-governmental organizations.' The more critical reflections on these discourses and practices, initiated in the 1980s, primarily centred around Foucauldian analyses aiming to reveal the power mechanisms and production of asymmetries within a field of interventions that, through their modus operandi and functional logic, establish a series of dichotomies and divisions, successively separating funding donors and recipients, North and South, developed and underdeveloped nations, rich and poor, and so on.

If we examine how this universe was studied over time, we can see that, in a form homologous to its own mode of operation, the analyses tend to divide up the variety of actors, scenarios and intentions composing its landscape into studies that privilege certain aspects emerging from this 'whole.' Among these we can cite studies of the constitution of a 'humanitarian government' in the international setting from the 1990s onward (Fassim, 2012); studies of the 'cultural turn' manifest in the adoption of the ideology of multiculturalism by governments and cooperation agencies under the sway of neoliberalism (Hale, 2002; Boccara, 2010); studies of the 'territorial turn' that has assured the concession of territories to groups with a specific ethnic profile (Offen, 2003); and studies of the growing emphasis on environmentalism as an issue informing public policies and social movements (Brosius, 1999; Leite Lopes, 2004). In sum, we find a huge set of themes and problems, revealing how development cooperation as a topic of study enables us to analyse the intersection of different arguments, disciplinary fields and transnational modalities of political-administrative action.

Examining the work of religious actors in this sphere provides especially rich possibilities for research. It allows us to capture the ebb and flow of themes shaping this universe and the bringing together of a set of ethnic, religious, economic and moral discourses and practices, previously dispersed, through the creation of a funding market for which all of them can compete as long as they adhere to its grammars and political-administrative formats. Among the questions concerning its analysis in the anthropological literature on the State, public policies and social movements, I would emphasize the possibility of understanding how States, religious agents and international cooperation agencies classify who is and is not indigenous. In the process, these agents define meanings that legitimize this category and indicate the 'problems' that need to be 'solved' in order to maintain their existence as indigenous peoples, or to integrate them into wider communities, whether ethnic, religious or political. It is also important to map how the State and the missions conceptualize aid, assistance, cooperation and other related terms so that we can distinguish situations in which these categories are defined as moral acts from those in which they become seen as a question of rights and citizenship.

Furthermore, I stress the need to examine the anthropological literature's discussion of how missions participate in development cooperation, an underdeveloped topic, usually treated just in terms of those activities supported by donations from church members. There is still a dearth of analyses exploring the implications of government funding towards these activities. Here it is worth stressing that religious missions have operated in postcolonial settings by working to raise funds from their church memberships, appealing to the conscience of individuals, but also by competing for financial resources in the 'projects market' formed by the apparatus of development cooperation. In both cases, missionary activities have been related to a highly diverse set of practices that extend far beyond the religious field, spanning from the implementation and management of development projects and social policies in the areas of health and education, to the promotion of values like generosity, solidarity, humanitarian government and policies of compassion.

The latter two values have been treated by some of the contemporary anthropological literature as a kind of 'new moral economy,' evincing the transition from the vocabulary of social critique to one of moral sentiments. Much of the work of missionary agencies and humanitarian organizations in the area of international cooperation today operates under its influence (Fassim, 2012). Nonetheless, we should not discard the analytic potential of understanding this 'new moral economy' as an actualization of previous moments combining grammars of morality, science and population management, including those that informed the founding of the first European anti-slavery societies back in the nineteenth century. Not by chance, these associations were composed of a significant number of members of religious groups, champions of humanitarian causes, and also scholars who for the first time identified themselves as ethnologists (Stocking Jr., 1968).

I also think it is important to pay attention to two processes that I provisionally label the 'missionarization of the State' and the 'Statization of the missions.' The latter can be perceived during those moments when the missions became an active part of the contemporary disputes over the classification of territories and populations, such as those defining which peoples are and are not 'indigenous.' In other words, when they produce what Trouillot (2006) called state effects, which include, along with the capacity to define the identities of groups and communities, the power to designate the social, geographic and political spaces that correspond to them. The 'missionarization of the State,' for its part, is expressed in the incorporation of missionary practices and values as a model for development cooperation activities. In the Norwegian case, these practices encompass the field of the diaconate and the values relate to the Protestant ethos of the missionaries, Pietist in inspiration, which have been recognized by much of the population as embodying the 'true Norwegian values' of sobriety, moderation, simplicity and so on, performing a strategic role in affirming national values.

Finally, within this thematic area that interconnects religious missions, indigenous peoples and development cooperation, one interesting research direction to be explored concerns the debates on intercultural indigenous education and contemporary policies for affirming the identity of minority ethnic groups within national States, marked by a series of paradoxes and ambiguities. Here we can highlight the example of indigenous education projects that advocate learning to write at school in the native maternal language rather than in the national majority languages. Although this approach would appear to contain a multiculturalist ideology defending the 'cultures' of these groups, it has very often been an obstacle to their effective political participation beyond the local level of disputes.

ENDNOTES

• 1
  The term cooperation is used hereafter to facilitate reading.
• 2
  For a description and analysis of the use of these terms in the Norwegian case, see Barroso Hoffmann (2009).
• 3
  I refer to the seminar Norges bistand til urfolk (Norwegian assistance to indigenous peoples) held in December 2006, in Oslo, where the report of the same name was presented and discussed. The report had been produced at the initiative of the non-governmental organizations Rainforest Foundation Norway, Norwegian Peoples' Aid and SAIH, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) research centre, and the Forum for Development Cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, coordinated by the Sami Studies Centre and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tromsø.
• 4
  According to the report, the Norwegian non-governmental organizations, including religious missions, formed the main channel for Norwegian cooperation with indigenous peoples. They absorbed around 40% of the funding earmarked for work with the latter between 1999 and 2005, followed by transnational and local NGOs (from the recipient countries) with 18%, UN organizations with 17%, and the remainder channelled to state bureaucracies from the recipient countries, to multilateral development banks and to private companies and consultancy firms. Among the group of Norwegian NGOs, missions appeared at the top of the list, according to data compiled for the years 2004 and 2005, closely followed by the environmental organization Rainforest Foundation Norway, the humanitarian organizations Norwegian Popular Aid and Norwegian Church Aid, the Strømme Foundation, run by a private company, and SAIH, a Norwegian student organization (Haslie & Øverland, 2006).
• 5
  The country's bilateral cooperation actions had begun well before this date, though, with the creation of the Fund for India in 1949, responsible for implementing a project in the fishing industry sector in Kerala, funded by government resources and donations made by the Norwegian public. Thereafter the Norwegians came into contact with a full-blown government pedagogy geared towards 'education for development': that is, the legitimization of diverse kinds of interventions in the 'Third World' under the banner of 'development.' This strengthened Norway's position as a donor country in the area of development cooperation. It is also worth noting that Norwegian activity in this field, fairly precocious compared to the majority of European countries, was stimulated by the occupation by Norwegian authorities of strategic posts at the United Nations, notably Trygve Lie, the UN's first Secretary-General. This also allowed the country to play an active role in defining the organization's initiatives in multilateral aid for development, designed to take place in parallel with bilateral (government-to-government) actions.
• 6
  The Norwegian government's support for the terms of Convention 169 can be traced to the ethnopolitical movements of the Sami, an ethnic minority today living in an area spanning the northern regions of Norway, Finland and Sweden and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. In the 1970s the Sami began campaigning to be recognized as 'indigenous,' reflecting their condition as an autochthonous people subjected to the impacts of colonial expansion. In the process, the Sami forged connections with the international indigenous movement also emergent during the same decade, spurred by indigenous leaders from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
• 7
  According to data supplied in 2004 by one of the leading mission directors in Norway, Oddvar Espegren, domestic organizations raised around 800 million Norwegian krones per year, 300 million of which was allocated directly to the missions and development cooperation activities. This amount corresponded to roughly the same amount received from the government for the same purpose. On this occasion, Espegren also stressed that some humanitarian organizations individually received the same amount allocated to the missions as a whole, without, though, offering any matching contribution to the government. See <http://pym.ekanal.no/sider/tekst.asp?side=602>.
• 8
  Name given to the Department of Aid for Development from 1968 onwards.
• 9
  Dahl was a professor at the Stavanger Missionary School and the Lutheran Teachers' Training College in Madagascar. He also held administrative posts in various Norwegian missionary organizations linked to development, as well as producing studies for NORAD on the work of voluntary organizations in the sector.
• 10
  The WCC is an ecumenical Christian organization based in Geneva in Switzerland, created in 1948. The Lutheran World Federation, to which the Church of Norway is affiliated, joined the WCC at its outset.
• 11
  The seminar, "The role of national churches in the development of civil society," was organized by the Centre for Intercultural Communication in Stavanger and the Centre for Health and Social Development in Oslo.
• 12
  These authors formed part of the interdisciplinary team commissioned by the Norwegian government to produce a collection of three volumes on Norwegian cooperation as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Fund for India, the History of Norwegian Aid for Development (Norsk utvlingshjelps Historie).
• 13
  Among the latter we can pick put the Sami organizations, environmentalists and members of advocacy groups working for indigenous rights, including the IWGIA, a pioneer in this area, founded at the end of the 1960s by Norwegian and Swedish anthropologists.
• 14
  On this aspect, despite the innumerable studies indicating the presence of economic and financial interests within Norwegian cooperation, its image in the country has remained strongly associated with moral values of altruism and selflessness. For a detailed analysis of this topic, see Eriksen (1987).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2015

History

• Received
  18 Apr 2014
• Accepted
  22 Jan 2015