Abstract
It is perhaps unsurprising that the ways in which anthropologists have looked at social support have been shaped by a preference within the discipline for disadvantaged social groups. The bias seems to have been reinforced by a trend outside the academic world—the increasing number of humanitarian interventions—that accelerated after the end of the Cold War. Anthropological work on social support has, as a result of these influences, and for the most part unwittingly, approached the subject in terms of purposive action, broadly understood as efforts to alleviate and overcome problematic states of affairs. Authors have typically postulated insecurity and risk as the fundamental conditions under which social support is organized (see, e.g., Benda-Beckmanns 2000 [1994]; Pine and Haukanes 2005; Read and Thelen 2007).
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© 2013 Markus Schlecker and Friederike Fleischer
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Schlecker, M. (2013). Introduction. In: Schlecker, M., Fleischer, F. (eds) Ethnographies of Social Support. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330970_1
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