As I write, the Syrian migrant crisis is boiling over and the Arctic Circle has become the latest precarious route desperate Syrian refugees are braving in their pursuit of security and shelter. A young Syrian woman is interviewed on the Norwegian evening news. Earlier this year other members of her family had fled to Germany. She stayed in Syria, waiting to hear from them before setting out herself. When she finally managed to get a call through to her family, they recounted the humiliating agonies they had endured on their journey through Turkey and advised her to find another route. She decided to take the new migration route to Europe, the safer and less expensive Arctic route, as far as possible from the horrors of war. She doesn't go into the details of her long journey, other than to say that she has been hungry for a couple of years, often dizzy from hunger. As she is interviewed in the polar night, she stands in front of a building decorated with Christmas lights, a Bethlehem star in each of the windows, skinny pines covered in frost in the background, snow on the ground: “I don't mind that my ears are frozen and that I can see my breath. I want to be safe and have a dignified life. Get a proper education, work, and be able to feed myself.” The camera shows other Syrian families with young children, single men and women, and girls and boys, traveling alone. Volunteers from the “Refugees Welcome to Norway” (RWTN) association distribute warm clothes, nappies, prams, toys, coffee, tea, sandwiches, and traditional Christmas cakes.

In Norwegian public discourse, the word folkevandringtid, literally, peoples-moving-era, is used to describe the current refugee crisis. New maps are drawn up to illustrate that we are witnessing an epochal event. Folkevandringtid is a gentle term, I think, that lends a humane image to the human toll, the distances and routes people cover, the span of time it takes them to reach safety and shelter, and what happens once they start new lives in some distant place.

What are the cultural and historical forces and the physical dynamics that shape contemporary human displacements in the Middle East and the humanitarian efforts that follow? In this essay I want to suggest that for an anthropology of Middle East humanitarian practices, questions should include the possibility of humanitarian activities that take place far beyond the region itself. Taking the contemporary refugee crisis in the Middle East to the Arctic frontiers, I am proposing that as scholars of the human condition we can use our ethnographic approach, attentive to local voices and grounded interpretations, to closely follow the refugees along the different routes they take—from the camps and detention barracks, to points of transit, and then further—as far as we can follow—to investigate what the refugee crisis reveals about what I will call humanitarian pluralism, a conceptual trope for understanding the proximities—that is, the spaces/places/distances—and ambivalences that surround humanitarian situations and actions. In many ways this thinking is part of my work on food relief efforts in the Middle East and the basic notion that humanitarianism begins with the simplest of things—warm food. Here I return to food in an attempt to understand the global remapping of humanitarian disasters in the Middle East.

RWTN has emerged as a noteworthy humanitarian movement. Among its founders is an industrious entrepreneur who took it upon himself to deliver warm meals daily to refugees. “Refugees are hungry and need warm food, and I have food.”Footnote ¹ I was interested and decided to look more closely at the group's humanitarian activities. Core organizers of the association told me that they had never really thought about “the food question” until they saw Syrian refugees arriving “in real time and in real life.” Previously, “Syria was a place on the other side of the globe. Of course it was sad, but it had nothing to do with us. It is different when you have a face to the story,” one volunteer told me. It was clear that the refugees were suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies and, one volunteer said, “My first thought was to bake something and take it over to them.” It was a connection many people would make over the course of the next several months. Food was a way to support the refugees and show solidarity.

Acts of humanitarianism are often defined by their tactics—marches of solidarity, sit-ins, and social media campaigns, disrupting local political meetings and global aid-conferences, and concrete, spontaneous group action. These tactics are refined in response to social contexts and circumstances. Humanitarian efforts ebb and flow, with periods of high activity and periods when only a small group of committed individuals struggle on. Over the course of time, tactics necessarily shift and adapt.

RWTN was started first and foremost as a response to the government's failure to offer emergency assistance, such as clothes and food, to the refugees arriving in the country. The warm meals RWTN offered both symbolically and materially scorned and bypassed political procedures and regulation. Volunteers took action while in the Norwegian parliament politicians were frozen in inaction despite their constantly announcing that we are currently witnessing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. Debates continue on the benefits and difficulties of opening up Norway, or of putting in place stricter regulations, of calculating very carefully the cost of each refugee. Citizens in various municipalities are anxious that refugees with very different habits, religions, and cultures will outnumber them. Alternative plans are also considered, such as distributing food and medicines more freely to Syrians in camps in the Middle East, and creating possibilities for them to get help where they are, in hopes that they stay there. Some argue that we must not lose sight of the human hope for a dignified life.

RWTN tactics have a particular resonance in this context, and the focus of the group's activities—its demands that refugees be fed well and often—have brought issues of global humanitarian solidarity to the forefront. Food is conceived of broadly, not as simply providing necessary calories, but as an essential element in creating living and resting spaces that make other humanitarian activities possible. Members of RWTN saw in food an experiment in new, collective forms of commitment to global issues. This was one of the defining features of RWTN—it was both a solidarity association and a laboratory for alternative humanitarian forms. Part of the humanitarian experiment was determining how to keep refugees reasonably clothed, fed, and cared for so far away from their homes.

Participating restaurants and people's private kitchens are central to this project, both figuratively and literally. Food is both a practical necessity and a contested symbol that gives RWTN visibility in a range of ways. In Arujun Appaduarai's classic article on “gastro-politics,” he argues that food can either serve the semiotic function of indicating equality, intimacy, and solidary, or it can serve to sustain relations characterized by rank, distance, and segmentation.Footnote ² Food and the way in which it became a core issue for RWTN is a medium for communicating an alternate vision, both for food humanitarian action and for refugee regulations—an approach based on solidarity. A regular volunteer reflected that, “I feel this is like throwing one Christmas dinner party after another.” Another noted, “We are like mums and dads preparing food for a sports event. You never know how many will turn up or what the score will be.”

Anthropologists have long demonstrated the way food, a seemingly inert commodity, shapes and constitutes social relationships and modes of consciousness and belonging.Footnote ³ Food and eating provide narratives of our existence, of our relationships with other humans and with our surroundings. The Norwegian archeologist and ethnographer Randi Håland explains: “Food items are not only ‘food for the body,’ they are also ‘food for thought’ about relations to ‘others’ in the world of living people, and to cosmological forces.”Footnote ⁴ Håland tells us what we already know: that food constitutes attachments at different levels and of different kinds. In humanitarian thinking, food tells us something about human struggles and vulnerability. As a core issue of humanitarian relief, food poses questions about how food makes and unmakes humanity. Food, as an object, and eating, as an act, resonate with attitudes and emotions relating to human understanding of and feelings about self and others and their underlying interactions. It is, as RWTN volunteers know, its political potency that makes food food. Footnote ⁵ As one RWTN volunteer said, explaining that these food efforts are also acts of political subversion, “from the politicians we hear about the refugee crisis, while we saw the faces of humiliated individuals.”

I began with a quote from Emmanuel Levinas, a contemporary phenomenologist thinker on the human condition. I trace the ethical position of food provision from Levinas for two reasons. First, he is relevant because so much of his philosophy is about humanitarian logic. He speaks about passivity in our encounters with other people's sufferings and provides affinity as an alternative. Second, by contrasting the choice of to provide or not to provide, Levinas can guide contemporary humanitarian research on questions of responsibility, obligation, and social integrity. He encourages us to pay attention to the face-to-face encounter. It is in the face-to-face that the face of despair becomes essentially transformative. Moreover, nourishment, in one form or other, is central to almost all of Levinas's works that consider relationships between people. Food gives us a sense of who we are in the world, and providing food is a specificity of human responsibility and repair.Footnote ⁶ To take one's own bread and give it to another constitutes a full acknowledgement of the suffering of others and the willing sacrifice of our own satiety in order to nourish others. To fulfill ourselves is to feed others. And so it goes that just as food deprivation breaks the human spirit, feeding others provides human mediation and healing.

Humanitarian food activities create a platform that brings a broad range of people together, those who are displaced and far from home and those settled in the comfort of their own country. These social relations that are played out during humanitarian encounters expose existing relationships and create new ones. Food does not just happen or appear; it is purchased, cooked, and offered. Accordingly, food brings with it human encounters and connections that are not anticipated.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote something to the effect that hell is the absolute lack of being heard.Footnote ⁷ Volunteers of RWTN say that they not only hear the voices, but they also see the faces of dispirited refugees, “sitting waiting for their fate to be decided by policy makers.” With the hearing and the seeing, these volunteer activities become subversive, and these efforts are spatially transformative in the sense that they give presence to individuals being fed.

Prosperous Norway seems a long way from the seas that carry migrants to Europe's shores, or the tense borderlands of the Balkans through which they trek. Norway's refugee policy used to be little more than a Scandinavian curiosity. As I submit this essay, thousands of refugees from the Middle East are looking to one country or another, and Norway is no longer a Nordic abstraction. RWTN has not only created a forum for grasping the struggles of those who live lives of “ordinary sufferings”Footnote ⁸; in perhaps subtle ways, it is also working to reorder the world and expand the humanitarian map through actions that involve food.

The massive folkevandring of refugees from the Middle East to the Arctic Circle has unsettled some of our most enduring perspectives about the limits of humanitarianism. At the same time the somber reality of Islamophobia and intolerance persists. However, the support being played out across the globe opens up possibilities for starting new conversations about Middle Eastern diasporas in unlikely places, and about how we can approach humanitarian pluralism. What takes people who do not even own warm clothes to the coldest parts of the earth? What are the life stories behind the individuals seeking refuge in Arctic regions? Which institutions are taking on humanitarian assistance and who are the people participating in providing this assistance? How will these encounters be recounted in the Middle East? And what is the long-term impact this moment in history will have on local Arctic communities? The connections and the breaks between the local and the global remain unexplored areas in studies of humanitarian relief practices and encounters. These are some of the questions that invite further research.