(..) It is an avatar of the twin themes of discursive power and institutional control that Michel Foucault discussed in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (I973) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (I977). Because the "limitation of land and budget" forecloses the consideration of infrastructural change in the camp environment, attention is diverted to the "change [of] their habits which detract from their good health." Refugee subjects are discursively represented in a way that reduces them to the unhealthy and/or passive Other who is to be managed, administered, and if need be, changed. Their resistance, interpreted as recalcitrance, only legitimizes and further sustains the institutional power and authority that are enacted upon them. Harrell-Bond deconstructs the strange, selfreinforcing logic that underpins refugee programs in Africa where she did fieldwork: "Often interpretations of compassion seem to define those in need as helpless, and then work in ways which makes sure that they are useless" (1986:82).

(Dwight Conquergood "Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee Camp")