Synopses & Reviews
In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world andquot;out there,andquot; led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound needinessandmdash;the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit andquot;trauma teddiesandquot; and andquot;aid bunniesandquot; for andquot;needy children,andquot; the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.
Review
andquot;Many have noted that heroic humanitarianism, if often inadvertently, tends to presume a passive, suffering other. In this work, Liisa H. Malkki shatters that one-way mirror. With uncommon imagination and insight, she turns her gaze back on the neediness of the benefactor: on the ways in which distant care-giving might offer an escapeandndash;a sense of passion and purposeandndash;to those alienated in prison-houses of relative affluence.andquot;
Review
andquot;With
The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki changes the agenda of the study of humanitarianism. This is much more than a study of Finnish humanitarians, as Malkki provides an extended meditation on a range of neglected topics in the study of humanitarianism, picking up and addressing fresh conceptual and moral questions. A vital contribution.andquot;
Synopsis
In this ethnography Liisa H. Malkki reverses the study of humanitarian aid, focusing on aid workers rather than aidand#39;s recipients. She shows how aid serves the needs of its recipients and providers.
About the Author
Liisa H. Malkki is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, and the coauthor of Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgmentsand#160; vii
Introduction. Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Selfand#160; 1
1. Professionals Abroad: Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motivesand#160; 23
2. Impossible Situations: Affective Impasses and Their Afterlives in Humanitarian and Ethnographic Fieldworkand#160; 53
3. Figurations of the Human: Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peaceand#160; 77
4. Bear Humanity: Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imaginationand#160; 105
5. Homemade Humanitarianism: Knitting and Lonelinessand#160; 133
6. A Zealous Humanism and Its Limits: Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutralityand#160; 165
Conclusion. The Power of the Mere: Humanitarianism as Domestic Art and Imaginative Politicsand#160; 199
Notesand#160; 209
Referencesand#160; 235
Indexand#160; 267