The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism – Liisa H. Malkki

The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism

Author: Liisa H. Malkki

Publisher: Duke University Press

Print Length: 320 pages

Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Philosophy, Social Science

Area: Finland

Topic: Humanitarian Action & Humanitarianism, Humanism, Ethics & Society, Social/Aid Workers, Globalization, Internationalism, The Need to Help, Imagination, Care, Domestic & Public, Local & Global, Peace, Children & Childhood, Sacrifice; Humanity, Impartiality, Independence, Neutrality (The Humanitarian Principles)

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 “out there,” 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 neediness—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 “trauma teddies” and “aid bunnies” for “needy children,” 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.
“The Need to Help situates aid work firmly in the social realities of the sending countries, rather than in the context of the abstract cosmopolitan values that academic accounts usually emphasise. For many of the Finnish workers Malkki studies, aid work is also linked to different notions about what is good and what is bad about Finland and about being Finnish. Complementing her focus on professionals who work in crisis settings across the world, Malkki looks at the needs that are associated with some of the more mundane ways in which people connect to the humanitarian enterprise, such as the knitting of bunnies and teddies for imagined children-in-need far away.” — Monika Krause, Times Higher Education

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Self

1. Professionals Abroad: Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motives

2. Impossible Situations: Affective Impasses and Their Afterlives in Humanitarian and Ethnographic Fieldwork

3. Figurations of the Human: Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace

4. Bear Humanity: Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination

5. Homemade Humanitarianism: Knitting and Loneliness

6. A Zealous Humanism and Its Limits: Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutrality

Conclusion. The Power of the Mere: Humanitarianism as Domestic Art and Imaginative Politics

Notes

References

Index

Liisa H. Malkki is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Source: https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/liisa-malkki

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