The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction. Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Self  1

1. Professionals Abroad: Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motives  23

2. Impossible Situations: Affective Impasses and Their Afterlives in Humanitarian and Ethnographic Fieldwork  53

3. Figurations of the Human: Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace  77

4. Bear Humanity: Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination  105

5. Homemade Humanitarianism: Knitting and Loneliness  133

6. A Zealous Humanism and Its Limits: Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutrality  165

Conclusion. The Power of the Mere: Humanitarianism as Domestic Art and Imaginative Politics  199

Notes  209

References  235

Index  267

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.

Review :
"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) "This book would be a valuable text in undergraduate and graduate courses on development and humanitarianism. Malkki’s skilled ability to link together so many different intellectual inspirations makes this book very useful to examine as a model for theoretical conceptualization and for her methodology." - Jeremy Rich (African Studies Quarterly) "[A]n original and highly significant analysis of 'Aidland,' essential reading for anyone interested in the growing literature on the people who work in the development industry and humanitarian organizations." - R. L. Stirrat (Journal of Anthropological Research) "...this book provides finely textured material with which to debate the salience of the various rationales that people give for helping others." - Erica Caple James (American Ethnologist) "This beautifully written book artfully navigates the purchase of domestic arts on international humanitarianism. . . . It is a book crafted with finesse, weaving in subtle threads of Western political thought on humanism, animism, cosmopolitanism with the empathetic understanding of an ethnographer engaged in painful and complex fieldwork." - Ritu Mathur (Society & Space) "Perhaps one of the more captivating and accessible texts on humanitarianism. The text would be a useful tool for students seeking a deeper knowledge about the drivers of humanitarianism, as well as connections between the ‘local’ and ‘global.’ Yet, it has sufficient theoretical depth for researchers to find value when reflecting on broader questions about the power of humanitarianism." - Simon Dickinson (Progress in Development Studies)