The need to help : the domestic arts of international humanitarianism / Liisa H. Malkki.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Humanitarian assistance.

International relief.

Helping behavior.

Physical Description:

x, 270 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2015.

Summary:

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Need, imagination, and the humanitarian care of the self

Professionals abroad: occupational solidarity and international desire as humanitarian motives

Impossible situations: affective impasses and their afterlives in humanitarian and ethnographic fieldwork

Figurations of the human: children, humanity, and the infantilization of peace

Bear humanity: children, animals, and other power-objects of the humanitarian

Imagination

Homemade humanitarianism: knitting and loneliness

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:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822359128

082235912X

9780822359326

0822359324

9780822375364

0822375362

OCLC:

900242725

Online:

Related Electronic Resource: Web site for this work, including link to table of contents: