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:

1 online resource (281 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

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

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:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822375364

0822375362

OCLC:

915119017