The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism - Softcover

Malkki, Liisa H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822359324 ISBN 13: 9780822359326

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Need to Help

The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism

By Liisa H. Malkki

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5932-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction. Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Self, 
1. Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motives, 
2. Affective Impasses and Their Afterlives in Humanitarian and Ethnographic Fieldwork, 
3. Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace, 
4. Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination, 
5. Knitting and Loneliness, 
6. Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutrality, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Professionals Abroad

Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motives

In my case, international work and missions for the Red Cross have been the most significant events of my life, ones that have guided my later choices in ... my life and career.

— Liisa Riikonen, "'Kuran ja kuoleman keskelle sinne sinisten vuorten alle'"

A year or two after the Rwanda genocide, I saw a T-shirt with the shocking text: "I'm in Rwanda because I'm a ..." The three options were "Rogue," "Adventurer," and "Saint." The sentiment on this T-shirt was obviously simplistic and more, but it encapsulated a set of current commonsense ideas about the motivations underlying the work being done under the banner of humanitarian intervention. What makes people do it? What pulls them in? There is a great deal of guessing at and attribution of motive, the T-shirt being but one instance of this. Sometimes more explicitly, sometimes less, the humanitarians may be suspected of motives less or other than they ought to be, of motives less than pure. What is it they're doing when they're "doing good"? Maybe they're in it for the glamour? Adventure? Glory? Money? (see Redfield 2013). Maybe they aspire to be cool — cosmopolitans? Or maybe they are holier-than-though world savers? Maybe they have Mother Teresa or Jesus complexes? Are they playing God? What is it we're not seeing, or not being told? When asked to make financial contributions to humanitarian aid campaigns, people are now accustomed to suspect, sometimes rightly, that their money is not going to its intended recipients and that their compassion is being sought on partially false pretenses. People suspect a trick of the heart, like a trick of the eye. As many have demonstrated, problems and harm are not hard to find in aid work, even in much state-of-the-art work done with the best of intentions and best practices.

One of the key intentions of this book is to try to really situate one particular group of aid workers anthropologically, and to refuse the all-too-common move of simply assuming that the aid worker is an always already worldly, generically cosmopolitan, globally mobile figure operating from a position of relative strength and anonymous power vis-à-vis ("local," "helpless") aid recipients (Malkki 1992). What motivations did I myself attribute to the Finnish Red Cross workers and their logic of humanitarianism when I was initially beginning to interview them? That my own reasoning might not have been so far removed from that on the T-shirt is a sobering thought. The attribution of motive is one thing, but getting at the aid workers' own understandings of why they do their often difficult and dangerous work is a more involved process. Here the organizing themes at their most general are, on the one hand, interrelationships among internationalism, professionalism, and occupational solidarity, and on the other, the attraction and sense of possibility in work and life abroad. Under these broad headings is a more specific set of motivational, and intimately aspirational, themes that emerged in the ethnographic interviews. First there was the workers' own ethical and experiential obligation to help in humanitarian aid and emergency relief, and their engagement with a more collective, national obligation as a "citizen of the world" to help those who need it. People had a strong "homegrown" sense of international obligation and the importance of "internationalism," and more lately "global responsibility," as important cultural values and goals. (Internationalism and cosmopolitanism are not synonymous, of course [Malkki 1994].) Second, people aspired to and admired occupational solidarities and professional teamwork. Third, they expressed a desire, and a need, to travel and see the world in ways other than touristic, and to experience the excitement of "the international scene." The love of travel turned out to be a way of talking about the professional and personal challenges and rewards of international missions that made their work for the Red Cross so meaningful. Fourth, people expressed a desire to leave "home" (koti) and "homeland" (kotimaa) and to be "out in the world" (olla maailmalla), and of it, and to be transformed by it — but only "up to a point" (Mauss 1990; Tambiah 1984:340; see also chapter 4). Fifth, some, more than others, were motivated to seek the international as a site of sensual engagement and enhanced sociality, a more private sensual internationalism. And finally, I examine here why people sometimes thought of their own national habitus as a burden or constraint — and as lacking in something — and how giving and helping, practices of generosity, came to seem like an alleviation of the helper's own neediness. (See also chapter 5 for an examination of these topics in another key.)

I will explore, in other words, a spectrum of motivations for Finnish aid work. At one end, there is an ethical and political obligation to the international or global community, a duty to offer something of one's own abundance to those who need it, and the solidarity of internationalist professionalism; at the other is a "longing for the faraway" (kaukokaipuu), a neediness for the world and human contact, and an ever-present tension between solitude and conviviality, both prized (see chapter 5). This is not to suggest that people's motivations and aspirations could not be overlapping, or even mutually contradictory.

Part I: Professionalism, Solidarity, and Internationalism

As I sought to understand what drove the aid workers, two closely related forms of social solidarity came into view. The first was that of international obligation. Both the Finnish Red Cross and the aid workers it sent out conceptualized internationalism as a value to aspire to and help foster on missions. To be a good citizen it was desirable to be a good citizen of the world. The second form of solidarity was the translocal, transnational occupational solidarity of professionalism. The ethnographic evidence I have suggests that rather than seeing aid work in terms of an abstract (and fundamentally unilateral) calling, it may be more productive to think in terms of structural (even Durkheimian) forms of solidarity, and to attend to the significance of professional dispositions and forms of habitus (Bourdieu 2000; Mahmood 2005:136–40). For, in all the places in which the Red Cross medical teams work (usually under the umbrella of the ICRC and, less often, the IFRC), they have resident counterparts — that is, ideally, fellow professionals in other national-level Red Cross/Red Crescent societies, and their volunteers. These locally based professionals work alongside the multinational expatriate teams, and they teach and are taught, often of necessity, in very improvisational ways. (Julie Livingston has documented similar practices in Botswana in Improvising Medicine [2012]; see also Wendland [2010] and McKay [2012a, 2012b]). The internationalist, professional ideal (if not always the social reality) at work for the Finnish Red Cross is a Maussian exchange. Thus, an important part of situating the aid worker is also to challenge the "humanitarian"–"victim" or "aid recipient" binary, and to insist on the recognition of the presence of the professional resident aid worker and volunteer in whose own society the political and/or natural disaster is occurring.

"Professional, but Not 'Good'": Beyond Nurse Nightingale

My early questions to the Finnish Red Cross workers reflected my preconceptions and expectations — shaped to a startling degree, I was to realize, by the media coverage of violence, displacement, and humanitarian intervention in Africa. The first among these mass-mediated expectations was that I would discern a clear (and perhaps not very subtle) "humanitarian sensibility" — that is to say, an aspirationally selfless, generic calling to help a distant "suffering humanity" (cf. Boltanski 1993; Riikonen 1994:9–11; Haskell 1998:251–54; Fassin 2012). More to the point, I had expected that the Red Cross workers would readily identify themselves as humanitarians. This did not turn out to be the case in any straightforward manner. People came to international aid work through many different occupational routes and with a variety of dispositions (Bourdieu 2000), sensibilities, and personal histories.

As the 1994 genocide was happening in Rwanda, I tracked it daily in the media in California (Malkki 1996). The news cameras loved the expatriate (usually white) aid workers wearing T-shirts and identity tags or vests with their organizations' distinctive logos (MSF, ICRC, and the UN [United Nations], among many others). The cameras seemed especially partial to the women aid workers. That there were black professionals, Red Cross aid workers, and volunteers on the scene did not usually get picked up by the cameras. The journalists interviewed the white figures against a backdrop of vast masses of black African refugees and dusty, deforested camps that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. The framing of such scenes was very predictable. The aid workers' concerned faces (and inexplicably clean T-shirts) seemed to pop off the screen. The media clearly sought charismatic figures — maybe latter-day Nurse Nightingales and Doctor Schweitzers — among their ranks, just as they sought nameless victims (again, preferably, in the figuralities of innocent children, women, or women and children) among the refugees (Evans and Hall 2007:5). Selfless healers, selfless victims.

I did not realize for a while to what extent my own expectations had been shaped by that heroizing mass mediation of efficient, "saving" aid to helpless suffering until I actually began to do research with the Finnish Red Cross people who had worked in places like Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan, among other sites. I expected to hear the feminine machismo of the Mother Teresa-like figure with her indomitable humanitarian calling and life-long self-sacrifice (Prashad 1997). My expectations were matter-of-factly brushed aside.

One of my early approaches to the question of humanitarianism as "service to humanity" was to ask the Red Cross nurses and doctors in Helsinki what ideals or professional role models they might have. (A pretty silly question, I admit.) I offered as possible models famous, idealized "medical humanitarians." In retrospect, I realize that these models were not just ideal-typical models in Weber's sense; they were caricatures based on stereotypes. Eyebrows raised, my respondents refused this attribution. A former director of the international section of the Finnish Red Cross actually told me early on in the research that the very term humanitarianism was a troubled one. I should have paid more attention to her remark at the time. Instead, I persisted in looking for humanitarians.

One nurse, Lilja, reacted to my questions: "I don't believe anyone expects [any] sort of Mother Teresa of me — and least of all do I expect it of myself." She was quite emphatic: "In my opinion those are not values — for me personally. I don't aspire to anything like that. For me, it's important how I do my work, and how I get a contact to the people I'm helping. I don't see myself as a person who'd like to become the flagship of some system or organization." She smiled, "Because, personally, I don't see it as important — to be some extremely 'important' person. It's the work, what I do; that's what's most important to me" (cf. Riikonen 1994:31–33).

I asked a doctor, Leila, this time: "Is your work a calling or a job or ...?" She flashed me a smile: "Well, the Red Cross pays good salaries. So that already drops you from the pinnacles of self-sacrifice. Those [interested in self-sacrifice], they go to the MSF, where they pay minimum wages — people who have that kind of concern foremost." She added, "Those who have only the most cursory understanding of this [work], they say, 'Oh, I admire you so much for going there to do something good.'" Many others told me of similar exchanges. They found friends', acquaintances', relatives', and domestic colleagues' barbed humor about "doing good" or "going off to save the world again" to be hurtful and frustrating. Being able to talk with interested listeners about one's mission after the fact (aside from other Red Cross colleagues) was not among the rewards of this kind of work. The doctor returned to the theme of self-sacrifice:

I remember when we were on a [10-week] training course in Copenhagen; there was a girl there who had come.... We were all doctors.... She had these sorts of ideas that she was going "to do good in India" — but she fell back to earth pretty quickly. She quit the course after two weeks. At the Red Cross course, there was no one who was so exaggeratedly that way [bent on self-sacrifice]. There [abroad], in practice, I haven't seen any sort of Nurse Nightingale thing among the nurses or doctors. But perhaps those people more often go [on international missions] through religious organizations? In my opinion, you don't need those sorts of people there. I think it should be people with a pretty solid grip [jämäkkä ote] who get sent there.... Of course, the two [models, of the calling and the solid professionalism,] don't necessarily preclude each other. If you have even the slightest grasp of the atmosphere and of people, that self-sacrifice business falls away pretty fast.

Another doctor, Sanna, had similar views on self-sacrifice: "I would like this issue to be demystified.... It's about choices people make in their lives, to make them the best possible for themselves. Sometimes it is this kind of work, for some it is to make the most money, for some to have an average decent life.... We (in 'developed' countries at least, but also everywhere) have very many options to choose from!" (cf. chapter 6). To underscore the point against self-sacrifice, she went on to discuss the extensive risk management training given to international delegates by the Finnish Red Cross.

An older war nurse, Kaarina, admitted (with an amused blush) that when she had first started out in international Red Cross work decades earlier, she had thought her mission to be to "heal the world" (parantaa maailmaa). She said: "You ask about seeking goodness? No, I don't think about that — that I am 'good.'" She laughed, "Professional, but not 'good'!" Emphasizing that Finns just work hard to prove that they're good professionals on the international scene, she went on to insist quite stridently upon certain generalizations about the interrelationship between work and Finnishness (suomalaisuus) (see Lehtonen, Löytty, and Ruuska 2004). In fact, these generalizations — as well as a marked cultural preoccupation with self-stereotyping — came up in some manner in all of the interviews I did. Kaarina said, "Well: Finns generally have a very poor sense of self, so [we] always have a terrible need to prove that we're good [at what we do], that we work like crazy. So, many get a much bigger paycheck than we do, but we work like crazy [hullun lailla] to prove that we're good [at our jobs]. And that's Finnishness." She laughed, and went on: "I [saw] it already when I was au pairing [piikomassa] in the States; Finns were liked because they worked really hard ... It's a pretty Nordic characteristic, although the Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes have a noticeably better sense of self [itsetunto]. We need to do it [work] to prove that we're good — and even then we don't really believe that we're good — and that's how Finnishness manifests itself!" This was a common way in which people understood their nationality to matter on international missions. In short, my search for "Humanitarians" was a relative failure. What I found among the workers instead was an embarrassed annoyance that people attributed any sort of heroism or halo to them (cf. Redfield 2013): "Heroism. One of the biggest myths that's attached to work in crisis zones" (Hyvönen 2012:15).

Neither did the Finnish aid workers characterize themselves as being motivated by any sort of Christian calling. While both the ICRC's early history and the obvious symbolism of the cross might suggest at least a vaguely Christian contemporary orientation, aid workers categorically rejected the idea that it was anything other than a "secular" and pragmatic aid organization. While Finland is formally a Lutheran country, most people view themselves as secular, and most aid workers, when asked, described themselves as "not religious." Religion was not a spontaneous topic in the interviews (see Asad 1993, 2003). Yet many had read surprisingly deeply into non-Lutheran cosmologies and philosophies — most notably different kinds of Islam and Buddhism — a will to knowledge, they said, inspired by their work abroad. And despite their self-reported secularism (see chapter 6), the aid workers' very determination to serve all equally and without favor sometimes entailed deeply passionate commitments that paralleled certain sorts of Christian and Islamic commitment quite closely.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822359324
• ISBN 13: 9780822359326
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296