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

Malkki, Liisa H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082235912X ISBN 13: 9780822359128

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 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.

Review:

"Many have noted that heroic humanitarianism, if often inadvertently, tends to presume a passive, suffering other. In this work, Liisa H. Malkki shatters that one-way mirror. With uncommon imagination and insight, she turns her gaze back on the neediness of the benefactor: on the ways in which distant care-giving might offer an escape–a sense of passion and purpose–to those alienated in prison-houses of relative affluence." (Jean Comaroff, coeditor of Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism)

"With The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki changes the agenda of the study of humanitarianism. This is much more than a study of Finnish humanitarians, as Malkki provides an extended meditation on a range of neglected topics in the study of humanitarianism, picking up and addressing fresh conceptual and moral questions. A vital contribution."
(Harri Englund, author of Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 082235912X
• ISBN 13: 9780822359128
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296