Description
Book SynopsisIn this ethnography Liisa H. Malkki reverses the study of humanitarian aid, focusing on aid workers rather than aid's recipients. She shows how aid serves the needs of its recipients and providers.
Trade 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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
