The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism

Abstract

In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from recipients to 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 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 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 to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

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