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.
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