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The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism
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.
296 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 24, 2022
This book is very academic and dives deep into the circumstances, motivations, and cultures of aid workers in a general sense by focusing on activities done by the Finnish Red Cross and Red Crescent societies. It wasn't a particularly accessible read because of how bogged down in references it was. Then again, I don't read nonfiction a lot. It makes some important points. It was a worthwhile read overall.
July 28, 2021
Great case study about all the different kinds of aid work people do from craftwork to field work.
April 5, 2018
This was a refreshing look at why people need to help, and what it is that drives them. It`s based on the Finnish population and their norms, which was quite a new thing to me and therefore it was an exciting reading. The book was written in a way that almost seemed like a fiction or a diary, and that makes the reading a bit of easier.
April 20, 2024
Read Intro, Chapters 1,2,6
April 14, 2025
this is my favorite book length ethnography i’ve ever read. domestic arts hold society together. learned lots about finland
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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