T

o remove the varnish from the “gloss” of humanitarianism this book poses a simple question: “who ‘the needy’ are in the humanitarian encounter”? The thoughtfulness with which this question is posed demonstrates Liisa Malkki’s unwillingness to take assumptions about the neediness of the Global South for granted. On the contrary she situates her ethnographic fieldwork in Finland: a country known for its neutrality, where a large number of the population devotes its time to voluntary service and the Finnish Red Cross holds special influence and prestige.

It is from here that the author begins to explore the domestic arts of international humanitarianism that are often disparaged or marginalized as a “mere” “complement” to the real world of politics. The ‘realm of the mere’ signifies the disempowered and the domesticated (page 98). It is from here that she makes carefully nuanced inroads into the ethics of care, imagination, and affect management as she interviews Finnish Red Cross delegates and observes local young and elderly volunteers.

She dwells on the “neediness” of the local volunteers and humanitarian workers that prefer to describe themselves as “aid workers.” These workers are conscious of their “home” in a developed country, their “white privilege” and material benefits but at the same time suffer from a sense of deprivation—an acute sense of deprivation sourced from “specific structural features” of their “home society” and an impoverished culture (page 144). In this culture that takes pride in its capacity for independent coping and self-sufficiency there is a lack of warmth, sociability, acute loneliness, depression, and alcoholism. An emotional and psychic suffering so intense that the need to “escape” is “palpable,” “severe,” “urgent,” and in short a “deep quaking neediness” (pages 1-9).

In an effort to prevent “falling from time” (page 137) so as not to become “a mere elder, an ex-person, a being without qualities” it is imperative to fight against the “crisis ordinariness” or “slow death” (pages 138-139). The author “spent a good deal of time in yarn shops” and learned from shopkeepers that they are often “the first living person who has spoken to the elder” for “many days” (pages 135-136). She visits many online forums in this Internet-connected society where the elderly that have not spoken for months are airing their concerns about the impact this oppressive silence has on them. These problems of the elderly and the young are compounded with experiences of immigrants in a “social context of widespread anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and even violence” (page 150).

In this “hard society”, “experiential diminishment of personhood” and “social invisibility” is met with chilling indifference and regarded as unproblematic and acceptable. The imagined others in need are not to be located within one’s own domestic realm but out there in the international. Thus the author seeks to explode the myth of being charitable due to an imagined sense of abundance and relative strength and instead draws our attention to the fragile, therapeutic, need of giving out of a crisis ordinariness—a sense of crisis experienced living an ordinary, mundane life. In this endeavor “care of the self” manifests itself as a “self-humanizing practice” by helping the most needy (page 158).

Children represented as the most needy in humanitarian appeals invoke a sense of imagination that forges a tenuous link of belonging and usefulness. These appeals make it possible to “imagine a relationship with the very human (indeed ultrahuman need of the child in crisis” (page 119). Children caught in areas devastated by armed conflicts or extreme poverty become recipients of “gifts of care” such as woolen, hand-knitted and croched “therapy toys” or “trauma toys” such as Trauma Teddies, Aid Bunnies, Shwe Shwe Dolls and Mother Teresa blankets. These hand-crafted toys and blankets are represented as ‘diplomatic emissaries of distant care and compassion of invisible strangers’ (page 106)

These gifts of care—“extravagant” in the time and money showered in knitting and sewing them—circulate in a ritualistic manner in the transnational humanitarian sphere (page 159). They help forge solidarity through exchanges and serve as “power objects for warding off thoughtlessness” (page 130). The very neoteny of these domesticated objects is questioned for neutralizing aid, failing to effect any real socio-political changes, and posing logistical challenges. The therapy toys might facilitate “self-making” through practices of imagination and exercise of skill by the donors but it also contributes towards infantilization and the tranquilization of suffering children as depoliticized subjects.

The depoliticization of suffering children as moral subjects might help appeal to the principle of humanity in universal terms but it does little to address the “ethical and affective challenges that caring for children brought up for many aid workers” (page 61). These challenges recollected and “spilled out in great ‘heart monologues’” expose the dangerous tensions between relation of self to self (page 61). It puts the self through the tests of self-sacrifice and self-transformation through “limit experiences” that often leave one feeling dirty, unable to cope with the scalarity of calamity and with the knowledge of a “safe return that wasn’t” (page 64).

Red Cross delegates benefit from professionalism gained through rigorous training and organizational emphasis on principles of neutrality encourage methodological distancing in confrontation with mortality. The author makes a distinction between political or operational neutrality and emotional or psychic neutrality. She notes that “strategies of neutrality are always delicately relational, situational and provisional” (page 179). The Red Cross emphasis is on “behaving neutrally” so that neutrality becomes a “temporally circumscribed tactic that demands performative efficacy and affect management” (page 179).

This beautifully written book artfully navigates the purchase of domestic arts on international humanitarianism. The author self-consciously acknowledges the limitations of her own work that is sometimes indicative of areas that need to be explored further, such as, for instance, questions relating to racism and humanitarianism. These are areas that would have been invaluable in their contribution to this field. But the author devotes herself to the main themes of her book: the transnational ritual sphere of affect, imagination, and the ethics of care. 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.