The

Need to
Help
THE DOMESTIC ARTS OF
INTERNATIONAL
HUMANITARIANISM
Liisa H. Malkki
The Need
to Help
The Domestic Arts
of International
Humanitarianism
Liisa H. Malkki

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015

 © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Natalie F. Smith
Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Copperline

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena)
The need to help : the domestic arts of international
humanitarianism / Liisa H. Malkki.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5912-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5932-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7536-4 (e-book)
1. Humanitarian assistance. 2. International relief.
3. Helping behavior. I. Title.
hv553.m264 2015
361.2'6—dc23 2015008325

Cover image by author;

cover design by Natalie F. Smith.
Photo credit: Christine R. Choi.
Contents

Acknowledgments 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
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank all the Finnish Red Cross people
who so generously shared their thoughts and experiences with me. I will al-
ways be grateful to them for their time and openness. Helena Korhonen first
welcomed me in the Finnish Red Cross at the introduction of Olli Alho. The
currently serving secretary-general, Kristiina Kumpula, and her colleagues
in Helsinki have been very kind to accommodate me since then. The con-
tributions of the Red Cross people in Tampere are everywhere visible. I am
also deeply grateful to the interlocutors I have had regarding knitting and
other work of the hand. The help of the research staff of the City of Helsinki
Library was invaluable. And I have had the most extraordinary research as-
sistants in Jacob Doherty, Hannah Appel, Arvi Pihlman, and Jess Auerbach.
Thank you.
The research first began to resemble a whole during a yearlong Stanford
Humanities Center Fellowship (2007 – 8) and a fellowship from the American
Council of Learned Societies (acls). I am very grateful for both. Summer
research funding from Stanford University has enabled me to spend time
interviewing Red Cross staff in Finland. At the Stanford Humanities Cen-
ter, I was fortunate to find excellent fellow travelers in Gerald Bruns, James
Clifford, Babacar Fall, and Richard Roberts, among others.
I thank Sally Falk Moore for her farsighted advice, and for setting me on
the path to thinking about mass displacement, and the care and control of
people. I deeply admire her intellectual force and critical imagination. There
is much in this book of what I was taught both by Sally Moore and Tambi,
the late Stanley J. Tambiah. In a 2007 American Anthropological Association
panel in honor of Professor Tambiah, I was also fortunate to receive truly
insightful comments on my Red Cross research from Engseng Ho. Felicity
Aulino and Miriam Goheen made that event possible.
Many friends and colleagues have given me support and advice along
the way: Carol Greenhouse, my very first anthropology professor, and, later,
wonderful friend and colleague. I thank her for our heady conversations. I
thank Jean Comaroff for bringing me a Forward Bear from South Africa,
and for her always stunning critical insight. She and John Comaroff have
given me much in decades of learning and friendship. Harri Englund read
the whole manuscript and gave invaluable comments of the kind only he can
give. Thank you. Paulla Ebron I thank for her gentle friendship and our theo-
retical wanderings; I will not forget our nineteenth-century correspondence
about slow-burning book projects. Emily Martin has been there through the
greatest challenges, and I am honored to be able to claim her as a friend and
colleague. Anwar Faruqi has always seen me through good days and bad.
I thank him for his lifelong loyalty and encouragement as a fellow writer.
Erica Bornstein, Didier Fassin, Ilana Feldman, Peter Redfield, and Miriam
Ticktin have together and separately made me think much better and more
subtly about what we gloss as humanitarianism. Their impressive body of
work has made mine easier. Miriam Ticktin read the complete draft of this
book, and gave truly constructive comments. Lynn Meskell has taught me
valuable ways of conceptualizing materiality and much else. Laurie Kain
Hart gave me wonderful insights on professionalism and chapter 3. Timo-
thy Mitchell gave excellent and much appreciated taped comments on chap-
ter 3. Clare Cameron and Amrapali Maitra — doctors and anthropologists
in process — have given me delightful ideas and encouragement along the
way. In Tampere, Anna Rastas, Laura Huttunen, Kaarina Nikula, and the
late Ulla Vuorela have been dear friends, imaginative colleagues, and gener-
ous listeners. Kaarina gave me valuable feedback on chapter 6. To Laura and
her colleagues — Arvi Pihlman, Mari Korpela, Matias Helinko, Mirkka Helk-
kula, and Anna Rastas — an admiring and humbled thanks for arranging the
translation of my previous work into a book in Finnish. (The translations in
this book are mine.) I thank Donald Brenneis for inviting me to give a talk
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The graduate students at lunch

viii acknowledgments
afterward were impressive. Daniel Linger wrote me a letter full of wonderful
insights after my talk there. Elizabeth Cameron gave me a valued reminder
about how dolls can matter, for better and for worse, as did Marina Warner.
Amanda Moore has taught me to think further with animals. I thank Wynn
Furth for the extra dry wit. Both Eric Worby and Zhanara Nauruzbayeva did
me the honor of giving chapter 2 very close, critical readings, and Zhanara
Nauruzbayeva also contributed to chapter 3. Kabir Tambar gave me an inspi-
rational reading of chapter 6. Peter Geschiere, always gentle and inspiring,
read chapters 1 and 3. Conversations with Sharika Thiranagama, my sunny
friend and brilliant new colleague, have been full of insight and illumina-
tion. Chrisy Moutsatsos has been a generous friend and an imaginative col-
league through thick and thin. I truly admire the delicacy and power in Ann
Stoler’s thought and care. I thank Melchior Mbonimpa for the constancy of
his friendship and his intellectual honesty in reading my work. Sylvia Yanagi-
sako has intellectual elegance and an understanding heart; I am grateful for
her mentorship. Thomas Blom Hansen produces both trust and laughter; in
the midst of his own brilliant writing, he has always made time for listening
to me and reading my work. Christina Schwenkel has been a constant com-
panion throughout this project and much else, and she has enabled me to
think better, especially about materiality and the visual. Reading drafts of
Ramah McKay’s brilliant forthcoming ethnography and our conversations
about writing have been a delight to me. It was always a high point of my day
to listen to Elif Babül’s intense thought processes. Conversations with Tanya
Luhrmann, especially about affect, have helped me to move forward and ex-
plore new lines of thought. Susanna Luoto helped me to obtain “humanitar-
ian dolls.” I knew I could count on her. I have deeply appreciated and bene-
fited from lively conversations and warm support from Tania Ahmad, Kevin
O’Neill, Michelle Apotsos, Jeremy Benthall, Hilary Chart, Molly Cunning-
ham, Sam Dubal, Bharat Venkat, Melissa Caldwell, Duana Fullwiley, Angela
Garcia, Bruce O’Neill, Mark Gardiner, Mari Lautamatti-Alho, Armi Malkki,
Timo A. Malkki, Timo T. Malkki, Tomas Matza, Selim Shahine, Marilyn
Strathern, Anna West, Judith Wilson, and Thet Win. So many people have
given me kindness and help along the way that I know I will inevitably have
forgotten to name someone. If you are reading this: thank you. I often think
about my department and marvel at my good fortune in being here. Thank
you to my colleagues.
Thank you to Ken Wissoker for his insight in choosing the perfect readers

acknowledgments ix
for this book, and for his always generous and patient “in-process” support.
Thank you also to Elizabeth Ault, Danielle Szulczewski, and the Duke Univer-
sity Press art department for all their work on this book. I truly appreciate it.
Aila Ferguson read and impressively critiqued two key chapters of the
book, making them a great deal stronger in the process. Elias Ferguson’s in-
sights have been very sharp and imaginative throughout. I thank them both
for their patience and understanding. Jim, this book, warts and all, is for you.
I don’t know how I could even begin to thank you.

x acknowledgments
Introduction.
Need, Imagination, and
the Care of the Self

The interview in the coffee shop had long since become something else; we had been there
for hours. She worked hard to get across how trapped she felt in her hospital work, and
just in her ordinary, workaday life as a doctor and a woman in Finland. Her desire for
the world “out there” and her love of beauty came across as a deep quaking neediness.
“Maybe I really was born in the wrong country.” She remembered a late friend who, she
explained, just wasn’t suited to life in his “own” country. He “blossomed like a rose” in the
[Middle East]. Before he was killed, they had talked about how, for each of them, “out
there in the world” (tuolla maailmalla) was where they would both thrive. Missions
for the Red Cross took her out there.

In a Helsinki yarn shop on a quiet afternoon, an old woman had picked out her se-
lection of yarns and stood at the checkout counter. She talked familiarly with the shop
owner about the “Mother Teresa blankets” she was knitting to send to the needy — via
the Vaaka ry organization, or perhaps the Red Cross; she had not decided yet. She talked
about other things, too, and a conversation ensued. Finally she gathered her bag of yarn,
her beige purse, and her walking stick. Then I was the only customer in the shop. The
owner told me that the “elder” (vanhus) who had just left had knitted scores of blankets
for charity (hyväntekeväisyys). She also remarked that the elder did not seem to have
much else in her life.1

In recent years, a formidable critical literature has emerged on humanitari-

anism as a key figure in global politics. Likewise, human rights and humani-
tarian nongovernmental organizations (ngos) have come to be recognized
as increasingly important, and sometimes valorized, actors that “provide
independent voices” in a politically “murky and dangerous” Global South.2
Much has been written about the ethics, pragmatics, and politics of humani-
tarian interventions; how humanitarian interventions help or harm; how
they may be hijacked by war machines and by ever more sophisticated tactics
of terrorizing; how their work and security are compromised by militaries
(including that of the United States) waging hearts and minds campaigns
through “humanitarian care”; how idealistic moves to relieve suffering in-
tersect with the so-called realpolitik of international relations and corporate
interests; how different institutional mandates may have contradictory or
unintended effects in the field; and many other themes.3 This is a very dy-
namic field and I hope that this book will be a useful contribution to it. But I
also want to shift focus a bit, from humanitarian intervention and its effects
on the recipients of aid to a more intimate set of questions about “humanitar-
ians” themselves — in this case, Finnish Red Cross aid workers sent abroad
on aid and emergency relief missions by the International Committee of the
Red Cross (icrc).
Here, I am most interested not in the effects that their interventions produce,
or how to assess politically either the value of their work or the problems it
raises. Instead, I wish to begin with what seems to me a more foundational
question, which is: Who are these people? Who wants to work in humanitarian
aid and emergency relief, and why? What are their motivations and aims?
Who wants to help? What conceptions of help and want circulate in these so-
cial fields? And what forms of imagination animate and sustain them? There
is, across the Global South, an apparently ubiquitous (and mass-mediated)
social presence — a humanitarian subject characterized by a desire to help. But
what do we really know about this subject? What forms of understanding
might emerge from a closely ethnographic inquiry into humanitarian mo-
tivation? Of course, the answers will always arise from social and historical
specificity.
Some of the results of this inquiry were surprising. The Finnish Red Cross
“humanitarians” I worked with were highly trained, experienced, and had
each been on numerous missions around the world. In many ways they were
very strong. They knew what needed to get done. (This fact made it very
frustrating for them when technical or other obstacles to their work came
up, as they frequently did.)4 Professional as these workers were, however,
one should not be too quick to assume that help and humanitarian aid al-
ways come from a position of unilateral strength, or power. What I found

2 introduction
was impressive strength and good sense, but also, for many, an undeniable
neediness that drove people to do their often hazardous work. For them, there
was a need to help (tarve auttaa). Taking that observation seriously meant revis-
ing some basic assumptions about who “the needy” are in the humanitarian
encounter.
In trying to answer such basic questions — who are they and why do they
do what they do? — another, equally vital, set of questions emerged. How
did people with such motivations think about themselves?5 What kinds of
relations of self to self did they form? How did the self, engaged in work that
is often described as “selfless,” undergo transformations — in contexts of
humanitarian aid and emergency relief in war and violence, and death and
grieving? Is there such a thing as selflessness? What does that mean? When
is the self undone?
A final question took form: It had to do with the imagination in terms of
which this humanitarian subject, or self, framed both the world and her
place in it. Her subjectivity tended to be strongly internationalist, and a
sense of international obligation powerfully shaped her personal trajectory
and professional habitus—and her drive to work abroad. Why did the “world
outside” (ulkomaailma) have such power to enchant my interlocutors? “To be
out in the world” (olla maailmalla) was a powerful object of imagination for
them. This ethical, aesthetic, and affective process of world-making came
to matter in a number of ways. The processes and practices of being in the
world “out there” were also complexly aspirational.
I likewise found that these forms of internationalist humanitarian imag-
ination and practice were remarkably domestic — in two senses. In the first
sense, key aspects of international humanitarian aid always begin “at home”
(as opposed to abroad), somewhere local and specific, even intimate, in this case
Finland. Finnish histories and contemporary cultural and political forma-
tions, as well as people’s conceptions of themselves as Finns, mattered in
both predictable and unexpected ways in the work they did abroad, and key
features of the “home” society provided important motivations for this work.
The second sense of the domestic involves practices of care de facto often
undertaken by women and/or in a home — prototypically, nursing, cleaning,
and caring for the young, the old, and the vulnerable, but also such “do-
mestic arts” as knitting and crocheting “for the needy,” or participating in
“homemade” craft projects organized as humanitarian campaigns (often for
fund- and awareness-raising purposes) by aid organizations such as the Red
Cross, the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef), and numerous others

introduction 3
(see chapters 4 and 5). In these later chapters, the focus will be not the pro-
fessional aid workers in the international field abroad but rather other social
categories of Finns in Finland with a nonprofessional need to help. I will
examine what happens to the relation of self to self, and self to the world,
where helping occurs, but no traveling is involved. At stake are conditions
of isolation and abjection in Finland, most specifically among aged people,
where some engage in “humanitarian handicrafts” in order to find forms of
“stranger sociality” (Povinelli 2006) and human connection (even if precar-
ious) that help them to feel like real persons (cf. Muehlebach 2012). This is
an account of stark social realities that again inverts our usual assumptions
about where “need” is located in humanitarian relations of helping and giv-
ing, on the one hand, and receiving, on the other.
The domestic, in both of these forms, is relatively invisible in the predom-
inant representation of humanitarian actors as always already “cosmopoli-
tan.” While these forms could easily be (and often are) dismissed as trivial,
inconsequential, or irrelevant, each can be surprisingly powerful and even
dangerous in its capacity to entangle the self both with very close, intimate
(sometimes cruel) realities “at home” and with more distant realities that
may not only affect it but even invade and undermine it.
Thus, the need to help is perhaps not as “quintessentially cosmopolitan”
as some scholars would have it (see, e.g., Calhoun 2008:73 – 75). The case I
studied, at least, suggests that it is not as generic “global citizens,” “worldly
nomads,” or “cosmopolitans” but as specific social persons with homegrown
needs, vulnerabilities, desires, and multiple professional responsibilities that
people sought to be part of something greater than themselves, to help, to be
actors in the lively world. And they found their own, sometimes quite idiosyn-
cratic, ways of doing so at different stages and circumstances in their lives.
This sense of the domestic sheds light on how the conduct of the aid work-
ers “out there” reflects their specific culture regions and social contexts —
and the way that aid work abroad presents for some a line of escape from the
familiar, and sparks urges to self-transformation.
Much of this book, then, is the result of in-depth ethnographic inter-
views with Finnish Red Cross aid workers who have been deployed interna-
tionally, usually with the icrc (International Committee of the Red Cross).
I interviewed them sporadically, when they were in Finland and not on mis-
sion, between 1996 and 2012. Most of the interviews became one-on-one
conversations of many hours. All translations are my own. As will become
apparent, I worked with people in numerous different occupational fields

4 introduction
(e.g., transportation, logistics, administration, psychological support), but
mostly with nurses and secondarily with doctors. Most were women (like the
staff of the Finnish Red Cross more generally), but they tended to refer to
themselves in gender-neutral terms as persons or people (ihmiset) (Finnish
personal pronouns are also gender-neutral).
The earliest 1996 interviews occurred in the long aftermath of the 1994
Rwanda genocide. As I explain later in the book, my original intent was to
focus on interviewing specifically those Finnish Red Cross workers who had
been posted to Rwanda with the icrc because I had myself worked with refu-
gees from an earlier genocide in neighboring Burundi. The people I worked
with in 1985 – 86 had asylum in western Tanzania, and were survivors of a
genocide where the regime, dominated by people ethnically Tutsi, targeted
the majority Hutu population. This meant in practice that I interviewed Finn-
ish Red Cross staff who worked where the roles were reversed, in a genocide
where Hutu were the perpetrators and Tutsi (and “moderate Hutu”) the vic-
tims. The icrc was on the scene in Rwanda early partly because it already
had teams working in Burundi where another underreported genocidal polit-
ical conflict was under way in 1993. I was just finishing my first book manu-
script when the 1994 Rwanda genocide began. My eventual 1995 book, Purity
and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanza-
nia, includes a long afterword on the Rwanda genocide as it was happening.
I was in Finland when I learned that numerous Finnish aid workers had
gone to work on multinational icrc teams in Rwanda and Goma (Congo,
formerly Zaire). Since there had been only a few international aid workers
in the refugee camp where I had worked earlier in Tanzania, and since I had
focused on interviewing the refugees in the first project, I began to think se-
riously about these aid workers and what it could possibly mean to them to
be in the middle of one of the most horrific genocides in modern history.6
Their motivations were initially opaque to me, except in the most abstract
of terms — they were humanitarians. But why did they accept that mission?
What, or how much, were they hoping to accomplish? How would they be
affected by what they experienced there? How would they fathom the magni-
tude of the human catastrophe they were working in? How could they? Were
they damaged by their professional duties?7
I formed my new research project around those questions and specifically
around the aid workers, and was fortunate to be able to begin research quite
quickly. Officials at the Finnish Red Cross headquarters in Helsinki were
welcoming and relatively open to researchers, and the aid workers, when

introduction 5
in Finland, generously gave me their time and thoughtfulness. As I had an-
ticipated, it was easy to talk with the aid workers who had been posted to
Rwanda, Goma, and Burundi. They needed to talk — just as the genocide
survivors in Tanzania had needed to talk. Many aid workers said it was worth
talking with someone who had lived and worked in the general region, and
with genocide survivors specifically. There was some shared understanding.
In the end, I wound up interviewing the aid workers not only about Rwanda
and Central Africa but also about the numerous other missions around the
world they had worked on. Many of them were very mobile — “veterans,” as
people at the Helsinki Headquarters called them, and as they often described
each other. I did not have the opportunity to interview anyone for whom one
mission had been enough, or too much.
The most recent interviews date from a time when the icrc, including
delegates from the Finnish Red Cross, were (and are) heavily involved in Af-
ghanistan (see chapter 6). It is striking to me that even after so many other
missions — and in the midst of the extremely long, difficult, and contro-
versial mission in Afghanistan, where the icrc has worked for decades —
Rwanda still kept coming up as an upsetting experience and as a kind of
reference point. As I discuss in chapter 2, it was a limit experience for many
who had worked there. One person called it a “breaking point.”

Need

War, genocide, mass killings, mass rape, torture, famine, tsunamis, earth-
quakes, floods. These words (often in this string-like form) have become glob-
ally meaningful terms for identifying specifically “humanitarian need,” espe-
cially by “the West,” or the wealthy North. What is specifically humanitarian
about these situations—situations that have come to form distinct, mobile,
and unevenly globalized social imaginaries and fields of action? The quali-
fier humanitarian makes the need of those to be helped appear simultaneously
somehow elementary (basic) and monumental (superhuman) in scale: “basic
human needs” (water, food, medicine, shelter, sanitation) have to be supplied
by “the international community” to alleviate the “basic human suffering” of
the anonymous masses of “humanity.” (All this seems straightforward, of a
practical urgency and thus politically neutral, but see chapter 6.)
Much important work has been written about needs-based versus rights-
based humanitarianism, but for the icrc need was certainly the more fun-
damental category, the mandate for action. In fact, one can make the case

6 introduction
that this must be so in humanitarian work, where the invocation of “hu-
man rights,” lacking the sanctioning power of a state, so often struggles to
amount to more than a pious wish (as Hannah Arendt [1951] 1973 noted long
ago), and where it is inevitably evidence of raw, visible need (starving, sick,
or injured bodies, dying children) that provides an immediate impetus for
intervention (cf. Ticktin 2011). Indeed, for all its very real political problems,
the language of need often directs our attention to precisely those material
conditions of life that, as Harri Englund has observed (2006), abstract com-
mitments to rights can sometimes sidestep or even obscure (see also Festa
2010:15; Rancière 2011:67, 72).
Yet there is a tendency among some scholars in the Global North—as also
among the donor public and the thousands of university students and others
who want to be aid volunteers — to imagine (“basic”) human need with a
surprising degree of uniformity, as I have suggested (Malkki 1996), and to
see it as somehow essentially located “over there.” The “suffering stranger” is
still in the main imagined as “distant” (Boltanski 1993; Haskell 1998), socially
anonymous, only “basically” human, and usually only momentarily in the aid
worker’s or volunteer’s life.
The historically resonant logics associated with need, suffering, and hu-
manity in humanitarian discourse can end up making some people more
basic (read: simple) than others (see Vaughan 1991:115; Englund 2006; and
Fassin and Rechtman 2009:183 – 88, 228 – 30). Africa has embodied need on
a continental scale ever since its colonization was systematized and ratio-
nalized. When it comes to the African continent, there is much “basicness,”
much “simplicity.” In the worst case, such views can lead the “needy African”
to be imagined as a sort of specimen of “basic humanity” more biological
than political— “bare life,” as Agamben (1998) and others have argued, more
zoë than bios (cf. Arendt [1951] 1973:267 – 302; see also Mbembe 2001:1 – 3; Pet-
ryna 2002; Foucault 2003; Biehl 2005; Redfield and Bornstein 2010:18, 23;
Rancière 2011:62 – 75; and Ticktin 2011:14, among others).
In thinking about the depoliticization of both rights and needs, Englund
cites Alain Badiou, who suggests how

a universal human subject is split into two modalities. On the one hand, the
subject is passive and pathetic, the one who suffers. On the other, the sub-
ject is active, the one who identifies suffering and knows how to act[. . . . ]
“On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television
screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative

introduction 7
 to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to
the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics rests on the misery [. . .]
the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?”
(Badiou 2001:12 – 13, cited in Englund 2006:32 – 33)

The needy, sick, dirty recipient and the strong, healthy, clean giver: these
charismatic figures draw a certain kind of attention — the principal actors
in the ever-expanding imagination, documentation, and mediatization of
certain kinds of misery and misfortune. The popularly imagined good doc-
tor (from Albert Schweitzer to Paul Farmer), the ever-giving nurse (from
Florence Nightingale to Mother Teresa), and their (ideally grateful and well-
behaved) suffering, ever-needy mass of patients.8
Yet my research with the Finnish Red Cross aid workers revealed a coeval,
co-present neediness on the other side, the neediness of the helper, the giver. This
suggests the possibility of combating the splitting of the human subject that
Badiou describes, not only (as anthropologists are wont to do) by recognizing
the agency, will, and specific motivations of the “recipient” of humanitarian
aid but also by insisting on acknowledging the frequent weakness, neediness,
and non-universality of the humanitarian “benefactor” — the giver who, no
less than the receiver, always sets out from a social and existential position
both specific and precarious (Butler 2004). The benefactor’s own need to
help those in need may generate actions that in fact help the benefactor him/
herself in surprising and vital ways (see chapter 5).
Through my research with the Finnish Red Cross workers, I came to think
of need in ways previously unfamiliar to me. In “Professionals Abroad”
(chapter 1), I saw that some of the Red Cross aid workers on international
missions sought in their work a partial escape from national belonging —
even an escape from their mundane, workaday selves. The safe, well-ordered,
and in principle predictable national home, the welfare society that should
have met their social and material needs, had become, for some, burdensome
and constraining, and emotionally cold. One nurse described it as ascetic.
The abroad was described by most as more “full of life” and — this is key —
as a site of easier human sociality and conviviality, even in the midst of ter-
rible circumstances. This desire for “the world outside” (ulkomaailma) was in
some interviews so palpable and urgent that it came across as an unmistak-
able neediness. Finland meant safety, progressive social policies, many good
things, but also reserve, restraint, and constraint, and, along with it, experi-
ences of social and sensorial deprivation.

8 introduction
 Humanitarian work abroad of course meant encountering people with
severe needs on a monumental scale now unknown in Finland. But the in-
terviews I did with Red Cross people while they were in Finland (and not
on mission abroad) workers also eloquently spoke of giving and helping as
alleviating their own neediness, allowing them “to be a part of something
greater than themselves.” I encountered other nonprofessional relationships
to need as well. In “Bear Humanity” (chapter 4), I write about “Aid Bunnies,”
“Trauma Teddies,” and all manner of soft toys as “humanitarian devices”
for framing human need for the general donor public to imagine. And what is
more “human” and “innocent” than a child in need? The child is the “exem-
plary human” (see chapter 3). The 2006 –7 Finnish Red Cross Aid Bunny cam-
paign for volunteers to make and donate hand-knitted bunnies — intended
to comfort children hurt by political conflicts and natural disasters, but also
used as a domestic consciousness-raiser about the special needs of children
caught in complex emergencies — framed the specific kind of need that
could be imagined and alleviated. It was a thing the domestic donor could
imagine “doing something” about; it was particular and of a humanly graspable
scale, and sensorially pleasurable (see Tsing 2005:58).9 One could say that
the Aid Bunny had “the deep present of physical things” (Mitchell 2001:180)
that animated it in an enchanting way (Gell 1988). The social imagination of
the Finnish knitters (thousands of them) was often charged by an intimate,
personalized link to the imagined “play-age” (leikki-ikäinen) child somewhere
out there, “out there in the world” (siellä maailmalla), who would play and be
consoled by the Aid Bunny. The suspension (if not erasure) of the child’s
parents, siblings, grandparents, and other relatives, and also friends, teach-
ers, and neighbors, was a striking feature in the imagining of the needy child
(cf. Bornstein 2001, 2012). The children’s own proclivities and desires, sub-
jectivities and social embeddedness, fears and plans, were off-frame. The
faraway children’s need, as understood from a great distance, in the specific
social context of Finland, generated an often bubbly, extravagant online
playfulness in the practices that people used in making, naming, animat-
ing, blogging about, and sending as gifts the Aid Bunnies they had knitted
(cf. Allison 2004). It is as if the bunnies, too, became children for a while,
and their makers childlike, or sometimes maternal (see Winnicott [1971]
2005). Although clearly meaningful to their makers in a number of different
ways, the bunnies were to other eyes the very embodiment of the trivial, and,
worse, the offensive, in the face of “the real needs” of people awaiting emer-
gency assistance (even if it was never, of course, the case that people in dire

introduction 9
circumstances received bunnies instead of emergency relief ). But it has to be
said: one need that the bunnies demonstrably answered at home in Finland
was to provide badly needed sociality — whether face to face or virtual — to
what were sometimes very lonely people. The most evident need here — a
need for belonging and imaginative sociality — was the knitters’.
In “Homemade Humanitarianism: Knitting and Loneliness” (chapter 5),
I focus on a theme that runs throughout the book: again and again, inter-
national aid seems to involve the domestic arts such as knitting or other
handwork (käsityö) (see also chapters 3 and 4). The need to help through
international service has, as I mentioned, roots in specific structural features
of the “home society,” of Finland, that create the deep need to help, and to
become thereby connected to something other and greater than oneself — to be con-
nected to “the world” (maailma). It is against a background of unremitting
social and affective neediness that the people whom I call “the old women”
knit. Many do so in an effort to “keep busy” and “useful” in a world that
sees them as useless (or simply does not see them), and to have the dignity of
giving something to an anonymous person somewhere in the world (jossain
maailmalla) who may need it — or not (cf. Kelley 2003; Muehlebach 2012). Vol-
unteers who knitted “Mother Teresa blankets” (a project like the Aid Bunny),
for instance, accomplished several things: they alleviated their own, possibly
keenly felt, sense of uselessness and they engaged in activities that required
human contact (in going to the yarn shop, for example, as was noticed by
the owners of many such shops). The blanket was a gift of the self to an
imagined other, but also a gift to the self. It is possible, then, to interpret
the process — including both the making and then of the giving away — as
a form of intimate “affect management” and care of the self (Foucault 1986;
Mazzarella 2009:298).10

The Relation of Self to Self

It is through writing about need that I came to think about the relation of
self to self. Humanitarianism is often associated with selflessness and self-
sacrifice, but less often with other things that came, in my work, to seem
more important: self-escape, self-loss, dehumanization, self-humanization,
self-transformation, the care of the self, the relation of self to others, and
the relation of self to the world (maailma). For selflessness, the simplest ini-
tial task was to make a mental list of all the famous humanitarians whom
history has dubbed “selfless servants to humanity” and who, some of them,

10 introduction
still get fed to elementary school children (Henri Dunant, Clara Barton, Flor-
ence Nightingale, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, among others). This
sort of selflessness — selflessness as self-sacrifice — the professional Red Cross
people had no use for, as I will show throughout (cf. Kester 2004:78; see
chapter 6). Indeed, I was often told that an aid worker bent on self-sacrifice
was not only foolish and inexperienced but also a possible danger to herself
and others on her team in the field.
But selflessness is not entirely irrelevant here, and often figured less as
sacrifice and more as a kind of self-escape. Self-escape emerged as a good
descriptor for many of the international aid workers’ motivations. Their per-
sonal desires to get a break from the safe predictability and routinization of
their work life in Finland, and perhaps especially to find a self-conscious
respite from how they themselves were in Finland, were definitely factors in their
decisions as to whether to accept an international mission or not. This is ob-
viously not to say that the specific nature of the emergency call they received
was insignificant to them, or that they did not have highly developed senses
of ethical obligation.
If such self-escape could be thought of as a kind of selflessness, it was
of a decidedly nonsacrificial kind. It was not as saints but as experienced profes-
sionals that they sought their line of escape. For many, such selflessness became
most powerfully articulated as a desire to lose themselves in the intensity
of sustained demanding work. In those moments, they did not have awk-
ward selves to manage or what they sometimes described as an encumbering
Finnish self-consciousness getting in the way; they experienced, I think, a
kind of pleasurable self-loss. I would interpret those as moments of a lithe
freedom, perhaps even transcendence. Musicians know what this is; it is
when they are “playing over their heads” (see, e.g., Berliner 1994).
Another of the possibilities I saw in the relation of self to self was self-
transformation. The most memorable figure in this connection is per-
haps a doctor I discuss in chapter 1, whose missions were definitely about
work (no mistake about that), but who was also sensually captured by the
places to which she was posted and “vicariously possessed” by the people
(especially women aid recipients) whom she met there (Piper 1991:735 – 37;
chapter 1). She articulated very clearly how she in fact sought continual self-
transformation through her missions and even through the materia of her
ever-changing surroundings. She reminded me of Adrian Piper’s contention
that “empathy must be carefully calibrated between the extremes of self-loss
and self-absorption.”11

introduction 11
 It is, of course, common to be transformed by experience, but in Red
Cross work, people’s spatiotemporal sequence of presences and absences
in/from Finland seemed to make such transformation more noticeable. As
I mention in chapter 1, people often returned from missions abroad feeling
somehow changed, their hearts full and eager to share their experiences —
only to find that no non – Red Cross friends or colleagues were truly inter-
ested in understanding, or willing to listen for very long. Everyone had their
own lives and concerns to attend to, after all.
Of course aid work is something like anthropological fieldwork in that
both can be transformative life experiences that engage affects, the senses,
and the imagination — the whole person —for better and for worse. Both can
be creative and re-creative (see “The Imagination,” below), and both can re-
sult in what Foucault and others have called limit experiences, in other words,
experiences that “[wrench] the subject from itself ” (2000:241). But while in
the traditions Foucault wrote and lived from, the limit experience was sys-
tematically sought and explored (see Foucault 1991, 2000; Lacan quoted in
Evans 1996; Bataille 2000; and Blanchot 1993), I discuss (in chapter 2) limits
and impasses from which there was no clear way forward, where there were
no good choices to be made, where things had become impossible.12 The
person was transformed by the experience, but in a damaging way that di-
minished and troubled the self. Maybe this could also be characterized as a
kind of self-loss. The disaster zones in which the Red Cross people worked
of course involved limit experiences of this kind for the people who were in
need of the emergency relief, but sometimes the same kinds of limits were
encountered by the “helpers” themselves.13
The relation of self to self appears in another guise in chapter 5. Against
a backdrop of often stark and dehumanizing social isolation (Biehl 2005),
volunteer work, (as I described under the heading “Need,” above) often
amounted to a kind of “care of the self ” in circumstances sometimes verg-
ing on desperation (Foucault 1986). Associational life — as toothless as it
may seem against some of the bleak scenes to come — made it possible for
many people to be part of something other and bigger than themselves, to
imagine themselves — through their own handwork and volunteer work — as
members of a greater “community of generosity” and help, even as they also
gained more mundane forms of intersubjectivity and social connection in
the process (see Muehlebach 2012:7). The Red Cross was one socially import-
ant and truly nationwide institution that made it possible (even for people in
very small towns and villages) to enframe their lives differently and to open

12 introduction
themselves to new kinds of social and affective experiences that they might
not have found otherwise. Getting training to help others was important to
people, and provided new possibilities in the relation of self to self.14

The Imagination

The imagination has emerged, in an unanticipated way, as an important ele-

ment in each chapter of this book. Humanitarianism is an object of imagina-
tion, and aid projects engage in many imaginative practices. Consider again
the figure of the child. So vital to humanitarian appeals, it always has to be
not only seen but also imagined in order to be socially effective, to matter.
The historically deep practice of fundraising with the picture of the child in
need goes on around the world (Vaughan 1991). One might think it so cli-
chéd that it is in danger of losing its life. It is junk mail. One ignores it with
a twitch of irritation. But then it turns out (as will become clear in chapters
to come) that the postcard of the child in need finds a more generous and
considered reception among categories of people who become imaginatively
invested for reasons of their own. They may be lonely and/or aged. The child
in need interpellates, hails them, as “persons who can help” (Althusser 2007;
Evans and Hall 2007). The imaginative work of the child in need is to allow
“an ex-person,” someone “socially worthless,” the dignity of giving (Biehl
2005; Muehlebach 2012). The postcard of the child may do more: it may pro-
duce an enchanted child then “made real” through surprisingly involved,
affective processes of the imagination.
Danger. The aid worker in the field suddenly senses that she herself is
in danger, and is then privately embarrassed that she was not after all —
embarrassed that she had had time to imagine her own personal crisis or
even demise. The practice of emergency relief often involves risks and those
risks inevitably engender imaginative scenarios, even when in principle it is
part of one’s professionalism to not imagine, not think, just do. Loss and grief.
These may be witnessed and imagined in clinics and hospitals in the field
every day, among patients so little known as to leave great spaces for guess-
work and the imagination. Wounds. Certain kinds of wounds may confront
the aid worker as evidence of a sadistic imagination.
Danger, loss and grief, wounds, and one’s place on the scene of a disaster
or in the world as a “humanitarian,” are dynamically imagined, especially
when they become relevant to one’s own life, and in encounters and rela-
tionships with others. Sometimes they “imagine themselves in you,” even

introduction 13
against your will (pace Sartre).15 As James Engell, following Kant, has sug-
gested, some forms of imagination are discretionary and volitional, while
others are unwilled; and often these coexist (Engell 1981:135 – 38; Kant 2008).
How humanitarian needs and challenges are imagined is important. Often
there are ways of making them be, and, then, of making them not be. Some-
times there is no such choice. Some problems aid agencies can fix and make
not be, for example, while others are utterly unaffected by their volition. And
the technologies of humanitarian advertising can similarly make things
be and not be. Some disasters fade quickly for donor publics though long
ongoing, while other newer problems are “made be.” One powerful way of
making be is “the logic of the one” (visualize one singular child, one singular
benefactor): this can enter the imagination and leave one feeling responsible
(see Bornstein 2003, 2012; Suski 2009; and chapters 2 and 3). This can hap-
pen to anyone — even aid workers. Is the responsibility “real” or “imagined”?
What is the difference, exactly? Ethics can be thought of as an imaginative
practice, and imagination as an ethical practice (Mittermaier 2011), and both
of these can be — often have to be — improvisational practices (Cerwonka
and Malkki 2007:164 – 79).
A great deal has of course been written about the imagination, and the real
and the irreal; I will work here with only a few texts to clarify my uses of the
term throughout this book. Cornelius Castoriadis makes a forceful argument
for the importance of the theorization and understanding of the imagina-
tion. In “The Social Imaginary and the Institution” (1975), Castoriadis rightly
argues that “representation, imagination, and imaginary have never been
seen for themselves but always in relation to something else — to sensation,
intellection, perception, or reality — submitted to the normativity incorporated in
the inherited ontology, brought within the viewpoint of the true and the false,
instrumentalized within a function, means judged according to their pos-
sible contribution to the accomplishment of the end that is truth or access
to true being, the being of being (ontos on)” (1997:197, emphasis added).16 I
think his point is still important, for all the current, often market-driven,
profit-focused valorization of “imagination,” “innovation,” and (especially)
“creativity” today (Ricoeur 1994:119). In fact, it is newly and differently im-
portant now.17 And yet the very old distrust or contempt for the imagination
still also persists today. “In this way,” continues Castoriadis, “there has not
been the slightest concern with knowing what making/doing [faire] means,
what the being of making/doing is and what it is that making/doing makes
be, so obsessed have people been with these questions alone: What is it to

14 introduction
do good or to do well, to do evil or to do badly. Making/doing has not been
thought because no one has attempted to think of anything other than two
particular moments of making/doing, the ethical moment and the technical
moment.” Castoriadis stops to observe how much of the social-historical
is thought through the imposition of the “inherited logic-ontology” in the
West (1997:197, 198, emphases added; cf. Bachelard 2005:xxvi).18 He goes on
to say that the things that are “irreducibly in excess or in deficit” of the in-
herited schemata become “scoria, illusion, contingency, chance — in short,
unintelligible” (1997:198). They might be ignored as inessential to the real
matter at hand: just noise and babble. Dross. Distraction. Or, as will emerge
here, “the mere.” The mere is not “political,” nor relevant to “real” theoret-
ical debates. It is that which is “appropriately” ignored. The concept of the
mere is developed throughout the following chapters, and also concludes
the book.
This mistrust of the imagination has ancient origins, and its force still
has a surprising degree of caution, distancing, and even contempt around it
now (see Kearney 1991; Crapanzano 2004; Bachelard 2005:xxvi).19 Even as the
imagination is thought the font of the next possible insight or invention, its
wildness is not always instrumentally “useable” and it becomes vulnerable
to pathologization, as Emily Martin (2009) has powerfully demonstrated (see
also, e.g., Beckett 1966, Sass 1992, and Weller 2009). Nigel Thomas (n.d.:n.p.)
writes about how, in ancient and medieval conceptions, the “imagination,
although recognized as indispensable to cognition, was usually profoundly
distrusted. Unless strictly disciplined by reason it would soon lead us into
concupiscence and sin.” This mistrust was compounded in European his-
tory by the iconophobia following the Reformation and its long afterlives
(Belting 1994; Ricoeur 1994:119; Heinänen 2006).20 But as Susan Sontag
(like Thomas n.d.) has observed, “philosophers since Plato have tried to
loosen our grip on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way
of apprehending the real” — Plato’s cave ever a warning (2007:80). And as
Amira Mittermaier further suggests in Dreams That Matter, “the imagination
was eyed with suspicion throughout the history of western philosophy be-
cause it might not merely transmit images but could also play with sense
impressions, creating images of nonexistent things — a danger that could
be circumvented only by reason’s firm grip on the imagination” (2011:16; cf.
Sartre [1940] 2004). The modern category of art emerged, in some sense,
as a way not just to acknowledge the power of the imagination but also to
contain its danger (Belting 1994). Harri Englund, in conversation with Cas-

introduction 15
toriadis, makes a further interesting point: “No longer situated within the
confines of ‘a psychological or ego-logical horizon’ (Castoriadis 1997:245),
not to mention its reduction to the domain of the arts, the imagination as-
sumes a profoundly social character, an inter-subjective sphere of experi-
ence and argument within which alternatives to dominant perspectives can
attain collective purchase” (Englund 2011:15 – 16).21 Gilles Deleuze (1997)
develops parallel thoughts in Essays Clinical and Critical, noting that the most
relevant distinction is not always that between the real and the imagined: “A
real voyage, by itself, lacks the force necessary to be reflected in the imag-
ination; the imaginary voyage, by itself, does not have the force, as Proust
says, to be verified in the real. This is why the imaginary and the real must be,
rather, like two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory,
two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror”
(1997: 62–63).22 Giving an example from Aboriginal Australia, Deleuze writes
that there people link “nomadic itineraries” with “dream voyages” (1997:63).
“At the limit, the imaginary is a virtual image that is interfused with the real
object, and vice versa, thereby constituting a crystal of the unconscious”
(1997:63). I would emphasize in response, with Englund, how often the imag-
ination is intersubjective and profoundly social — and processual.
Doubts about the imagination became a prominent issue in my first field-
work for Purity and Exile (1995). As I will describe in chapter 2, I did research in
the mid-1980s with survivors of the 1972 genocide in Burundi who had been
granted asylum in Tanzania. During the fieldwork with the Hutu refugees,
I was warned by officials there not to “imagine things” as I listened to the
refugees’ accounts of their violent pasts, and their circumstances in exile.
The refugees’ (genocide survivors’) accounts, often dismissed as grossly
exaggerated — and, especially early on, as “hysterical” — were refused any
solid reality or rationality.23 Similarly, I, as researcher, was often regarded as
gullible, too vulnerable to the refugees’ “stories.”24 I was wasting my time and
then letting my imagination run away with me. (Tragically, many of the gro-
tesquely violent events and practices of which I was told at that time would
then be repeated in well-documented detail in the 1994 Rwanda genocide.)
Now, what would it have looked like for the refugees to remember their
experiences of the genocide and their flight in a “purely” non-imaginative
way? What would it have looked like for them to produce a technical, dispas-
sionate record of the “real” events, editing out what was so outlandish that
it must be “irreal,” or a nightmare? (cf. Mbembe 2001; De Boeck 2004; Ash-
forth 2005). But they themselves strove for painstaking technical accuracy

16 introduction
and thoroughness. How could they accurately represent experiences that
were as if from the most perverted and sadistic of horror films? Why did they
talk so much about this, wherever I went?25 But accurate records: this was what
they were trying to deposit with me so that I might “inform the world” about
them — they imagined that “the international community” would act to help
them if only they had the correct information, the true historical record. I
also expected accuracy and a (situated) thoroughness of myself (Haraway
2013). I could sense their sincerity, and my own; usually that just took us
further into the relations and processes of imagination and memory. It was
hard to take these accounts for real at times, so terrible were they. Their
very power made them seem unreal. They made me feel unreal (see Mbembe
2001:145).26
My particular experiences in Tanzania are not surprising given that the
imagination has been “equated with the unreal throughout much of Western
history. This verdict became remarkably pronounced in the writings of Jean-
Paul Sartre according to whom the imagination is ‘an incantation destined to
produce the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, in a manner that
one can take possession of it’ ” (Mittermaier 2011:17). This is the (imaginary)
unreal in the service of the safely real — no intrusive imaginings or involun-
tary thoughts here. Sartre’s formulation is possible because the boundary
he erects between the real and the imagined, at least here, is so solid (see
Kearney 1991:54, 67).27 “The act of imagination . . . is a magical act” (Sartre
[1940] 2004:125). This conception is discussed by Elaine Scarry in Dreaming
by the Book:

Sartre identifies freedom as the imagination’s great endowment to us:

“[In the act of the imagination] there is always something of the impe-
rious and the infantile, a refusal to take distance or difficulties into ac-
count. Thus, the very young child acts upon the world from his bed by
orders and entreaties. The objects obey these orders of consciousness:
they appear.” Sartre returns to this attribute continually. We will the im-
ages into being: we will the images out of being. “Thus I can stop the
existence of the unreal object at any moment, I am not dragged along despite
myself to the specification of its qualities: it exists only while I know it and
want it.” We start it. We stop it. It never takes us “by surprise.” (2001:32 – 33,
emphases added)

This conception seems curious to me; and it is profoundly inappropriate to

the analysis of the social context of (and my work with) the Hutu refugees

introduction 17
in Tanzania. There my imagination did “drag me along despite myself ” and
continually “took me by surprise.” And even after all the research, I under-
stood very little of what the refugees themselves — children, teenagers, men,
women, and elders — had been dragged through. It was, in J. M. Coetzee’s
words, an “imaginative horror” (2001). This is important: the imaginary is
“not false . . . nor illusory. The imaginary is not a mode of unreality, but indeed a
mode of actuality,” as Michel Foucault has written (1986:70, emphasis added;
cf. Deleuze 1997:63; Mittermaier 2011:17– 19). And it seems much more accu-
rate to say, with Mittermaier: “Diverging from an objectivist mode of obser-
vation,” an imagination “is not enclosed within an individual author-figure
but instead creates a dialogical in-between space in which the visible and the in-
visible are intertwined” (2011:239, emphasis added; cf. Englund 2011:15 – 16).
Filip De Boeck (2004:12 – 13), describing conditions of life in modern
Kinshasa, also writes about the imagination and experience in a way that di-
rectly helps to express the circumstances of the Hutu refugees in Tanzania at
the time of my research with them. De Boeck’s central question is: “[W]hat
happens when people’s material conditions of life become so incredibly
hard that their very conceptions of what constitutes reality is affected[?]”
He describes an “overproduction or an ‘overheating’ of meaning that gives
expression to a disturbing unmooring of the social imagination” (2004:12;
and see Achille Mbembe 2001:145). People, in all their complex interrela-
tions with other people, face a kind of ontological “indiscernibleness” and
uncertainty (2004:29).28
Yet the volitional imagination that Sartre described does have explanatory
power in other contexts in this book, especially among donor publics moti-
vated by a need to help alleviate human suffering in faraway catastrophes. In
chapter 4, I will consider a 2007 Red Cross call to the public to knit Aid Bun-
nies to psychically assist children in conflict zones or natural disasters. Little
did the Red Cross know that this project of making/doing would enchant
thousands of eager knitters or that Aid Bunnies would eventually almost
deluge its national logistics center. These bunnies were conjured by their
makers. They were willed into being in just the way Sartre described. It is in-
teresting that the bunny was always envisioned by the knitters in an intimate,
exclusive relationship, not as one toy among many that groups of children
could use. It was imagined, following the logic of the one, as the “special
friend” and comforter of a single, special child in need of help and solace.
Kant’s conception of the imagination was quite different, and useful in
the present context. “When [Kant] says that the imagination is ‘the faculty

18 introduction
of representing in intuition an object that is not in itself present,’ [h]e does
not mean that it is the capacity for the mental imaging of absent objects.
His view is rather that imagining involves two moments: immediate sen-
sory awareness, or empirical intuition, and the taking or construing of that
awareness as the awareness of something other, or something more, than
what immediately appears” (Young 2009:142). Michael Young reiterates
Kant’s point thus: “it is not the capacity for mental imaging, but rather the
capacity for construal or interpretation, that Kant characteristically has in
mind as he develops his view of imagination” (2009:142, 155).29
What I find particularly helpful here is Kant’s position that there are two
general (usually coexistent) forms of imagination: the reproductive, com-
binatory, or re-creative imagination and the productive, or creative, imagi-
nation. (This is, of course, parallel to Castoriadis’s formulation.) By repro-
ductive imagination Kant means a function that is “empirical” and based
on “association”; thus one may reproduce some combination of things one
has encountered before (Young 2009:155; cf. Bachelard 2005:13). But this is
what is of particular interest here: “while Kant holds that imagination and
understanding are distinct faculties, he also believes that they may nonethe-
less come to be intertwined as we employ them” (Young 2009:155, emphasis
added). Pauline von Bonsdorff writes along the same lines that reproductive
imagination is an effort (only an effort) to make oneself as one with the po-
sition of the other (2009:29).30
As Mittermaier notes, Foucault has remarked on the consequences of
such a blurring. “Shifting our attention from what the imagination is to what
it does, Foucault describes an erasure of the sharp line between subject and
object, between the absent and the present. The imagination makes me what
I imagine. The ‘like’ is erased. Signifier and signified become one” (Mitter-
maier 2011:18; see also Foucault 1986).31 The Finnish Red Cross very explicitly
trains its outgoing teams to be professional and to manage the line between
self and other. But as I show in chapter 2, despite solid professional experi-
ence and self-monitoring, this does not always work. Something unexpected
gets to you. Often this something is an ill young child who crosses your path
in a hospital or refugee camp. Through the daily intimacies of caring for
the child, the aid worker might come to feel, “it’s almost as if I were this
child’s parent.” In a flash, she might suddenly imagine, just for a fraction
of a second, “I am his mother.” “I am responsible!” The “like” is erased. The
aid worker starts imagining, even planning, possibilities of adoption, and
envisioning the child’s prospects for life in an arctic Finland wary of “for-

introduction 19
eigners.” Then she imagines his future here — wherever here is — a refugee
camp in East Africa perhaps. It may seem morally and ethically very wrong
to sever the connection with that child when the mission is over. These kinds
of cases, many of them, haunted the aid workers I have interviewed.32 They
have had to face painful and sometimes humiliating ethical and affective
impasses — “limit experiences” of a kind. Anthropologists, as I write in
chapter 2, often face comparable situations. These difficulties are a clear
reminder that the imagination is not only a plaything: “Einbildungskraft is spe-
cifically a power [voima], not just a capacity or ability [kyky]. The difference
is clear: the power can sweep you along, whereas a capacity is controlled.”33
Alongside the re-creative, reproductive, or combinatory form of imagi-
nation is, of course, the productive, or creative, imagination. As Kant said,
the two modes of imagination are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This
is important. But for a very long time the creative — making/doing some-
thing quite new, being/doing newly, breaking molds, thinking completely
otherwise — has been, and is still, considered “higher” in many contexts,
and productive of more highly valued results than those of the reproduc-
tive imagination (as if both were not intersubjective social practices, as if
both did not also depend on the imaginative work of others who have gone
before). As I suggest in “Homemade Humanitarianism” (chapter 5), this is
abundantly clear in the endless, predictable dismissals of the re-creative,
“reproductive” imagination in gendered humanitarian handwork. Classified
as the domestic arts, “handicrafts,” “amateur crafts,” or “hobbies,” these are
often assumed to be “merely” repetitive, “just copying” from predesigned
models and patterns — and not even mimetic with any of the potential that
that term opens up (see Taussig 1993; Frank 2000). They are nice “confection-
aries” (Kester 2004:19, 33); they are “decorations” (Loos [1910] 2000; Kant
2006:108, 110 – 11) — mere supplements to “art” in Derrida’s sense.
Challenging such dismissive attitudes, Grant Kester writes appreciatively
about an aesthetic imagination that, in fact, looks once more like Kant’s
reproductive imagination (cf. Bourriaud 1998). Drawing the contrast with
the old modern figure of the singular autonomous artist, Kester argues that
a “dialogical aesthetic suggests a very different image of the artist, one de-
fined in terms of openness, of listening . . . , and of a willingness to accept a
position of dependence and inter-subjective vulnerability relative to the viewer
or collaborator” (2004:110, emphasis added). This sounds very much like the
process of ethnographic fieldwork. Kester continues: “It is in the nature of
dialogical projects to be impure, to represent a practical negotiation (self-

20 introduction
reflexive but nevertheless compromised) around issues of power, identity,
and difference, even as they strive toward something more” (2004:123). Sim-
ilar practical negotiations are necessary in the impure project that is anthro-
pological fieldwork, and also in the imaginative work that I have suggested
is so central to humanitarian action.
Perhaps the “productive” imagination is more present in the spheres I
have been discussing than at first appears. For the term re-creative can also be
translated as “to create again,” which is related to artistic imitation or mime-
sis. “Mimetic imitation is not slavish copying, but the repetition of a thing
differently, representation, that reaches for and at its best reaches some cen-
tral features without necessarily looking the same, for example. . . . Looked
at through art, the creative and the reproductive are perhaps not very far
from one another, or even separate” (von Bonsdorff 2009:29 – 30; see also
Taussig 1993). The numerous handwork projects I discuss in chapters 4 and
5, from the Aid Bunny to the Mother Teresa blankets, usually involved re-
creation and not simple copying; things were made from resourcefully re-
purposed yarn, reclaimed fabric, found millinery in projects that were often
some combination of individual and collective agency — and surprise. In-
stead of mechanical imitation there was a flow with a back-and-forth move-
ment between the near automatic gesture of knitting and the aesthetic deci-
sion — and perhaps deliberative conversation and collaborative imagination.
Examined through ethnography, things look very much the same: the
re-creative and the creative are both present in the dialogical, intersubjec-
tive social processes of interviews, the close listening, the seeing and envi-
sioning, the making/doing with others, and other practices through which
basic anthropological understanding emerges, both in the field and in the
writing.34 And, again, the parallel can be extended to emergency relief and
aid work, as I learned from the Red Cross people I interviewed. I never heard
an aid worker describe a mission as “more of the same old same old.” Quite
the contrary, international missions were occasions for personal and pro-
fessional learning, and for pushing oneself. There was an anxious need to
do things really well. This was not just a matter of doing what one was being
paid to do. There was, I think, an expectation of putting one’s “heart and
soul” into one’s work in the field. The professionalism required discipline,
coordinated teamwork, following procedure, the management of affect, but,
as with any mission, people also got entangled with risk, the necessity of
improvisation and fast decision-making, and, continually, working with aid
recipients faced with extreme circumstances. The imagination of the worlds

introduction 21
(and the dangers) around them as they worked, ate, took breaks, washed, and
slept, and the subtle changes to the self that were demanded in daily work-
ing with people (often in cultural contexts very different from their own)
involved forms of both re-creative and creative imagination. These worlds in
the field formed a certain kind of “dream space” that was, for many, good to
inhabit and hard to relinquish when a mission came to an end (Tsing 2005).
So, to return to the beginning: Who are these people? Who are these aid
workers? I will attempt to show through intersubjective, ethnographic en-
gagement with them what I came to understand about their need to help,
their need for “the world out there,” their experiences of domestic attach-
ments, the creative and re-creative processes and practices they became
engaged in through their work in disaster zones of many kinds, and the
transformations (willed and unwilled) of the relation of self to self that they
experienced. Later in the book, I will also make be, in order to make mean-
ingful, the worlds of loneliness and even abjection that the nonprofessional
domestic humanitarians — old knitters and others — lived in. The forms of
voluntarism and help that they offered to the needy involved creative and
re-creative processes that were important to try to understand. They, too,
needed a connection to the world “out there,” elsewhere.

22 introduction
Notes

Introduction. Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Self

1. I have altered details in this scene to ensure anonymity.

2. See Englund’s (2006:8) insightful discussion of this.
3. See, e.g., Terry (2002); Bornstein (2001, 2003, 2012); Duffield (2001); Redfield
(2006, 2010, 2013); Ticktin (2006a, 2006b, 2011); Feldman (2007); Calhoun (2008, 2010);
Forsythe (2009); Benthall (2010); Bornstein and Redfield (2010); de Waal (2010); Fas-
sin (2010a, 2010b, 2012); McFalls (2010); Ophir (2010); Pandolfi (2010); Pupavac (2010);
Donini (2011), among many others. Several texts also give good reviews of the most
current literature. Among them are Barnett and Weiss (2008); Bornstein and Redfield
(2010); Fassin and Pandolfi (2010); and Feldman and Ticktin (2010a). This is a very par-
tial list of an important body of work.
4. Sometimes these “obstacles” arose from cultural differences that were difficult
and lengthy to negotiate with patients, their kin, and others. Sometimes local suppliers
and government officials were the “obstacles.” My interviewees usually commented on
their professional frustrations with a surprising degree of self-reflection and humor.
They had a keen insight into the extent to which they themselves had their own very set
ways of doing things, their “very Finnish” expectations.
5. For none of my interlocutors did this appear to be a “religious” need. They were,
on the whole, by their own reckoning, staunch secularists. They were very used to hav-
ing to answer the question: “Isn’t this a Christian organization? You have a cross on your
cars.” They spent a good deal of time trying to convince people that their mission was
“strictly medical” and “humanitarian,” “not religious,” but they could not of course con-
trol other interpretations of the intended official meaning of the symbol, or the uses to
which it was put (see Asad 1993, 2003; and chapter 6). The Swiss historical foundation of
the international Red Cross was deeply Christian, of course. This has been extensively
studied (see Hutchinson 1996; Moorehead 1998; and Forsythe 2005).
6. In my second research site, in Tanzania, Kigoma Township, there were more
aid workers representing two international organizations dealing with refugees, the
unhcr (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and the Tanganyika
Christian Refugee Service (tcrs), a local arm of the Lutheran World Federation, but
their presence was minimal compared to that of the organizations and aid workers in
Rwanda and Congo.
7. Chapters 1 and 2 contain very partial accounts of their work in Rwanda.
8. Pace Badiou (2001), the “good-Man, the white-Man” is often a woman.
9. Anna Tsing has written insightfully about scale-making: “scale is not just a neutral
frame for viewing the world; scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and
evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and
political projects” (2005:58). The Red Cross and other aid organizations are likely quite
aware of the significance of projecting scales of need to the donor public. This includes
time scales, of course.
10. Well-tended plants on windowsills seemed as ubiquitous as knitting. Potted
plants were also a medium for momentary socialities.
11. See Grant Kester’s economical and interesting account of Adrian Piper’s views
(Kester 2004:78, 210n61); see also Piper (1991:741 – 42, 744).
12. Foucault sought “that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossi-
bility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme” (1991:30 – 31).
13. In some ways, a comparison with the experiences of soldiers would not be
far-fetched.
14. There is a wealth of volunteer, training, and work possibilities on the Finnish Red
Cross website — from first aid and emergency response to work on behalf of new immi-
grants and refugees, antiracist work, friendship services, and prison visits, to name just
a few (see chapter 5). They address need in Finland. In a group interview, participants
with both national and international experience spoke of their Red Cross work, waxing
poetic about it — by their own laughing yet emotional admission. They agreed among
themselves that the Red Cross was a profound and meaningful part of their lives. Many
had worked for the organization for decades. Listening to the interview tapes, I got a
sense that many would have been adrift and very alone without the Red Cross. In work-
ing for the Red Cross, they were taking measures against their own neediness — that is,
loneliness and social disconnection.
15. Jean-Paul Sartre was peculiarly insistent that the imagination is volitional. Aid
work, like political violence, challenges this view. Sartre’s conception has been roundly
criticized by Richard Kearney (1991:92 – 95) and others. See also Gaston Bachelard
(2005).
16. Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries is a prominent example of the tenden-
cies that Castoriadis critiques. Informed by a liberal, functionalist holism, Taylor tends
to hypostatize the imaginary as a matter of a “whole society,” and to associate it with
“images, stories, and legends” (2004:23). Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen (2009:5 – 6,

210 notes to introduction

8) point out that many anthropologists, like social theorist Taylor, treat the imagination
holistically as if it were “a culture,” and “instrumentally” in the way that Castoriadis
criticized. They lean on Immanuel Kant’s work in order to argue that “the imagination is
pervasive in all human apprehension” and should be understood processually (Sneath,
Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009:6; cf. Moore 1978).
17. Newer texts on the imagination do not necessarily agree with each other. Cf.
Englund (2011:15 – 16); Tsing (2005); Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen (2009); and Bottici
and Challand (2011a). The latter suggest: “In contrast to the ‘imaginary’ as an adjective,
which fundamentally means ‘fictitious, unreal,’ the concept of ‘imaginal’ simply de-
notes what is made of images, be they real images or not. Furthermore, in contrast to
‘imagination’ and ‘imaginary’ as substantives, ‘imaginal’ can be both the product of a
social context and of the free imagination of individuals” (2011a:8). This passage raises
several questions: Why should we assume that the imaginary refers to the fictitious
and the unreal? As I note later in this introduction, Foucault refers to it as a “mode of
actuality” (1986: 70). Can there be such a thing as the free imagination of individuals?
This phrasing suggests that all persons everywhere are individuals when that is not
actually the case. Even western “autonomous, bounded individuals” are still social per-
sons. It should also be considered that “the individual” is not a universally meaningful
concept. What does freedom mean here? Is it not related to language and the social? Are
there contexts in which the imaginary would not simply signify the “irreal” (in Sartre’s
terms)? This is a question that Benedict Anderson also considered in Imagined Communi-
ties (1991). From that tradition it became clear that the imagined, or even the imaginary,
can be all too real in the context of nationalism, for example. The imagination of en-
mity is but another example. Finally, what does it mean for “the imaginal” to be “made
of images”? I would not collapse the range of differences between the image and the
imagination (differences that have vexed thinking about the imagination at least since
Aristotle [see, e.g., White 1990 and Kearney 1991]). For if the image is a visual object,
or even only “visual,” what happens to affect and the fuller sensorium in relation to the
imagination? Ricoeur has convincingly challenged the yoking of the imagination to the
image, but his “semantic” definition of the imagination in terms of language in turn
raises problems of its own (see Rundell 1994b:9).
18. Mindful of Castoriadis’s (1997) views on “the technical” and “the instrumen-
tal,” I note Snead, Holbraad, and Pedersen’s preeminent emphasis on “technologies of
the imagination”; they “have in mind primarily the diverse manners or indeed styles
through which imaginative effects are engendered” and they are also inspired by Fou-
cault’s concept of “technologies of power” (2009:16, emphasis added). As examples of
such technologies, they cite light bulbs in rural Mongolia, Chinese numerological prac-
tices, Internet chat rooms, and open source software, among others. These “technolo-
gies” have “imaginative effects” and have here been arrived at “by means of [a] means-ends
logic” where “ ‘technologies’ count as being ‘of the imagination’ insofar as they serve to
precipitate outcomes that they do not fully condition” (2009:16, 24 – 25, emphasis added).
Castoriadis’s text critiques precisely such means-ends logics and the reduction of the
imagination into “effects” and “outcomes.” But because elsewhere the authors refer to

notes to introduction 211

more Kantian views of the imagination, there may be several different conceptions of
the imagination at play here.
19. Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Wittgenstein are among
the many who have thought specifically about the problematics of the imagination as a
suspect category. See, e.g., White (1990) and Engell (1981).
20. Paul Ricoeur (1994:119) also identifies a persistent newer phenomenon: “The
general problem of imagination suffers from the disrepute in which the term ‘image’ is
held following its misuse in the empiricist theory of knowledge. The discredit suffered
by ‘psychologism’ in contemporary semantics . . . also attaches references to imagi-
nation. . . . Behaviourist psychology is similarly anxious to eliminate images, which it
holds to be private, unobservable mental entities.” Likewise, Ricoeur argues that “the
zealous pursuit of [a] popular philosophy of creativity” has furthered the discrediting
of the imagination.
21. I agree, but would also observe that such intersubjective, dialogical spheres of
imagination and experience are actually considered increasingly important to the con-
temporary “social work” of art, work that can in some ways be useful to ethnography
as practice (see Bourriaud 1998; Kester 2004, 2011; Jackson 2011; Bishop 2012; Shenk
2014). Of course, there was also a moment when contemporary artwork began to mimic
ethnography (see Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real [1996]).
22. It is interesting to think of Deleuze (1997) in relation to Ananda Coomaraswamy
([1946] 2007:117), who argues that “in the catholic (and not only Roman Catholic) view
of art, imitation, expression, and participation are three predications of the essential nature
of art; not three different or conflicting, but three interpenetrating and coincident defi-
nitions of art, which is these three in one” (emphasis in the original). Later, he defines
the imagination as “the conception of the idea in an imitable form. Without a pattern
(paradeigma, exemplar), indeed, nothing could be made except by mere chance” ([1946]
2007:118). (But here, too, the imagination is in danger of being yoked too heavily to
the image and the visual — and to “art.”) Coomaraswamy’s ideas regarding imitation,
expression, and participation in some respects prefigure more contemporary concep-
tions and practices of “relational aesthetics” and “dialogical” art (see Bourriaud 1998;
Kester 2004; Shenk 2014).
23. It is relevant, too, that the expatriates’ accounts were of violence in Africa by Af-
ricans. The dismissals by the few remaining Europeans had a dismissive and even racist
cast to them (cf. Fassin and Rechtman 2009; see also Malkki 1996).
24. It was recognized by French and other psychologists that after the 1988 Armenian
earthquake, “what people really needed was to talk” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009:166).
No such understanding was extended, initially, to those caught up in the 1994 genocide
in Rwanda or the 1972 genocide in Burundi. Fassin and Rechtman (2009:186) quote an
msf (Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders) nurse, “We don’t have men-
tal health programs in the refugee camps in Africa. We should. But everyone thinks it’s
just too complicated — that it’s cultural.”
25. This was claustrophobic, as I describe in chapter 2.
26. The naïve empiricist suspicion of the imagination parallels distrust of the work

212 notes to introduction

of memory. But out of all this complex and tragic memory, a future had to be imagined
in both Burundi and Rwanda. “Practices and experiences of the imagination can have
powerful ethical dimensions; they can shape lives and create communities” (Mitter-
maier 2011:50). But they can also destroy those futures, as has happened again and again
in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa.
27. “Though I want to affirm the Romantic roots of Anthropology; I am not advo-
cating veneration of the irrational, the irreal, the imagination,” writes Vincent Crapan-
zano (2004:18) in parallel fashion. Yet he devotes a whole study to understanding the
imagination, calling it a kind of “aura” that accompanies “all thought, perception, and
experience” (2004:18, emphasis added). I would add affect to that list. And he does go
on to cite William James (1992:160) on “sensorial imaginations” (2004:19 – 20) and Jean
Starobinski (1970:173 – 74) on the role of the imagination in the constitution of reality.
But why does Crapanzano link the imagination with “the irrational” and “the irreal”?
28. One should further add, with William James (1992), that the in/visible does not
exhaust the being of the imagination; James suggests that its processes are multisenso-
rial (cf. Crapanzano 2004:18). These processes are also affective, as this book will show.
29. See Young (2009:140, 142); see also Deleuze on Kant (1997:33 – 34, 63).
30. The capacity (or at least the strong desire) to understand and live with something
of another’s situation is often what anthropologists aspire to do in their professional
practice. Here it is productive to seek to understand and imaginatively inhabit anoth-
er’s circumstances, even if momentarily and very partially, but it can be dangerous to
develop points of communion between self and other to such a degree that the line
between self and other blurs. This danger, and its connection to the situation of the
Red Cross workers, is explored at some length in chapter 2.
31. Mittermaier likens this to the Egyptian form of imagination, al-khayal, where the
imagined is “not inherently unreal, but . . . is present and absent at the same time. It
defies the either/or and closure” (2011:18). It is an “in-betweenness” (2011:29).
32. Comparably, Robert Musil distinguished between “the normal relation to expe-
rience and the heightened relation to experience that is common to art, religion, and
erotic excitement, which he called the ‘other condition.’ The intensification of experi-
ence . . . is characterized by a weakening of the role of the ego in the social sense; this expressed
Musil’s interest in ‘a deeper embedding of thought in the emotional sphere, a more
personal relation to the experiencing subject.’ Common to all experiences of the other condition
is that ‘the border between self and nonself’ is less sharp than usual. . . . Whereas normally the
self masters the world, in the other condition the world flows into the self, or mingles
with it, or bears it’ ” (Luft 1994:xxvii, emphasis added). In “the other condition,” the self
becomes utterly vulnerable. Again, I think of this state in relation to Foucault’s (1991),
Bataille’s (see Noys 2000), Blanchot’s (1993), Lacan’s (see Evans 1996), and others’ quest
for “limit experiences.” To me, fieldwork in Tanzania and sometimes in Finland was
“the other condition” where the relation of self to Other, and even self to self, became
difficult to manage.
33. Pauline von Bonsdorff writing about Kant (2009:27 – 28, emphasis added).
34. See artist Jay Koh, cited in Kester 2004:102 – 3.

notes to introduction 213