Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction. Need, Imagination, and the Care of the Self 1
5. 1. Professionals Abroad. Occupational Solidarity and International Desire as Humanitarian Motives 23
6. 2. Impossible Situations. Affective Impasses and Their Afterlives in Humanitarian and Ethnographic Fieldwork 53
7. 3. Figurations of the Human. Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace 77
8. 4. Bear Humanity. Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination 105
9. 5. Homemade Humanitarianism. Knitting and Loneliness 133
10. 6. A Zealous Humanism and Its Limits. Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutrality 165
11. Conclusion. The Power of the Mere. Humanitarianism as Domestic Art and Imaginative Politics 199
12. Notes 209
13. References 235
14. Index 267