The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism
Liisa H. Malkki is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, and the coauthor of Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork.
A Zealous Humanism and Its Limits: Sacrifice and the Hazards of Neutrality
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Published:August 2015
This chapter explores the ICRC’s commitment to the principle of “humanity,” and its remarkably absolute insistence that its services be provided equally to all human beings, irrespective of circumstance. Starting with the analysis of an interlocutor’s discussion of a film about murdered Benedictine monks in Algeria, the chapter documents a range of cases in which adherence to the principle of “humanity” required ICRC workers to subject themselves to possible acts of violence, sometimes while providing medical aid to the very people carrying out such acts. Such “neutrality” is neither rational nor detached, but instead grows out of an absolutist commandment...
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