About

Liisa H. Malkki is an Emerita Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania explored how political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people, resulting in her book 'Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania.' She also examined how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, imagined future scenarios for themselves and their countries following genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Her most recent book, 'Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork,' co-authored with Allaine Cerwonka, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her ongoing research project, based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present, investigates the evolving relationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Theology
• Mechanical engineering
• Environmental ethics
• Philosophy
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Business
• Medical physics

Selected publications

• Algumas palavras para Jim Ferguson: de Liisa, Roberto, George, Jess, Bóris e Márcio

  Antropolítica - Revista Contemporânea de Antropologia · 2025-05-19

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  Aqui, trazemos algumas palavras para homenagear o antropólogo James Ferguson, falecido no último 12 de fevereiro de 2025, aos 65 anos de idade. Ferguson era professor do Departamento de Antropologia da Universidade de Stanford, na Califórnia, Estados Unidos. Recebeu formação em Antropologia Cultural pela University of California, Santa Barbara (1979) e em Antropologia Social pela Harvard University (1981/M.A. e 1985/PhD). Teve uma carreira profissional amplamente reconhecida na Antropologia, em especial a partir dos seus estudos e etnografias sobre economia política, antropologia do desenvolvimento e programas internacionais de assistência social. A visão crítica de Ferguson sobre esses temas, sustentada no trabalho de campo em países da África Austral, se estendeu também para trabalhos sobre teoria e metodologia antropológicas. Durante seus estudos de pós-graduação em Harvard, Ferguson conheceu e passou a conviver intelectual e pessoalmente com a antropóloga Liisa Malkki, desde então também sua esposa, e com seus amigos, os antropólogos George Bisharat e Roberto Kant de Lima, naquilo que denominaram “Escola Bacardi de Antropologia.” Sua partida precoce surpreendeu e consternou todos nós e, de modo muito especial e emotivo, àqueles que conviveram com ele diretamente. Reconhecendo sua trajetória profissional e intelectual e suas qualidades pessoais, a Antropolítica acolheu imediatamente a iniciativa do nosso colega e professor Roberto Kant de Lima para publicar uma série de textos em homenagem a James “Jim” Ferguson.

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• News and Culture:

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
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• A Tale of Two Affects: Humanitarianism and Professionalism in Red Cross Aid Work

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Medicine
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• 5. Homemade Humanitarianism. Knitting and Loneliness

  2020-09-30

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• 3. Figurations of the Human. Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

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  • Environmental ethics
  • Philosophy
  • Theology
  PublisherDOI

• A Tale of Two Affects:

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2018-04-06 · 3 citations

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• The Need to Help

  2015-09-03 · 8 citations

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• The Need to Help

  2015-09-03 · 30 citations

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• The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism

  2015-09-03 · 442 citations

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  In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from recipients to workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world out there, led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit trauma teddies and aid bunnies for needy children, the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

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• The Need to Help

  2015-08-17 · 246 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Allaine Cerwonka

  3 shared

• George Orwell

  1 shared

• Wolé Soyinka

  1 shared

• Gérard Prunier

  1 shared

• Sidney Verba

  1 shared

• Reporters Sans Frontieres

  1 shared

• Antjie Krog

  1 shared

• Primo Levi

  Institut za filozofiju

  1 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Harvard University

  1989