Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Need, imagination, and the humanitarian care of the self -- Professionals abroad: occupational solidarity and international desire as humanitarian motives -- Impossible situations: affective impasses and their afterlives in humanitarian and ethnographic fieldwork -- Figurations of the human: children, humanity, and the infantilization of peace -- Bear humanity: children, animals, and other power-objects of the humanitarian -- Imagination -- Homemade humanitarianism: knitting and loneliness -- A zealous humanism and its limits: sacrifice and the hazards of neutrality -- Conclusion: the power of the mere: humanitarianism as domestic art and imaginative politics