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Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

From crude and uneasy beginnings, sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex within the space of thirty years. It covers the introduction of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to China to address infertility, the expansion of the use of donor sperm in cases in which the male partner suffers from a genetic disease, and other issues, such as the availability and screening of potential sperm donors.

This book is not about crimes against humanity. Rather, it is an indictment of “humanity,” the concept that lies at the heart of human rights and humanitarian missions. Based on fieldwork in northern Uganda, this book brings readers inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, an insurgent group accused of rape, forced conscription of children, and inhumane acts of violence. The author talks with and learns from former rebels as they find meaning in wartime violence, politics, spirituality, and love—experiences that observers often place outside the boundaries of humanity. Rather than approaching the LRA as a set of possibilities, humanity looks at the LRA as a set of problems, as inhuman enemies needing reform. Humanity hegemonizes what counts as good in ways that are difficult to question or challenge. It relies on specific notions of the good—shaped in ideals of modern violence, technology, modernity, and reason, among others—in ways that do violence to the common good. What emerges from this ethnography is an unorthodox question—what would it mean to be “against humanity”? Against Humanity provocatively asks us how to honor life existing outside normative moralities. It challenges us to shift toward alternative, more radical approaches to humanitarian, political, medical, and other interventions, rooted in anti-humanism.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, this book explores Pentecostal Christianity in the kind of community where it often flourishes: a densely populated neighborhood in the heart of an extraction economy. On the Zambian Copperbelt, Pentecostal adherence embeds believers in relationships that help them to “move” and progress in life. These efforts give Copperbelt Pentecostalism its particular local character, shaping ritual practice, gender dynamics, and church economics. Focusing on the promises and problems that Pentecostalism presents, the book highlights this religion's role in making life possible in structurally adjusted Africa.

The Art of Connection narrates the individual stories of artisans and traders of Kenyan arts and crafts as they struggled to overcome the loss of physical access to roadside market space by turning to new digital technologies to make their businesses more mobile and integrated into the global economy. The book illuminates the lived experiences of marginalized Kenyan businesspeople struggling in the shadow of the country’s international tourism to balance new risks with new types of mobility. These new strategies are balanced against older models of development based on the co-operative industry and ethnic networks. But for many young traders, such models appear outdated and lacking innovation. An array of ethnic and generational politics have led to market burnings and witchcraft accusations as Kenya’s crafts industry struggles to adapt to its new connection to the global economy. To mediate the resulting crisis of trust, the Fair Trade sticker and other NGO aesthetics continue to successfully represent a transparent, ethical, and trusting relationship between buyer and producer. By balancing revelation and obfuscation—what is revealed and what is not—Kenyan art traders can thus make their own roles as intermediaries and the exploitative realities of the global economy invisible. The art of connection is, therefore, a set of strategies for making and maintaining connections by deploying notions of transparency. But as the book illustrates, it is also an artistic motif that represents the importance of ideals of transparency and connections in the world today.

Departing from common treatment of female genital cutting as an African problem to be debated within Western moral and critical publics, this book examines how Ghanaians problematize and materialize cutting as an African concern in which Western reason and governmentality have been implicated since colonialism. It examines the genealogies of activist and governmental efforts to end cutting (including feminist, public health, and legal interventions and cultural reforms) and the forms of rule, subjectivity, and positioning they produce. It attends to the social concerns and ethical dilemmas of women and men who have been most engaged in and affected by them. Ghanaian opposition to NGOs does not take the shape in the continuation of the practice, as they accommodate NGO platforms, but critique what they leave unaddressed. They question extractive governance that takes without giving and disidentify with the legal rationality of sovereign violence that punishes without caring. They desire governance based on ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility. This ethnography challenges and reinvigorates anthropological and feminist theories about neoliberal punitive rationality and feminist love of law, efficacy and unintended consequences of NGO interventions, minimalist biopolitics of saving lives, and postcolonial abandonment in the postcolonial world. It also charts a path for working against the analytical and political common sense by cultivating sensibilities on the basis of disidentification and immanent critique.

One of the most disturbing spectacles of recent decades has been brutal acts of violence—indeed genocide—between groups who had long lived together in relative peace. In such cases lethal violence is the product not of some far away and unseen hand but rather the hand of your neighbor, someone who before some unforeseen event was perhaps even your friend. Employing multi-sited and multi-vocal ethnography, the book examines how peaceful neighbors become transformed into perpetrators and victims of lethal violence. It engages with a set of interlocking Kenyan case studies, focusing on sometimes-peaceful, sometimes violent interactions between Samburu herders and neighboring groups, interweaving Samburu narratives of key violent events with the narratives of neighboring groups on the other side of the same encounters. The book is, on one hand, an ethnography of particular people in a particular place, vividly portraying the complex and confusing dynamics of interethnic violence principally through the lives, words and intimate experiences of individuals variously involved in and affected by these conflicts. At the same time, it aims to use this particular case study to illustrate how the dynamics in northern Kenya may provide comparative insights to well-known, compelling contexts of violence around the globe.

In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending decades of white colonial rule. While tens of thousands of whites relocated in fear of losing their fortunes, many stayed. But over the past decade, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them that their belonging is tenuous. This book looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in post-independence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to pronouncing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, the book focuses on their discourse and narratives to ask: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claim to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-à-vis the colonial past and anti-colonial sentiment, phrasing and re-phrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable? The book explores contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind-spots, denials, and self-doubt as her respondents strain to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry.

This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to sabotage the revolution that was being led by the urban-based African National Congress (ANC), igniting a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. While the violence of that period has largely subsided, migrants continue to express discontent with the ANC government, which they articulate as a critique of liberal democracy itself. Migrants claim that democracy undermines the moral order that is crucial to good fortune and social reproduction in their rural homesteads—a fear that has heightened as neoliberalism renders family livelihoods ever more precarious. This antiliberal stance must be understood in the context of colonial governance in KwaZulu-Natal, which manipulated social differences between urban and rural areas. These differences continue to inform popular politics in the region today, particularly for migrant workers, who link their critique of democracy to a disapproval of the social forms that characterize contemporary urbanism. This study provides grist for a number of broader theoretical discussions. By paying attention to subaltern perspectives on democratization, it compels us to question common assumptions about the nature of liberal freedom and the forms of personhood that it seeks to produce. It also pushes us to rethink the social-scientific theories that seek to explain antiliberal politics, which rely on the very same assumptions that underpin the project of liberal democracy itself.

Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the decade-long war that devastated their country. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship of material exchange that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, they create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and to orient themselves to a livable everyday existence. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government’s own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government’s disloyalty to its people, rather than the rebel invasion and occupation, that destroyed the town and forced the uneasy coexistence between civilians and rebels.