CONCLUSION

Starting with the “Ordinary”

This book offers an unusual perspective on a global health emergency. Rather than beginning with an extraordinary virus or disease, as most epidemic narratives do—often playing on tropes of alterity and exoticism—here we began with the ordinary. The protagonists of this story are not government officials, scientists, or international humanitarian responders but rather the residents of an ordinary neighborhood in a city that became swept up in a global emergency. On center stage here are the intimate spaces of the home and other corners of the neighborhood where its residents regularly socialize rather than hospitals and conference rooms (although these have featured too). Foregrounded are the priorities and practices of young people, with particular attention placed on familial relationships, movement through the life course, and work. These priorities tended to be expansive and long-term, in contrast with the narrower and more short-term priorities of international agencies and actors. Instead of relying on testimony after the fact, this account weaves between what was spoken and known by people in real time during the emergency and the realms of observed activity that are embodied and unspoken.

Starting with the ordinary is not just about people, priorities, practices, and places but is also about time. As an anthropologist, I was in an unexpected situation of finding myself embedded in a field site while a major emergency unfolded around me. This allowed for a granular perspective on what the epidemic looked like as it played out, which in turn pointed me to question established scholarly frameworks for making sense of crises. A major takeaway from this book is that emergencies are not linear events. Ebola did not introduce ambiguities and difficulties around care, intimacy, and health; rather, the Ebola emergency animated existing and deep-rooted problems. Thus, some of the uncertainties of emergencies are not necessarily the product of the emergency itself, even though this might appear to be the case, but instead are the ways that emergencies interact with what has come before. As we saw in the case of “black” and “white” systems of burials, deep-rooted historical patterns going back to the Atlantic slave trade and abolitionism were unearthed during Ebola, providing a framework that structured people’s understandings and responses to it.

To add a further layer in what I have described as the extraordinary ordinary, emergencies can paradoxically allow for forms of normality that are normally absent. This was especially the case for many of the young people at the heart of this book for whom the Ebola emergency presented unusual clarity on the contradictory expectations of different overlapping social orders in which they were enmeshed. The existence of these different social orders was made unusually plain during the international intervention, manifesting as two constructed worlds, one local and undeveloped and the other global and developed. But these orders were already found in many domains of life in Freetown, such as the relational order of kinship versus the transactional order of business in and around the home, and in the registers of formal and precarious informal work on the city’s streets. The clarity that came with the emergency had material implications for those we were able to broker and navigate between social orders, drawing on long-standing approaches to social mobility in Sierra Leone and other postcolonial contexts. This found expression in employment opportunities, the realigning of familial relationships, new relations between precarious workers and the state, and openings for honorable progression through the life course.

In flipping the ways that emergency narratives are normally structured, this book contains a broader message with both scholarly and political implications, namely that we must increasingly swing our focus from the extraordinary to the ordinary. The extraordinary understandably captures much of our attention by virtue of being unusual. Such a bias is particularly blatant in mainstream media and news reporting, in which shocking stories attract eyeballs and ears and, of course, advertising and sales revenue. In connected ways, the prioritization of the extraordinary dictates where budgets are directed in the spheres of public and global health, humanitarianism, and international development. For example, routine illnesses such as malaria and typhoid, while ultimately more deadly in Sierra Leone, are much less “sexy” than viruses such as Ebola and therefore receive less attention. A similar instinct pervades popular and professional culture. Academics are valued for saying something original and finding something new. Across the board, the drive to brand and market ourselves pressures us to discover what makes us unique. This moves attention away from engaging seriously and critically with the multiple layers of the ordinary, which in the end speak most closely to the reality of most people’s lives.

Following the lead of the residents of the Congo Town neighborhood, it is not only that the ordinary reveals much of the lived reality of emergencies that becomes concealed in extraordinary framings and discourses but also that emergencies present surprisingly rich opportunities to cast our critical attention on different dimensions of ordinary life. By virtue of being time marked as “emergency,” they reveal with unusual clarity the range of what people find to be pressing concerns for themselves and others around them and where the openings and limitations lie. In this process, the basic constructability of social, cultural, political, and economic life becomes revealed in a new light. Additionally, the disparity between the expectations that people place on themselves and each other and the material possibilities of meeting those expectations becomes particularly stark. This can lead to flexible, accelerated, and creative reworkings of conventions, as we saw in the case of family ritual at various stages along the life course and in approaches to work by young Ebola responders. Such reworkings can also lead to lasting transformations in familial relationships and perhaps to forms of politics that question the vast inequities of our global economic and political structures.

Crisis and Emergency

In this book I have set out to describe and theorize the significance of emergencies in places and among people for whom crisis has become more of a norm than an exception. The young men and women at the heart of this story fit the profile of those considered to be living amid the uncertainties and precarities of ongoing crisis today. This crisis can be described as having a public and private face (although I hope that this book has somewhat complicated this distinction). The public face is the economic and state structure that they live and work within. Young people criticize the government for not serving their material interests and, particularly informal workers, blame the police for holding them back. On a larger scale, extractive global economic arrangements ensure that only a meager percentage of Sierra Leone’s wealth in natural resources benefits ordinary people, directly or indirectly. Thus, Freetown remains one of the world’s poorest cities although it has a rich, cosmopolitan history and culture. Freetown, like many cities in the Global South, is overcrowded and underserviced, with communities suffering from floods, fires, and other environmental disasters on an almost annual basis. The private face of the crisis might be summed up in the complaint I regularly hear among youths in Freetown, particularly young men, that it is practically impossible to find “real love” and that there is too much “money love.” This challenge extends beyond securing stable intimate partnerships and the land and resources required to build a home to the possibility of honorable progression through the entire life course from marriage and the birth of children to death.

Ebola, however, represented something more temporary and defined than this slow-burn contemporary crisis. The dangers were more clearly articulated and quantifiable even if they were scary and unusual. Yet, as we have discovered, the Ebola emergency—and indeed all epidemics—take on a range of political, economic, and, centrally here, social meanings and significances that far exceeds the contours of biomedicine and epidemiology. In part, the term “Ebola,” as it was understood in Freetown, was closely connected the public health emergency of Ebola; in other words, the numerous ways that the novel disease and the public health protocols and regulations put in place to control it directly impacted people’s lives. But “Ebola” was also a way of talking about and responding to the broader crisis described above in ways that were transformative for many of those involved, partly in ways that accentuated existing problems and partly in ways that proved to be unusual solutions to them. The efficacy of the time of emergency for such transformative social processes was connected to the fact that it was understood as temporary. During this period there was an unusual alignment of attention across many strata of society, including internationally, toward a shared problem, while novel material flows and bureaucracies in the public health response were not yet fully tainted with the patterns of exclusion that the marginalized are accustomed to.

Bringing It All Back Home

This book is not only an account of the Ebola emergency in Freetown, with all its specificities and peculiarities, but in keeping with the anthropological tradition, it also aims to deepen our understanding of something more global and shared. When I started writing, I was not expecting that the world would go through a pandemic before I had finished. Most readers will have had direct personal experience of some of what I have described. My experience during Ebola made me particularly attuned to the mismatch between the ways that COVID-19 was being talked about in public and private forums and people’s actual day-to-day experiences of life at the time. I wondered whether people across the globe, particularly in the West, would become more sympathetic when considering the challenges of balancing ongoing commitments and routines with the demands of a public health emergency that was lacking in the widespread blaming of culture by international and local observers during Ebola. Perhaps this is wishful thinking.

This book does not just aim to promote a richer analysis of Ebola and other emergencies but also asks us to question what we take to be normal and ordinary in our own lives. In reality, we rarely encounter the stability and predictability that we might associate with these notions or indeed yearn for. This is certainly the case when considering the flux of the material world and natural phenomena but is also the case in our human social worlds too. Social reproduction and intergenerational cultural transmission, even in normal times, rely on breaks and ruptures. This is particularly overt during rituals, when social rules and hierarchies tend to shift from the sincere “as is” of the day-to-day into the subjunctive mode of “as if.” The “as if,” following the analysis of Victor Turner and others, might signify a world of dark fantasy emerging into view from beneath the surface or, in more mild, playful form, the temporary blurring of social boundaries and categories through embodied performance.¹ However, such dynamics are at play not only in the rituals that we overtly socially orchestrate but also in emergencies that can appear much less within our control. Emergencies are particularly powerful catalysts for both change and continuity in society, especially for those who are stuck. It does not seem coincidental that family ritual was such a focal point for young people in Freetown during Ebola. In the midst of major upheavals of one sort or another today, there is a striking persistence, if not growing importance, of family as a defining social institution in old and young people’s lives, however flexible and contested this concept might be.

Emergencies, in particular epidemics, are critical occasions when we define and redefine what we value in our lives and share with others. As normal routines become disrupted (and especially if we are locked down in our homes or neighborhoods), we are forced to confront aspects of ourselves and our relationships with others that otherwise can easily be missed or go unacknowledged. This can be a highly challenging process but one that forces us to glimpse more acutely the ways that we are vitally reliant on others around us and those beyond sight. Viral epidemics reveal on one level what we fundamentally share as human beings. They spread across national borders and between bodies that bypass the social boundaries and categories that we erect between ourselves and others. And yet, emergencies are also times when we redefine and reinforce division and distinction. We see securitized policies of containment, discourses of blame, and new (and old) patterns of exclusion. If we are to better understand the deeper causes and longer-term consequences of emergencies today, we must better appreciate not only the range of experiences, priorities, and needs of people caught up in them but also what they tell us about being human.