Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all of those at the London School of Economics, past and present, who have supported this book throughout the years. Thank you Deborah James and Matthew Engelke for your long-term guidance since my time in the Department of Anthropology. I am thankful for the support of my colleagues at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and the Centre for Public Authority and International Development, in particular Tim Allen, Martha Geiger, and Melissa Parker.

I am greatly appreciative to all of those, more than can be mentioned here, who have read my work and supported this research from its inception until its finished form. I would particularly like to mention Adia Benton, Thomas Brooks, Charlotte Bruckermann, Michael Edwards, Harri Englund, Ilana Gershon, Hyman Gross, Aisha Ibrahim, Marloes Janson, Melissa Lane, Nick Long, Fabio Mattioli, Friederike Mieth, the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and American Ethnologist, and the two reviewers of this manuscript.

I have benefited from the comments and feedback from audiences at the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, St. Peter’s College Oxford, the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, Njala University, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the University of Bath, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and several conferences.

I am indebted to my friends in Freetown, who generously accepted me into their lives and guided me through my fieldwork with care and humor. They have not only shaped the contents of this book but have also taught me lessons that have shaped my life.

I am so grateful for the love of my friends and family. Diana Lipton, Jacob Lipton, and my partner, Eda Seyhan, have engaged deeply with me in this work and supported and facilitated it in innumerable other ways. Thank you Hatice, Nail, and Jale for hosting me in Naarm (Melbourne), where much of this book was written.

The writing of and research for this book were supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, which funds the Centre for Public Authority and International Development research grants ES/P008038/1 and ES/W00786X/1. Earlier research funding came from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, a Malinowski Memorial Grant, a Halperin Memorial Fund Pre-Doctoral Travel Fellowship, a Rosemary and Raymond Firth Scholarship, and an Alfred Gell Memorial Studentship.

Parts of this book have been published in different forms, and I appreciate the permission given to reuse this work in its new form. A different version of chapter 5 was published with the title “ ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Death: Burials in a Time of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, no. 4 (2017): 801–19. Some of the ethnographic material presented in chapter 4 appears in a chapter titled “Taking Life ‘Off Hold’: Pregnancy and Family Formation during the Ebola Crisis in Freetown, Sierra Leone” in the book Pregnant in the Time of Ebola: Women and Their Children in the 2013–2015 West African Epidemic, edited by David A. Schwartz, Julienne Ngoundoung Anoko, and Sharon A. Abramowitz (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019).