1. On pandemic bonds and private equity models of global health financing, see Erikson, “Global Health Futures?”

2. United Nations Development Programme, Assessing the Socio-economic Impacts of Ebola Virus Disease in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone: The Road to Recovery, 2014, https://www.undp.org/content/dam/rba/docs/Reports/EVD%20Synthesis%20Report%2023Dec2014.pdf.

3. Seisay and Kamara, Sierra Leone 2015: Population and Housing Census; Thematic Report on Mortality.

4. In chapter 6, I specifically outline practical and theoretical insights that I learned from my personal experiences of navigating a long-term research project in the face of an unexpected emergency.

5. There are a number of in-depth ethnographic accounts of local responses to historic and contemporary intervention in rural Sierra Leone. See Ferme, The Underneath of Things; Ferme, Out of War; Leach, Rainforest Relations; Richards, Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic; and Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade.

6. See Farmer, Fever, Feuds, and Diamonds; and Rashid, “Epidemics and Resistance in Colonial Sierra Leone during the First World War.”

7. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, questions the usefulness of the concept of crisis, given its breadth of meaning and susceptibility to manipulation. Rather than cast the term aside, in this book I argue that crisis remains an important critical concept but that we need to better understand, both theoretically and empirically, the relationship between an ongoing crisis and a temporary emergency.

8. As Calhoun, “The Idea of Emergency,” points out, “Emergency focuses attention on the immediate event, and not on its causes. It calls for a humanitarian response, not political or economic analysis. The emergency has become a basic unit of global affairs” (30).

9. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Agamben, State of Exception, famously argues that the ability to declare a “state of exception” rather than upholding the rule of law has become central to contemporary state sovereignty.

10. On subjectivities of crisis as an ongoing phenomenon, see Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Hage, “Waiting Out the Crisis”; and Mbembe and Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.”

11. On waithood, see Honwana, Youth, Waithood and Protest Movements in Africa. For models that emphasize the difficulties for African youths in escaping their marginal status, on social navigation see Vigh, “Social Death and Violent Life Chances,” and on crisis in context see Vigh, “Crisis and Chronicity.” However, waithood and social navigation differ in their characterizations of structure and agency. In waithood the social and political structure in which youths are situated is rigid and static. Meaningful mobility takes place through horizontal mass collective action, such as protest movements. In social navigation, the structure—that is, the young men’s social environment in a violent context—is constantly in motion and shifting. All available escape routes from marginalization entail in one way or another the joining of vertical patrimonial networks.

12. Ambiguity is a recurring theme in the anthropology of Sierra Leone. See Diggins, Coastal Sierra Leone; Ferme, The Underneath of Things; and Jackson, Life within Limits.

13. Anthropological research emphasizes that “youth,” rather than being a universal biological age-based category, is instead a social category, as famously demonstrated in the study by Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa. Thus, in a given social context the biological ages of those occupying the category of youth differs. And indeed, in the same social context individuals can move in and out of the category in a nonlinear manner, as emphasized in regard to the theory of “vital-conjectures” in Johnson-Hanks, “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography.” As a social category, youth gains meaning through its interaction with other social categories, such as religious affiliation, gender, class, ethnicity, and race. On the crisis of youth in Africa, see, for example, Abbink and van Kessel, Vanguard or Vandals and Honwana and de Boeck, Makers and Breakers. For more recent ethnographic studies in urban settings, see Janson, Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia; Masquelier, Fada; Smith, To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job; and Di Nunzio, The Act of Living.

14. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Facts: Youth Population Trends and Sustainable Development.

15. On factors leading to the youth uprisings in Sierra Leone, see Peters, War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone. On child soldiers in the aftermath of the war, see Shepler, Childhood Deployed.

16. See, for example, Banton, West African City; Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer; Fortes, The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi; and Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money.

17. On youth and stuckedness in Rwanda, see Sommers, Stuck.

18. See, for example, the widely viewed HBO documentary Orphans of Ebola.

19. For work in Sierra Leone, see Parker et al., “Ebola and Public Authority”; and Richards, Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic.

20. See, for example, Farmer et al., Reimagining Global Health; Fassin, When Bodies Remember; and Hunter, Love in the Time of Aids.

21. On witchcraft and intimacy in West Africa, see Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust.

22. Reece, “ ‘We Are Seeing Things,’ ” charts similar entanglements between kinship and crisis in the context of AIDS in Botswana.

23. The ordinary in crisis, particularly conflict and violence, is the focus of a number of anthropological studies in recent decades. Das, Life and Words, charts how major violence in India’s modern history, such as partition, entered the “recesses of the ordinary” in its aftermath, playing out at the everyday, gendered, and subjective levels. In Africa, various studies have pointed to how the ordinary and related notions are prioritized by people during and after conflict. See, for example, Bolten, I Did It to Save My Life; Hoffman and Lubkemann, “Introduction: West-African Warscapes”; and Porter, After Rape. The context of an epidemic emergency has parallels to wartime but also some important differences, as outlined in chapter 4.

24. On these two different notions of normal and ordinary, see Bolten, “The Agricultural Impasse”; and Warner, The Trouble with Normal.

25. See Turner, The Forest of Symbols.

26. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, 42.

27. See Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences.

28. See Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution; Englund, Prisoners of Freedom; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; and James, Songs of the Women Migrants.

29. On porous social orders in contemporary anthropology, see Gershon, “Porous Social Orders.” On the notion of two orders in theories of crisis, see Narotzky and Besnier, “Crisis, Value, and Hope.”

30. As Gershon, “Porous Social Orders,” notes, “Porous boundaries let people, ideas, objects, and forms circulate between social orders in ways that often keep distinctions between social orders durable” (405).

31. See Vaughan, Curing Their Ills.

32. Jane Guyer’s formative study, Marginal Gains, shows how West Africa’s long-standing entanglement with foreign markets and influences led to the emergence of a multiplicity of value scales and economic logics, from equivalence to asymmetrical exchange determined by social factors such as status. The possibility of “marginal gain” occurs at the transactional threshold between registers through “conversions.”

1. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills.

2. Wald, Contagious.

3. For more on youth performance and global interconnection in contemporary Sierra Leone, see Bolten, Serious Youth in Sierra Leone.

4. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 120.

5. The population of greater Freetown, including adjacent neighborhoods and towns in Western Area, is estimated to be two million.

6. Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order, defined “neighborliness” as social relations connected by spatial proximity, suffused with values of kinship. This is similar to what is more recently described by Bjarnesen and Utas, “Introduction Urban Kinship,” as “urban kinship,” which pays attention to the micropolitical facets of urban relatedness.

7. Cohen, The Politics of Elite Culture.

8. On African cities in the twenty-first century, see Nuttall and Mbembe, Johannesburg; Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar; and De Boeck and Plissart, Kinshasa.

9. See Hoffman, The War Machines; and Enria, The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State.

10. On stuckedness, see Sommers, Stuck. On waithood, see Honwana, Youth, Waithood and Protest Movements in Africa.

11. See the notion of African youths as shifters in Durham, “Disappearing Youth.”

12. Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800, argued that local social transformations at this time were inextricably linked to the external trade that had interacted with coastal societies for a much longer period.

13. Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History.

14. Lovejoy and Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery.

15. Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone.

16. Asiama, “Land Accessibility and Urban Agriculture in Freetown, Sierra Leone.”

17. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 296.

18. The most recent epidemic of smallpox in Sierra Leone was in 1968–1969, which, as with Ebola, was transmitted around burial practices. See Hopkins et al., “Smallpox in Sierra Leone.”

19. On the ways that nonequivalence between Black and White lives was built into the spatial organization of Ebola treatment centers, see Hirsch, “Race and the Spatialisation of Risk during the 2013–2016 West African Ebola Epidemic.”

20. On the legacy of Spanish flu during Ebola and in particular the remarkable parallels and forgetting, see Farmer, “Ebola, the Spanish Flu, and the Memory of Disease.” “Although Ebola responders and public-health authorities have short memories—no one, in 2014, seemed to remember that mass graves had been dug before in Kambia or Port Loko, save during the civil war that ended a dozen years earlier” (68).

21. Rashid, “Patterns of Rural Protest.”

22. Cohen, The Politics of Elite Culture.

23. Harris, Sierra Leone.

24. Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest.

25. On performativity of rebel combat, see Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest. On post-Fordist economic practices, see Hoffman, The War Machines.

26. On the mixed impact of the formal peace-building process in Sierra Leone, see Mieth, “Bringing Justice and Enforcing Peace?”; Allen, Trial Justice, charts similar mismatches between local and international notions of justice surrounding the International Criminal Court in Uganda.

27. Polman, The Crisis Caravan.

28. On the exceptionality of HIV in the postwar period, see Benton, HIV Exceptionalism. This mirrors the privileged status of Ebola in international funding priorities during the 2014–2016 epidemic.

29. See accounts by Black, Belly Woman, and Walsh and Johnson, Getting to Zero, about their experiences of working in the international response in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic.

30. As Benton notes, “In part, the difficulty of decoupling security and aid is related the ‘defensiveness’ embedded in the aid landscape and everyday aid practices.” Benton, “Whose Security?,” 27.

31. On the connections between brokerage and neoliberalism in Africa, see James, “The Return of the Broker.”

1. See Lazar, “A ‘Kinship Anthropology of Politics’?,” and Kapsea and McNamara, “ ‘We Are Not Just a Union, We Are a Family’ ” on notions of labor unionism as kinship.

2. For more on the violent politics of commercial bike riding in Freetown and its connection to national political processes, see Enria, The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State.

3. For more on the history of commercial bike riding in provincial Sierra Leone and the continuities of wartime dynamics in the postwar period, see Bürge, “Riding the Narrow Tracks of Moral Life”; Menzel, “Between Ex-Combatization and Opportunities for Peace”; and Peters, “From Weapons to Wheels.”

4. Bolt, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms, describes how economic crises in southern Africa similarly led to new configurations of formal and informal work.

5. World Health Organization, “Ebola Response Roadmap.”

6. On the coercive elements of state and foreign intervention during recent epidemics in Africa, see Abdullah and Rashid, Understanding West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic; Chigudu, The Political Life of an Epidemic; and Parker et al., “Epidemics and the Military.”

7. Agamben, State of Exception.

8. Ethnographic investigations of interventions—particularly in the world of international development—have tended to make more nuanced arguments, emphasizing how the failings of particular projects serve to nonetheless reproduce global and local hierarchies and inequalities. See Englund, Prisoners of Freedom; Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine; and Gardner, Discordant Development.

9. Farmer, Infections and Inequalities.

10. Richards, Ebola.

11. Parker et al., “Ebola and Public Authority.”

12. On resistance during the 2014–2016 West African Ebola epidemic, see Fairhead, “Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea”; Marcis et al., “Three Acts of Resistance during the 2014–16 West Africa Ebola Epidemic”; and Wilkinson and Fairhead, “Comparison of Social Resistance to Ebola Response in Sierra Leone and Guinea Suggests Explanations Lie in Political Configurations Not Culture.”

13. Tapscott, Arbitrary States, argues that arbitrariness has become institutionalized in postcolonial African states.

14. Benton, HIV Exceptionalism, describes similarly contradictory attitudes toward the Sierra Leonean state in the postwar period, where routine criticisms of the state’s inadequacy coexisted with the widespread belief in its indispensability.

1. Brown and Sáez, “Ebola Separations,” explore different dimensions of separation and distancing during the West African Ebola epidemic, particularly in medical settings.

2. Farmer, “Ebola, the Spanish Flu, and the Memory of Disease,” describes Ebola as the “caregivers disease.”

3. The feeling of being stuck is widely ascribed as the central subjective experience of the crisis of youth in a variety of settings in Africa. See Hansen, “Getting Stuck in the Compound”; Mains, “Neoliberal Times”; and Sommers, Stuck.

4. Castro and Farmer, “Understanding and Addressing AIDS-Related Stigma,” critique the popularization of the concept of stigmatization in public health discourse, pointing out the ways that it can mask deeper and more complex social inequalities.

5. The home is highly underrepresented in the study of contemporary male youths in urban Africa. Recent work has begun to acknowledge the significance and complexities of this space in economic, social, and cultural terms. See Masquelier, Fada; and Smith, To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job.

6. Anthropological scholarship has emphasized the ways that ambiguity in domestic settings in a range of different contexts is connected to wider, often violent, historical events and processes: the Atlantic slave trade in study of a Mende village in Sierra Leone by Ferme, The Underneath of Things; partition and the massacre of Sikhs in the study in India by Das, Life and Words; the forms of financialization associated with neoliberalism in the study of South Africa by James, Money for Nothing, and of urban Chile in the study by Han, Life in Debt; and political rupture and domestic dislocation in the study of rural China by Bruckermann, Claiming Homes.

7. As Jane Guyer, Marginal Gains, reveals, there is a long regional history of status recognition intersecting complexly with registers of exchange based on contradictory logics in Atlantic Africa. Marginal gains are secured through strategically positioning oneself at the interface of different registers of exchange.

8. For Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, witchcraft in Africa, which is described as the “dark side of kinship,” is a powerful modern discourse on the ways that relations of intimacy hold malevolent potential.

9. Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society, 93.

10. Cooper, “Sitting and Standing,” argues that creative, often embodied, ways to “fix” the family in Africa are prevalent as a result of social, economic, and political upheavals.

1. There is a growing literature on public authority and crisis in Africa, which emphasizes how multiple authorities oversee day-to-day governance in contexts were state capacity is limited. For an overview, see Kirk and Allen, “Public Authority in Africa.” For a discussion of public authority during COVID-19 in Uganda, see Kirk et al., “Crisis Responses, Opportunity, and Public Authority during Covid-19’s First Wave in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan.”

2. On gender inequalities in global health governance and on the ground during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, see Harman, “Ebola, Gender and Conspicuously Invisible Women in Global Health Governance,” and Ibrahim, “ ‘I Am a Woman. How Can I Not Help?’ ”

3. Shepler, “ ‘We Know Who Is Eating the Ebola Money!,” argues that Ebola money was a novel way of knowing the state in Sierra Leone during the epidemic.

4. On the difference between statistical and evaluative normal, see Warner, The Trouble with Normal.

5. Ferme, “The Violence of Numbers,” 555–57.

6. Bolten. I Did It to Save My Life.

7. Bolten, “The Agricultural Impasse.”

8. On social responses to conflict in different African contexts, see Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos; Porter, After Rape; and Vigh, “Crisis and Chronicity.” In more general terms, Hage, “Waiting Out the Crisis,” points to the value often ascribed to waiting out a crisis in the contemporary world.

9. For more on the complexities and challenges of pregnancy and childbirth during the Ebola emergency, see Black, Belly Woman; McKay et al., “Family Planning in the Sierra Leone Ebola Outbreak”; and Schwartz, Anoko, and Abramowitz, Pregnant in the Time of Ebola.

10. For analysis of how being educated as a source of status for young people in Uganda beyond the sphere of formal work resonates, see Jones, “Education as Identity.”

11. For an ethnographic perspective on the everyday uncertainties facing ordinary Africans, see Cooper and Pratten, Ethnographies of Uncertainties in Africa.

12. Turner. The Anthropology of Performance, 42.

13. Guyer, “Prophecy and the Near Future.”

14. This dovetails with the observation by Engelke, “Secular Shadows,” that the “immanent” temporal orientation associated with secularism is underrepresented in Africanists debates, which have tended to center on religious temporalities.

15. Bornstein and Redfield, Forces of Compassion, identify the immediate future as the dominant temporality of humanitarian action.

1. For more on the Bangura family compound, see chapter 2 in this volume.

2. Cohen, The Politics of Elite Culture, 68.

3. Anthropological analysis of good death, following the Durkheimian analysis of second burials in Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, has emphasized the close relationship between the performance of proper postdeath ritual and the maintenance and reproduction of social order. This is achieved by exerting ritual order in the face of abrupt and unpredictable biological death and, as Bloch and Parry, Death and the Regeneration of Life, explore, harnessing the regenerative powers of ritual to compensate for the loss of individuals by reinstalling them in the collective consciousness.

4. Sophocles’s Antigone is a prime literary illustration of the risks of bad death, when the protagonist attempts to illegally perform an honorable burial for her brother—the disgraced loser of Thebes’s civil war—against the orders of her uncle, King Creon. The ensuing disorder is characterized as a disease, tragically wiping out Creon’s family and threatening social order at large: “the entire city is gripped by a violent disease” (Antigone II.114).

5. Fairhead, “Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea.”

6. Parker et al., “Ebola and Public Authority.”

7. For more on cosmologies and practices around death in Sierra Leone, see Jackson, “The Identity of the Dead”; Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone; MacCormack, “Dying as Transformation to Ancestorhood”; Richards, “A Matter of Grave Concern?”; and Spencer, “Invisible Enemy.”

8. At our first encounter, I was surprised to discover that the German was Black, and he was surprised to discover that the family’s lodger was White. After some time in the neighborhood, I earned the somewhat lighthearted nickname “black man in the white man’s skin,” which spoke to prevalent nonessentialized understandings of race.

9. See the examination of challenges in reconciling mass death with traditional categories of death and practices of memorization in postwar Vietnam in Kwon, After the Massacre.

10. Studies of modern funerary practices in Africa have similarly highlighted the coexistence of contestation and negotiation between competing social and religious groups and authorities. See, for example, Jindra and Noret, Funerals in Africa; De Boeck, “Death Matters”; Pendle, Spiritual Contestations; Posel and Gupta, “The Life of the Corpse”; Smith, “Burials and Belonging in Nigeria”; and de Witte, Long Live the Dead!

11. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

12. See ethnographies by Diggins, Coastal Sierra Leone; Ferme, The Underneath of Things; and Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade.

13. Fassin, “Racialization.”

14. On the embodied and material dimensions of burial and funerary ritual, see Engelke, “The Coffin Question”; Engelke, “The Anthropology of Death Revisited”; and Hallam, Hockey, and Howarth, Beyond the Body.

15. Gomez-Temesio, “Outliving Death,” observed a similar resurgence of imagery associated with the slave trade, in particular the figure of the zombie, in Ebola treatment centers in Guinea.

16. Harris, Sierra Leone, 13.

17. Benton, “Risky Business,” argues that humanitarianism in Sierra Leone reinforces racialized nonequivalence in the valuations of human life, which Hirsch, “Race and the Spatialisation of Risk during the 2013–2016 West African Ebola Epidemic,” documents in the international response to Ebola. In a connected way, Ferme and Hoffman, “Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in Sierra Leone and Beyond,” observed how that human rights discourses after the civil war became locally meaningful in Sierra Leone in ways antithetical to the international organizations that promote the discourse, while Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade, observed the resurgence of local ritual knowledge over Western education in the context of economic failings.

18. Enria, “The Ebola Crisis in Sierra Leone,” identified internal contradictions between humanitarianism’s dual agendas of securitization and community engagement during the Ebola emergency. On inequalities between local and international actors during the crisis, see Abdullah and Rashid, Understanding West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic; Abramowitz, “Epidemics (Especially Ebola)”; Fairhead, “Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea”; and Richards, “A Matter of Grave Concern?”

1. Erikson, “Cell Phones ≠ Self and Other Problems with Big Data Detection and Containment during Epidemics,” identifies significant limitations in big data approaches to disease management in Sierra Leone.

2. See the overview of anthropological engagement on Ebola by Abramowitz, “Epidemics (Especially Ebola),” as well as the account and critique of the discipline’s search for relevance by Benton, “Ebola at a Distance.”

3. On militant anthropology, see, for example, Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical.” On anarchist anthropology, see Graeber, Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology. On decolonial ethnography, see Bejarano et al., Decolonizing Ethnography.

4. On sexual violence and ethnographic research, see Schneider, “Sexual Violence during Research,” based on her own fieldwork in Freetown. On a decolonial queer of color reflection on fieldwork, see Adjepong, “Invading Ethnography.” On blackness and fieldwork in New York City, see Jackson, Real Black.

5. Ferguson, “Anthropology and Its Evil Twin?”

6. Jobson, “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.”

7. Kovats-Bernat, “Negotiating Dangerous Fields.”

8. Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, 166.

9. On improvisation in jazz music as a metaphor for doing ethnography, see Humphreys, Brown, and Hatch, “Is Ethnography Jazz?”

10. Evens and Handelman, The Manchester School.

11. Kapferer, “Situations, Crisis, and Anthropology of the Concrete,” 122.

12. On challenges of doing research during the Ebola epidemic, see Bolten and Shepler, “Producing Ebola” and Martineau, Wilkinson, and Parker, “Epistemologies of Ebola.” On the possibilities of doing research during emergencies, see Hoffman and Lubkemann, “Introduction: West-African Warscapes.”

13. Pigg, “On Sitting and Doing.”

14. Bear et al., A Right to Care.

15. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship.

16. Kuper, “We Need to Talk about Kinship.”

17. Kleinman, Rethinking Psychiatry: from Cultural Category to Personal Experience.

1. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences.