6 ANTHROPOLOGY IN CRISIS
One morning I found an email from the UK Ministry of Defense in my inbox. A staff sergeant was asking my advice on cultural considerations around sickness and death in Sierra Leone for an initiative to establish temporary hospital facilities for Ebola patients. The email stood out to me like a sore thumb. At the time, in 2014, I was a PhD student in my midtwenties, and most of the emails I received were exchanges with my friends, family, and supervisors. I was uncertain of the implications of the email and unsure how best to respond, if at all. Was it good that the advice of an anthropologist (in training) was being sought directly by intervening forces? Did the emergency justify an email out of the blue rather than a more formal or methodical process? How much of the necessary nuance around social and cultural life in Sierra Leone could I convey in this format? Was this an opportunity to meaningfully influence global health policy for the better, or did it amount to neocolonial collusion?
In this chapter, I describe how I navigated an unexpected emergency in the course of a long-term ethnographic research project and outline some of the key lessons I learned along the way. I highlight what I consider to be three core tenets of the anthropological method, which were key in producing this book: flexibility, personal relationships, and theory from the home. During emergencies it is common for anthropological research methods to be compromised in favor of rapid policy-oriented research. While this demand is understandable, and indeed I consider flexibility to be a central asset of the anthropological method, this chapter makes the case for not abandoning what anthropologists—and social scientists employing socially embedded methods—can uniquely bring to the table.1 My aim in this chapter is to usefully make this case to readers who are not anthropologists while also providing some practical insights from my personal experiences for anthropologists and students faced with questions and conditions similar to those that I faced during Ebola.
A considerable number of anthropologists were consulted officially during the Ebola epidemic by international actors. Several leading organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hired field anthropologists to assist with their work on the ground. Other primarily academic anthropologists with regional and thematic expertise banded together to form the Ebola Anthropology Response Platform and the Ebola Anthropology Initiative. These networks provided agencies and authorities with relevant anthropological insights and information about the social and cultural context in the affected countries, largely through collaboratively produced briefings on a number of different themes. I contributed to briefings on burial practices, livelihood strategies, the mobilization of youths into the response, and the underreporting of cases. Most of these topics were or ended up becoming major research interests of mine.
In my contributions to the briefings, I aimed to forward the concerns and priorities of my friends and neighbors in Freetown and also offered insights that I had learned firsthand. I hoped that this might mitigate some of the more heavy-handed aspects of the international intervention, identifying ways that could help it better meet ordinary people’s needs and expectations. However, I felt uneasy about the requirements for the briefings to be only a few pages long. I understood that the short format made material more digestible than longer-form work and therefore perhaps more likely to be taken up by decision makers. But reducing complex social and cultural material to a series of bullet points was a big ask. There seemed to be an unspoken assumption that culture and social beliefs and practices (which we as anthropologists were in effect deemed experts in) were possessed only by ordinary Africans and not by intervening agencies, which were implicitly neutral and objective. If beliefs and practices could be documented in briefings, then it seemed to be assumed that these were static, unchanging things that could be basically known. This felt to be at odds with the remarkable capacities for adaption and change that I had been observing in my neighborhood, detailed in this book. Were the beliefs and practices of Freetown residents supposed to be those found during normal times (whatever that means), or were they those at play during an epidemic emergency? If the latter, could these really be separated from the impact of the international intervention and the conditions of the state of emergency?
Such concerns have long accompanied anthropological engagement. Unsurprisingly, opinions and approaches on the matter differ. Some anthropologists see public engagement as an ethical duty and lament that anthropology has lost its public relevance when compared to, say, economics. The discipline’s involvement during Ebola was welcomed as a sign of relevance.2 However, academic anthropology has historically looked down on engaged or applied anthropology as compromising the discipline’s core scientific tenets by, for example, employing rapid and purpose-driven data collection rather than open-ended fieldwork. Other criticisms of engaged anthropology come from a political standpoint. Should anthropologists work uncritically within dominant power structures, just as colonial anthropologists did in the past centuries? Militant, anarchist, and decolonial anthropologies have been proposed as alternatives.3
My experiences of policy-oriented engagement during the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic taught me that in an emergency when there is a felt sense of urgency, opportunity, and desire to help, core disciplinary values are too easily compromised. In the sections that follow, I outline my personal reflections on three deep-rooted tenets of the anthropological method that have closely informed the research and thinking behind this book. I believe that these elements are particularly important when doing research on or in a crisis, and I emphasize their continued importance as the discipline moves forward.
Participant Observation (It’s Personal)
The first time I did anthropological fieldwork was for my undergraduate dissertation on hip-hop and kinship in New York City. I spent one month over the summer in the city, where I stayed with my grandmother. I attended concerts and block parties; interviewed rappers, artists, and educators; and spent time with my family. Earlier in the year, my department organized an information session on dissertations for students that was led by a senior professor at the time. I told him that I was planning to do fieldwork and wondered if he had any advice. He told me that conducting fieldwork takes years and that the relationships developed through it must be maintained for life. This was a rather dispiriting answer for an undergraduate with only a summer vacation available, but I was encouraged by others to go ahead with my plans.
Was it real fieldwork? Yes and no. Perhaps it would have qualified if the topic had been the dining practices of elderly Jews living on the Upper East Side. But I was not, sadly, interviewing my grandmother, who has since passed away. I learned a lot about hip-hop over my stay, but it was brief, and relationships did not last. Now that I have undertaken real fieldwork according to the senior professor’s standards, I am more sympathetic to his response to my question, however discouraging it felt at the time. Anthropological, or ethnographic, fieldwork is all about personal relationships, which take time to build and nurture.
The fieldwork for this book took place over a total of two years during which I resided in an urban neighborhood in Freetown. My first visit was in 2011, and my most recent visit (at the time of writing) was in 2019. The bulk of my fieldwork was over two long stretches: almost a year between 2013 and 2014 and half a year in 2015. I was hosted by two families in the neighborhood throughout these periods. My approach was traditionally ethnographic, with at its core participant observation, the methodology developed by Bronislaw Malinowski (who founded the department at the London School of Economics where I did my PhD studies). Because I was in a city, my fieldwork was not quite the classic bounded field site of traditional ethnography, but the neighborhood gave the research a defined locus and a semidefined boundary. What became a focus of the research—family and neighborhood life among young people—was thoroughly entangled with my own experience of becoming a friend, a neighbor, and an adopted family member there.
Turning points are a common motif in fieldwork narratives. Ethnographies and reflexive accounts of the process of fieldwork itself frequently emphasize its messy and contingent character. The story goes that the anthropologist spends a long time figuring out what is going on, learning a new language and sets of social and cultural norms, amid a lot of misunderstandings and errors. And then one day something clicks. Patterns and routines start emerging, connections are made, and things begin making sense. This rarely lasts long until disruptions and the unexpected take over once again. In practice, turning points can be monthly or even weekly or daily occurrences. Sometimes there are several turning points in a single conversation. The movement between islands of clarity and oceans of unknown is an essential and fascinating part of the dynamic process of fieldwork.
But some turning points turn out to be major turning points, which, on reflection, do really represent lasting shifts in direction and gear. The first of these for me happened two or three months after I arrived in 2013 for a planned year and a half of fieldwork for my PhD research. My project at the time was a study of taxi driving and informal economies in Freetown. These themes never fully disappeared from my research (see chapter 2), but the orientation and approach radically changed. In the early months, I saw fieldwork as something I had to go out and do. Fieldwork, it felt, began once I had left the home (Foday’s room and parlor) and was hanging out with drivers in the streets. This notion of fieldwork was comforting on some level because it seemed clearly defined and productive, almost like a job.
Foday and his brother Alhassan were themselves both taxi drivers. My own brother, Jacob, who lived in Freetown between 2009 and 2011, was close with Foday and Alhassan’s father, James, also a driver at the time, who had introduced Jacob to his children. When I arrived in Freetown, Alhassan offered to teach me to drive. Learning to drive for the first time in an old Nissan Sunny taxi on the city’s jam-packed streets was quite an initiation. After I got my license, a master class in navigating the bureaucracy of the Road Transport Authority, Alhassan would sometimes ask me to pick up private customers for him when he was busy with something else. He taught me a lot about driving, cars, traffic police, and the ins and outs of the taxi business. But the journey was more important than the destination. Along the way, I got to know Alhassan’s friends, sexual partners, and family members. A number of these people lived close to where I was staying, and so gradually these relationships turned into a network, or community, of people that I was becoming part of.
At the same time, I was building relationships in and around Foday’s home. Increasingly, my daily activities mapped onto established patterns of sociality. Rather than going out to do research, the process became more organic. I would share meals and watch TV with friends, stop by neighbors’ houses to catch up, or receive visitors at home. Those I knew well would invite me to their family events, such as weddings, burials, and baby naming ceremonies. Sometimes I would tag along on outings around town or, on several occasions, to far-flung parts of the country on trips that would last for days or weeks.
I recorded what I observed, was told, and thought and felt into field notes, a document on my laptop with subheadings for each date. Sometimes the events of the day, such as an important family meeting, seemed like the most pressing material. But the subplots and exchanges that happened around these events were often more revealing. I aimed to write directly onto my computer, battery life permitting, when I got home. Or I would find time the following day in the early morning or during the lull in the afternoon when people take naps before children come home from school and the evening’s activities commence. I would find a corner of the room where I could be alone with my recollections and notes. Or I would walk to the junction and take a shared taxi to a Lebanese café not far along the main road, where I could plug in my computer and write. Writing field notes was a regular reminder that I was an anthropologist who had come to Sierra Leone to undertake research, a fact that I found fairly easy to forget as I immersed myself in the full-time job of being a resident in a close-knit neighborhood of Freetown.
My first major turning point taught me that fieldwork is personal. It is about being in relationship with others and, as cheesy as it might sound, being in relationship with yourself. Developing and maintaining a multiplicity of interconnected relationships is key. Being exposed to many viewpoints on events as they unfold in real time reveals a layered and dynamic vision of social life and culture, compared to what can be learned through individual testimony after the fact. Relationships are never static, and viewpoints are always liable to shift. Being personally implicated in these relationships as a researcher is an important part of the equation. Going through the emotional journey with others allows you to more fully and deeply understand what is going on. But being personally implicated also means cultivating an internal touchstone necessary for building ethical and meaningful relationships. For fieldwork to be personal ultimately means going beyond any conceptual notion of personhood (even those that you encounter in fieldwork) into the realm of embodied experience, that which is felt but cannot easily be defined. Being in this kind of emotionally vulnerable relationship with others is never easy and can be especially challenging in a new place.
I regularly felt a sense of losing myself during fieldwork, which is perhaps an inevitable part of becoming socialized somewhere new. I experienced this particularly strongly when I felt that I was lacking personal space. For the nine months that Foday was hosting me we slept in the same bed, which was a common practice for friends and housemates in Freetown. And sometimes three of us shared the bed if there were guests staying over. It would get hot and uncomfortable at night, and the electricity would regularly cut off, meaning that the fan would stop working. Being dependent on my hosts and at the mercy of the unreliable National Power Authority felt to me like significant losses of the personal agency that I was accustomed to. And yet, I would feel guilty for feeling hard done by; after all, this is what I had chosen, while those around me had not chosen such material discomforts. When I moved to the Bangura family compound I had a bed to myself, but my feelings of restricted agency would persist. There was almost always loud noise, day and night. The dawn chorus began with roosters crowing and then, as the residents awoke, continued with washing, banging mortars, preparing food, greetings, and the sharing of jokes or news. In the evenings there was the hum of action films that one neighbor enjoyed watching on a television hooked up to a large stereo, a palava (dramatic dispute) between neighbors or family members playing out in the alleyway, or the singing of prayers and gospel songs through the night. I could expect my friends and neighbors to pay me a visit at any time. I felt a strong, palpable, sense of being socially and emotionally entangled with those around me. During one period of particularly heavy conflict in the compound, which included allegations of witchcraft, I remember being able to breathe the tension in the air.
The flip side of the discomfort that I felt around limited personal space and agency was the genuine nourishment and joy of interconnection with others. This was a striking contrast to my daily existence in London. There, I did not know my neighbors well and, arguably as a symptom of a society enmeshed in late capitalism, experienced a more lonely, individuated sense of self on a day-to-day basis. In Freetown, I felt a more contingent sense of self in which during the course of the daily routine more seemed to be at stake.
Honoring the reciprocities of social life kept me busy. Anthropologists inevitably receive a great deal in fieldwork: routine acts of hospitality and the sharing of things, time, and the intimate details of life. Sometimes building reciprocal relationships means sharing in kind, where possible, and in other cases it means contributing what is asked from you that you can uniquely provide. Sometimes, for example, I helped out with work around the house or assisted my hosts and their children with schoolwork and job applications. I was often asked to contribute to routine expenses, such as school fees, food costs, and medical expenses, as well as assist with the costs of family events such as birthday parties and funerals.
Responding to others’ expectations, demands, and requests respectfully and appropriately was not always straightforward. Sometimes the expectations were unmeetable. In other cases even if I could have met them, I felt that the integrity of the research would be jeopardized if I did. There is a fine line between receiving information from others freely, on the basis of reciprocal and appropriate relationships, versus coercively, on the basis of unresolvable indebtedness. There is no easy solution to this problem. Extracting data in the absence of personal relationship, even if verbal and written consent has been received, is not only, almost by definition, unethical but is also likely to be unreliable. And yet, relationships burdened with indebtedness and obligation can also present serious issues around ethics and reliability.
Figuring out what was reasonable in terms of reciprocating was a complex calculation because it was not always clear which standards to go by. They could not simply be my own standards as an outsider. This would amount to foreign imposition, which anthropologists are carefully trained to avoid. Yet, it also felt inappropriate to adopt the standards expected of an ordinary Sierra Leonean resident of or visitor to the neighborhood, which I clearly was not. I felt that I needed standards that were somewhere in between. Part of the solution for me was shifting somewhat from a transactional vision of ethical relationships to an ethics based on being a part of a wider moral economy. In other words, I tried to be a good person in the community rather than obsessing over what I did or did not owe individuals. In practice, I nonetheless fluctuated between conflicting positionalities. Sometimes I inhabited the role of “Molay Conteh,” the country name given to me, endearingly and lightheartedly, by friends and families. Or I lived up to the terms “uncle,” “brother,” and “son.” But in the end I was Jonah Lipton, the visiting White anthropologist.
Underpinning these issues is a deeper problem of privilege and power. Regardless of how real my life in the neighborhood was, I was there by choice with a professional motive that went beyond just living there. Being White, educated, male, and materially secure were all factors that allowed me to enter into this unfamiliar space voluntarily. For LGBTI people, women, and nonbinary researchers, the risks attached to becoming immersed in a field site can be significantly greater, while building trusting relationships can be harder, whereas for non-White researchers and those doing research in or proximate to their own communities, there are inevitably different sets of demands and challenges.4 As a White researcher coming from Britain, Sierra Leone’s former colonizer, I was by default favorably placed in a racialized hierarchy that lives on from colonial times. However much anthropologists are immersed in their research sites, power differentials in the act of research itself, almost certainly compounded by other inequalities, remain.
These issues of privilege and power in ethnographic research harken back to the discipline’s colonial roots. Since its inception, anthropology has specialized in the study of non-Western cultures and societies as opposed to sociology, whose remit is developed Western society. Anthropologists inevitably worked, to varying degrees, within colonial administrative structures, which gave them access to field sites and in many cases funding and employment. It is important to acknowledge that a number of anthropologists questioned and resisted coloniality through either political activities or recording empirical material and developing analytical frameworks that unsettled Eurocentric understandings of the world. But the very fact that most anthropologists from universities in the Global North continue to do fieldwork in the Global South and with marginal groups is clearly a colonial legacy in itself.5 Understandably, some argue that the discipline can no longer be justified in its current form.6
It is likely that much reimagining of anthropology will take place in the coming years and decades. For the discipline to deeply address its colonial legacies, structural, material, and institutional transformations are required not only within academic institutions but also in the world at large. I see this work as largely political and collective in nature. However, I also see the personal aspect as central to this process. As I have outlined, the personal sits at the core of the practice of ethnographic fieldwork. But it is also the primary terrain where lived, embodied, transformation takes place. My emphasis on the personal is certainly not to undermine or obscure the political. Rather I see the personal in the practice of anthropology as being both closely informed by and informing broader collective politics. Such an orientation entails that we expand our understandings of what the personal and politics can look like. In good anthropological fashion, we bring a range of concepts and lived realities into critical dialogue with dominant Western understandings of these terms. However, being personal, this must not start and end as an intellectual exercise but must also be lived and practiced.
Flexibility (On Being at the Wrong Place at the Right Time)
If the first major turning point in my fieldwork was, at least in part, an internal reorientation to the fieldwork process, then the second major turning point was external: the unforeseen onset of a global health emergency. It did not happen all at once, of course. First there were rumors and reports of Ebola. Then there was the spread of the virus from Guinea to rural Sierra Leone and then from country to towns. Finally, there was the declaration of a state of emergency and large-scale humanitarian and public health intervention.
The unfolding emergency undoubtedly intensified some of the challenges of fieldwork. During the earlier stages of the epidemic, I experienced a profound disconnect between my day-to-day life and the emergency at large. For a long time I did not know anyone who had caught Ebola, which was significant from a safety point of view, as the virus was transmitted through close bodily contact. As should be clear at this point, life in the neighborhood went on amid a host of state of emergency regulations. But Ebola loomed large. All major international news platforms were reporting on it. Commercial airlines began suspending their services to the region. My girlfriend at the time had come to stay with me for a month during the summer and had difficulties getting back to London when her flight was canceled. Because the future looked uncertain and potentially dangerous, I had a decision to make as to whether to continue or interrupt my fieldwork.
In the end with some guidance from my supervisors and my department, I left Freetown until it seemed safe to return. It was not an easy decision to make. My immediate instinct based on my day-to-day life was telling me to stay, but the wider narratives at the time were telling me to leave. Some traumatic emotional material from my own family history surfaced around that time. My father’s parents were both the only members of their respective families to survive the Holocaust. They left Germany as teenagers in the late 1930s, but their parents did not. Their parents were unable to get visas and hoped that the situation would not get so bad before it improved. It did not, of course, and they were unable to leave the country. I think that the hardest part of my decision to leave Freetown, however, was coming to face with an uncomfortable truth that however connected I felt to those around me, I was ultimately free to come and go pretty much as I pleased. Eventually, in any case, I would leave. My friends and host families in the Congo Town neighborhood encouraged me to go, given that it was possible. Ebola, as with many other epidemics before and since, served to highlight that while everyone is at risk in theory, in practice some are more at risk than others.
Back in London I stayed with friends in Streatham, who generously offered to host me for an indefinite period, which turned out to be five months. During this period, I became involved in the work of the Ebola Anthropology Response Platform and the Ebola Anthropology Initiative, and my PhD studies were put on hold. I was eager to get back to Freetown. I kept in close touch with my friends and contacts in the neighborhood through regular calls and exchanges of messages as well as participation in shared WhatsApp groups. And I stayed on top of the official data on Ebola cases and their whereabouts. With assistance from the Health and Safety Department at the London School of Economics, which helped me assess the risks of returning to Freetown and to devise safety and contingency plans, I returned for a further six months of fieldwork. The state of emergency was still in full effect (and would be for a year and a half longer), but it was clear that being in Freetown at this point was manageable and safe.
My second major turning point taught me the importance of flexibility in fieldwork. Flexibility is necessary in anthropological research because life, whether we like it or not, is inherently unstable and changing. Social relationships move between stability and strain. In dangerous field sites, flexibility is an essential factor in making research as safe as possible for anthropologists and interlocutors alike, which sometimes means going against narrowly formulated professional codes of ethics.7 But flexibility also means recognizing how so-called obstacles to research can present unanticipated openings for digging deeper. Paul Rabinow in his book Reflection on Fieldwork in Morocco puts it like this:
Interruptions and eruptions mock the field-worker and his inquiry; more accurately, they may be said to inform his inquiry, to be an essential part of it. The constant breakdown, it seems to me, is not just an annoying accident but a core aspect of this type of inquiry. Later I became increasingly aware that these ruptures of communication were highly revealing, and often provide to be turning points.8
Fieldwork must find the right balance between predetermined structure and openness to change and adjustment. We prepare by arriving with particular questions and with methodologies to answer these questions, along with a review of ethical considerations. But in the moment of doing the research itself, we must be fully responsive to what is happening there and then. Circumstances inevitably change during the course of the fieldwork, which is initially a forward-looking research agenda in which predictability is impossible. Compounded with this, research agendas are typically concocted away from the field site itself, and on arriving in the field site we might well discover that many of the assumptions we held in advance do not hold water. Or perhaps we find other questions or areas that seem more pressing or significant.
For fieldworkers, patience, care, and open-mindedness become practical approaches that are needed to create the flexibility required to be in the right place at the right time or, better perhaps, the wrong place at the right time. Events take shape in ways that are hard to predict, especially for an outsider not well attuned to the rhythms and patterns of social life. I discovered this when I showed up at weddings at the time stated on the invitation and found that the proceedings started four or five hours later. Sometimes mistakes can lead to unexpected insights, such as observing informal behind-the-scenes activities and conversations that reveal as much as the formal proceedings.9 For me, the Ebola emergency was a macroversion of this same phenomenon, although I certainly did not always realize this at the time.
On my return to Freetown, it was clear that my research was going to have to speak to the emergency that had enveloped the field site. At the same time, I also had to prioritize staying safe. During this period, I refrained from all body contact and in particular avoided close proximity to those who were unwell. I carried around hand sanitizer, which I applied constantly. I washed my home regularly with chlorinated water and was careful about what foods I ate. I was not ready to totally abandon the questions I had been pursuing the previous year nor, more importantly, the relationships that I developed. The solution for me was to reconceptualize my fieldwork as two research projects.
The first and primary project continued from where I had left off. The focal point remained the households and networks of friends and families in which I circulated in the neighborhood. Keeping up with these relationships and routines allowed for an authentic perspective on the impact of a global health emergency on an ordinary urban community without too much probing. As it turned out, sometimes the ways that “Ebola”—the broader crisis that surrounded the epidemic—was absent from life revealed as much as where it was overt and unavoidable. At the same time, the emergency entailed unusual clarity and reflexivity about many aspects of ordinary life that were opaque or taken for granted beforehand. It was almost as if everyone had become an anthropologist during the epidemic, expounding their own analyses and theories of culture and society.
The second research project, which really started as a smaller side project, involved a more probing and active approach. I wanted to identify a direct and unambiguous viewpoint on the emergency but one that connected to the social world that I already knew in Freetown. This project became my fieldwork with the official Ebola burial teams. One of my primary interlocutors and friends—Peter, the motorbike taxi rider—was enrolled in the official Ebola response as a bike rider attached to a burial team, as described in chapter 2. He invited me to meet the team. After gaining permission from the team leader, I met up with the team once a day every week or two and spent the day with them. The burial teams were well trained and equipped, and as such I was not at great risk of contagion. I took additional precautions, such as keeping my distance when they were physically handling a body and from the families they interacted with.
Burials were a definitive interface between families and state of emergency authorities and protocols, revealing critical dynamics in the ways that ordinary people made sense of and responded to the emergency. Although it was a new focus, this attention to burials nevertheless dovetailed closely with my established focuses and primary research project. The members of the burial teams, mostly young men who were trained to perform family funerary rituals, represented a continuity of my interest in the intersections of informal economies, youth, and family. At the same time, following several deaths in my community including in the compound I was living in (see chapter 5) and observing attitudes and approaches to burial from that vantage point, the material I was getting from my time with the team became part of a more complete picture.
The interplay of events and crises, whether micro or macro, sudden or drawn out, gets to the heart of the methodology of this book. Microevents form much of the ethnographic material: burials, a pregnancy and a baby naming ceremony, disputes at home and at work, meetings, accidents, and lockdowns. Looming above these was the macroevent of a global health emergency. The microevents presented in this book are not only useful narrative devices through which to illustrate to the reader what social life in Freetown looks like but are also in themselves focal points for protagonists and participants around which social life is scrutinized and analyzed. It was around these events that the wider event of Ebola often became most tangible and real. Combining my two projects revealed two forms of crisis that came together during Ebola: a temporary health emergency and an ongoing crisis of social reproduction connected to a long-unfolding political and economic crisis.
My approach to fieldwork and analysis in this book follows on from some of the innovations of Max Gluckman and his colleagues in the early and mid-twentieth century, who became known as the Manchester School. Contrary to structural-functionalists orthodoxy at the time, the Manchester School set out not to discover singular, static social orders in their respective societies of research but instead to document and understand change. Working through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, many examined industrialization, urbanization, and colonialism in southern Africa, often through a politically critical lens. At the cornerstone of their methodology was the “extended-case study method,” also known as “situational analysis.” Through rich ethnographic recording of the event, insight into transformative social processes was gained.10
The extended-case method did not see crisis, or emergency, as an obstacle to the investigation of ordinary social life but instead saw windows into it. During the event or situation, a bigger picture of the macroforces governing society is revealed to both participants and anthropologists alike. Bruce Kapferer summarizes it like this: “a major point that Gluckman stresses is that it is in crisis—in the situation as crisis and specifically in events that constitute concentrated and intense dimensions of the overall crisis of the situation—that the vital forces and principles already engaged in social action (or taking form in the event itself) are both revealed and rendered available to anthropological analysis.”11 While eventful times such as emergencies can present particular challenges to knowledge production—with potential difficulties in access, greater risks, breakdowns in trust, and information vacuums—they also present unique potential for understanding social agency and change when transformation is inevitable.12 During global health crises, when the pressures for anthropologists to respond directly to narrow health problems are amplified, maintaining ethnographic reflexivity and openness are particularly valuable.13
Theory from the Home
The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in large swaths of the global population experiencing the daily realities of life in a health emergency firsthand. Many of us sustained months of lockdown, with restrictions on work, travel, and social life. Our experiences were, of course, far from uniform. As epidemics tend to reveal rather starkly, some people are more vulnerable than others. In many instances preexisting inequalities—such as the quality of health care, housing, type of work, and hierarchies of class, gender, age, and race—are reproduced in the form of differential risk.14 Some people are more able to retreat into safety than others. However, it is safe to say that for many people of many different backgrounds and locations, the COVID-19 pandemic entailed significant amounts of time spent at home and greater interdependence among family and other domestic relations.
At the same time, many of us were glued to the news cycle and social media feeds, where we followed the dramas of governments and public institutions as they went about enacting often unpopular public health measures. Catching up with friends and family at the time, I noticed a disconnect between what we talked about and the reality of our day-to-day lives. What dominated conversations was the public face of the crisis: the political dramas, the rate of new cases and deaths, comparing responses in different places, and speculating about when things might ease up or go back to normal. Sometimes we talked about personal stories, such as people we knew or friends of friends who caught the virus. We criticized others for not taking precautions seriously enough. But we did not, at least in my fairly diverse circle, seem to have the language or the tendency to talk about the pandemic emergency as a domestic experience even though this was the arena that most directly defined our social experiences of it.
It is not coincidental that during health emergencies such as COVID-19 and Ebola, which are conceptualized as “public,” the dominant discourse tends to marginalize ordinary, domestic, personal, and private concerns. Maintaining the integrity of the government, the economy, and the state—and in more masked ways the interests of social networks we might refer to as the ruling class—is often prioritized over the maintenance and long-term priorities of ordinary families and other domestic and intimate relationships. The prioritization of “public” during epidemics and other emergencies is particularly pronounced but is in keeping with long-standing trends in Western political thought. When talking about “politics” today, most people expect a conversation about governments, parliaments, and politicians. These are traditionally male domains, associated with the governance of the nation-state. This is why the second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political” is radical and enduring (albeit easily co-opted for individualistic and consumerist purposes). The widespread coding of the home and the domestic as female spaces undoubtedly contributes to their being deemed secondary.
I am not saying that demands on the state and other public bodies should not be made in times of emergency. During epidemics, political organizing and collective pressure can be critical to ensuring fairer and more effective responses. And whether we like it or not, most of us do live, at least in part, within the governance structures of a nation-state. But the point here is that this is only one side of the story. The other side begins at home but expands beyond to a broader vision of society at large. From this perspective, the home is not taken for granted, parochial, or fixed in its ways but instead is dynamic, changing, and far-reaching. Epidemics such as Ebola and COVID-19 should make this clear to us all even if we lack the language to talk about it.
Anthropology has much to offer to this side of the story, because it has long been its specialty. Over more than a century of ethnographic research, the home and the family have been at the epicenter of the discipline. With the early (and arguably enduring) pigeonholing of anthropology as the study of non-Western small-scale societies, its archetypal subjects are nomadic hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and remote farming and fishing communities. In such face-to-face communities in the absence of (or, more realistically, on the fringes of) the state and the industrial economy, family and home are at the heart of social, political, and economic life. Given this, it is almost an anthropological truism to state that the social, political, and economic cannot be understood as distinct categories, as they are purported to be in modern Western frameworks. Kinship theory, which emphasized the interconnection of these domains, was for many decades the principal preoccupation of the discipline, particularly in the British and French anthropological traditions.
The practice of ethnographic fieldwork also favors situating the home as a starting place for theory. During fieldwork, many anthropologists, including myself, are hosted by people who in turn become their primary interlocutors and research subjects. When anthropologists are not hosted by interlocutors, the processes of making and visiting homes still tend to be instructive parts of being socialized into a new place. The quotidian and personal aspects of the ethnographic method make it particularly suited to the study of ordinary life. As anthropology turned its attention to urban and Western settings—alongside engagement with theoretical frameworks from sociology, geography, political theory, and cultural studies—the discipline’s orientation toward day-to-day sociality has remained intact. The study of kinship has become less prevalent in recent decades partly in the aftermath of David Schneider’s influential critique that the concept is itself Eurocentric.15 However, in widely disparate contemporary global settings, family continues to be hugely significant in structuring social life. As Adam Kuper recently put it, “The situation of kinship studies is paradoxical. Wherever we ethnographers go, we find that most people live in family households, obsess over marriage choices, celebrate kinship rituals, and quarrel over inheritance. And yet remarkably few anthropologists are writing about this sort of thing.”16
Perhaps the global spread of family makes it particularly prone to accommodating our unexamined notions and assumptions. It is easy to impose one’s own understandings of family into a context in which family might superficially look somewhat similar but actually represents and amount to something quite different. And there is the tendency to taint the family of the Other with unexamined (or examined) prejudices, for example, labeling non-White families as broken. Both of these patterns are common during public health interventions. Even sympathetic programs, such as psychosocial support, can inadvertently impose Western psychological constructs onto contexts where they do not readily apply.17 During Ebola, international actors routinely blamed family practices of burial and care for the severity of the epidemic. Behind this was a blurred vision of local culture as static and backward rather than adaptable and contingent.
It is easy to hold prejudices about that which you know little. Unlike the public sphere, which is—almost by definition—widely visible, the spaces of family and home are not. Trust and time are required for outsiders to begin to understand them. Unlike public institutions, family is not open for business or in session at a particular time but instead operates around the clock, often in quite coded and opaque ways. As many anthropologists, myself included, find out during fieldwork, accessing domestic and family spaces pretty much requires that you become family first. This must be learned through observation, instruction, and practice. Fully and personally participating in life in and around the home is not just a means for recording rich ethnographic material, such as the unfolding of family dramas, intimate revelations, and unusual ritual practices. The vast majority of what we encounter and experience does not make it beyond field notes but does allow us to gain a felt firsthand appreciation of the rhythms and contours of ordinary life. And in the process, meaningful, complex, and (hopefully) caring relationships are formed. This becomes the starting point for a different vision of society and crisis to emerge.
In this chapter, I have focused on three interconnected areas of anthropological research that are at once deep-rooted in the discipline’s history and hold renewed value in the study of and engagement in crises today: the personal, flexibility, and theory from the home. Their value lies in part in the fact that other disciplines and actors often do not attend to or practice them and in many cases do not have the language or method to do so. Yet, these are areas that anthropologists are liable to discard or compromise in the event of a pressing emergency when, ironically, these are the times when they matter most. As I have emphasized here, these are not tenets to be blindly adhered to. Rather, they center around the lived, intimate, embodied, contingent, and shifting practice of fieldwork and call for open-ended and open-hearted attention to the practice itself.
As such, I cannot prescribe what embracing these elements of the anthropological method will look like for others. For myself, they entailed gaining firsthand experience of ways that global histories and political and economic forces structure the most intimate of relationships. It meant going through uncomfortable and unsettling experiences during fieldwork, including adapting to novel constraints on my agency, navigating new dangers, and confronting aspects of myself, particularly my privilege, that was more convenient to ignore. It meant being implicated in other people’s projects and struggles on their terms and learning, however imperfectly, how to build caring relationships across the fault lines of social conditioning and inequalities. Although I went on to tell the story of this book, I have come to recognize that this book is only one of many stories and incalculable outcomes from the process of research that it has come out of.