In this episode, Michael Watts interviews Professor Mariane C. Ferme, a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence, and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. Ferme's latest book, "Out of War: Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone," draws on her three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war.
Ferme received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, after studying Political Science at the University of Milano, Italy, and majoring in anthropology at Wellesley College. Her research has long focused on Sierra Leone, and West Africa more generally. It encompasses gendered approaches to everyday practices and materiality in agrarian West African societies, and work on the political imagination in times of violence, particularly in relation to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone.
She has also done research on the ways in which international humanitarian legal institutions and jurisprudence shape that status in our collective imaginaries of figures of victimhood, criminality, and witnessing in times of war. The empirical focus of this work has been the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the developing jurisprudence in that setting about the forced conscription of child soldiers and the crime of “forced marriage.”
Her most recent fieldwork in Sierra Leone—carried out in 2015-16, with funding from the National Science Foundation—was an interdisciplinary research project on changing agrarian institutions and access to land in the country. The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea has made the contribution of anthropologists crucial to developing socio-culturally sensitive and acceptable strategies for public health interventions, and to understanding pathways of disease transmission. She has written on the ways in which understanding rural mobility, as well as healing and burial practices, in Sierra Leone and the neighboring countries sheds light on the patterns of EVD infection, and can help inform public health interventions to stem the spread of this disease.
