In the Time of Ebola

The anthropologist Jonah Lipton was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when the largest Ebola outbreak in history hit. In the Time of Ebola is his account of the epidemic, centering on the residents of a neighborhood swept up in the emergency.

Lipton follows the lives of young men and women over a period of seven years, revealing what the epidemic looked like on the ground. He explores its causes, impacts, and legacies in a place where crisis might be considered the norm, not the exception. The emergency was disruptive and challenging, not least due to the short-term international response. Yet for many youths Ebola was a time of unusual clarity on the ambiguities around care, work, and coming of age experienced in a context of vast economic and social inequalities. Lipton shows how residents of this historically cosmopolitan West African city drew on centuries-old frameworks for managing foreign intervention. In the Time of Ebola questions dominant framings of crisis and offers ways of theorizing, researching, and responding to emergencies that make the home, the family, and "ordinary life" their starting point.

Jonah Lipton is an anthropologist specializing in the study of youth, family life, emergencies, and global health. He has taught and researched at the London School of Economics in the Department of Anthropology and in the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. His writing has appeared in The Guardian.

Lipton offers an innovative path toward approaching how crises, and pandemics especially, enter the stage. This is because of his deep and sensitive commitment to understanding how young African men in Freetown, Sierra Leone, navigated the unmanageable.

Adia Benton, Northwestern University:

Jonah Lipton skillfully traces kin obligation and networks to show how 'normal life' is often adapted to the rules governing state and parastatal responses to a public health emergency. He also illustrates how emergencies produce their own opportunities and visions for the future.