Cornell University Press
In the Time of Ebola
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
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.
Reviews
According to conventional wisdom in anthropology, the 2014–16 West African Ebola pandemic was one of the greatest crises of recent times, and we should look to medical anthropology to study it. These assumptions, however, are beautifully upended in Lipton's rich and carefully theorized ethnographic study of life in Sierra Leone's capital before, during, and after Ebola.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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List of Central Characters
xi -
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Introduction
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1. Marginalized Cosmopolitans
20 -
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2. Hazard Pay
39 -
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3. Home Truths
55 -
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4. Extraordinary ordinary
74 -
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5. Black and White Death
90 -
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6. Anthropology in Crisis
105 -
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Conclusion
121 -
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Notes
129 -
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Bibliography
137 -
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Index
147
