Time and Place in the Anthropology of Events

A Diaspora Perspective on the Liberian Transition

Bibliographic Data

ID2430210
AuthorsMary H Moran (corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume78
Issue2
Pages457-464
Publication date2005-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-5491 • E-ISSN: 1534-1518
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/anq.2005.0027
OpenAlexW1967238283
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited6

The word implies a moment in time, a specific punctuation of the temporal flow. The of a day, month, or decade can be precisely located by chronology; thus can organize in terms of linear causality, a comforting and logically satisfying means of making sense of the world facilitated by the very structure of our language (see Lee 1977). But the notion of also carries a connotation of place; something happens at a particular point not only in but in space. An event must happen somewhere, and indeed this collection of essays was conceived as an anthropology of in a particular region-specifically, the Guinea Coast of West Africa. Yet, just as carefully interrogate the segmenting of into events, so too should our attention be addressed to the localization of in specific places. In a globalized, web-connected world of instant, simultaneous, time flows of information, can truly be thought of as limited to single places? If I watch the towers fall on my television in time (and then endlessly re-live the experience in replays), can I be said to have participated in the events of September 11, 2001? Such questions have been raised by analysts of the media and of virtual reality (for example, Baudrillard 1995), but usually as a critique of a false or mystified simulacrum of real experience in commodified form. Is it possible to understand the new technologies as allowing participation in displaced in a more positive light, as more than simply voyeurism? Anthropologists have attended to the question of place as it has been employed to construct the ethnographic subject: peoples and cultures with specific, fixed locations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997:2-29). Obviously, this consideration of place has crucial implications for how understand the impact of any particular event. In the words of Gupta and Ferguson, we must turn away from the commonsense idea that such things as locality and community are simply given and natural and turn toward a focus on social and processes of placemaking, conceived less as a matter of 'ideas' than of practices that shape identities and enable resistances (1997:6). In what follows below, I offer an analysis of which took place in Liberia, from the perspective of Liberian scholars and activists located in the United States. As much as their counterparts in West Africa, I argue that these people were deeply involved in political processes of placemaking and embodied practices that shape identities and enable resistances, despite being physically removed from the place where were unfolding. In the summer of 2003, the attention of the world was focused, briefly and unevenly, on West Africa, as Liberia entered what appeared to be yet another end stage of its interminable period of civil conflict. With the war in Iraq declared over only that May, Liberia looked like it might become the next site of American military intervention, this for humanitarian and peace-keeping purposes. In other words, Liberia had the potential to become the next big in the American news cycle, // US troops had been emplaced there. Especially in the weeks preceding President George W. Bush's tour of Africa in early June, the bloodshed and suffering of Liberian citizens seemed to cry out for some response from the United States, the country's traditional patron. Nightly news images of Liberians depositing the bodies of their dead relatives at the gates of the American embassy in Monrovia were a graphic reminder of both the violence unfolding on a daily basis and the unmet expectations of US aid. President Bush, however, declined to send troops until Liberians could prove, paradoxically, that they were ready for peace by laying down their arms and until the elected President, Charles Taylor, agreed to leave the country. Taylor, for his part, said he would not leave his supporters unprotected by decamping before foreign peacekeepers were on the ground

Art · Diaspora · Perspective (graphical) · Sociology · Transition (genetics) · Visual arts · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Gender Studies · Spatial and Cultural Studies

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