A01=Catherine Bolten
A01=Catherine E. Bolten
africa
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Catherine Bolten
Author_Catherine E. Bolten
Category=JHMC
Category=NHH
civilians
cultural memory
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographies
evangelists
fathers
government
human impact
life and death
makeni
militants
military history
modern history
nonfiction accounts
overcoming trauma
personal stories
political
politicians
power of love
rebel forces
rebels
sierra leone
sierra leoneans
social justice
social world
soldiers
students
survival
traders
traumatic experiences
true stories
violence
wartime experiences
Product details
- ISBN 9780520273795
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2012
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Utilizing narratives of seven different people - soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician - "I Did it To Save My Life" provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and orient themselves to a livable everyday. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship based on material exchange and nurturing, that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government's own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the rebel RUF during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government's disloyalty to its people, rather than rebel invasion and occupation, which destroyed the town and forced uneasy co-existence between civilians and militants.
Catherine Bolten is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
