Ebola Through a Glass, Darkly: Ways of Knowing the State and Each Other

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)During the height of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Sierra Leone in 2014, the international community worked to vernacularize biomedical models of the disease. They did so hoping that translating biomedical models of disease into local concepts would help stop transmission (Spencer 2015:2). Health communicators encouraged people to shed the intimate behaviors of care-welcoming strangers into the home, careful personal tending to the ill, washing corpses for burial-that facilitated Ebola's spread, in addition to educating them in basic virology to reinforce behavioral changes. In spite of these mass sensitization campaigns (see Bolten 2012), the disease continued to spread. Medical education seemed helpless against pavement radio (Ellis 1989)1: people in the Bombali District of Sierra Leone, where this study took place, explained the catastrophic death toll in one village the crash of a witch plane (Spencer 2015:2-3),2 with rumors circulating in urban areas that the disease's spread was a political ploy by the opposition party to poison wells in order to undermine the President.3 Families continued to nurse their sick at home, bury their dead, and mourn with loving, personal attention. In spite of this apparently willful ignorance of public health measures, Ebola did not spread exponentially around the country, and the 500,000 deaths that had been predicted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) did not, in fact, occur (CDC 2014). Transmission patterns were uneven, with some areas experiencing dozens of cases while others remained relatively unscathed, even if they were geographically and socially close. What accounted for this?In this article, we analyze a case study of two neighboring villages in northern Sierra Leone, which we will call Mabele and Katibana, with Mabele experiencing over 25 percent of its population falling ill, and Katibana not recording a single case. The villages are located less than 100 meters from each other on a well-traveled road, and had long enjoyed a close and cordial relationship involving mutual work and ritual activity, a situation potentially enabling the presence of Ebola in one to affect the other dramatically. That potential, however, never materialized into cases in Katibana. We argue that their divergent experiences of the epidemic occurred because the village chiefs interpreted their powers vis-a-vis outside and its purveyors in radically different ways, with one shunning the involvement of the government and the other seeing it as an opportunity to consolidate his power. Rosalind Shaw (2002:91) uses the phrase through a glass, darkly to refer to local understanding of in northern Sierra Leone as value-laden and political: information is never assessed as though it was value-free. Rather, it becomes knowledge by being interpreted one's social and political relationship to the bearer of that information, and an appraisal of what the bearer gains by disseminating it. Ebola communications from the government and NGOs were viewed this dark glass: many citizens were suspicious of the motives of health communicators and the so-called neutral information's potential to alter existing power relations. They could not see the messages as a straightforward articulation of the risks of a devastating viral hemorrhagic fever.The two chiefs handled EVD information as they would any government announcement, considering first why the government would bring Ebola to their villages, and how their own social and political positions would be influenced or changed by either embracing or rejecting these education and praxis campaigns. It was the social effects of Ebola about which people were concerned, not the itself (see Murphy 1981). Both chiefs initially acted strategically-rather than becoming compliant or resistant (as health educators would label villages)-in their handling of EVD sensitization. …