‘Heritage’ and ‘cultural practice’ in a globalized disaster: a preliminary thematic analysis of documents produced during the Ebola epidemic of 2013–2015

ABSTRACT

The Ebola crisis of 2013–2015 highlighted the relationship between cultural heritage, neoliberal globalization and public health. It also raised the problem of cultural compatibility between organizations within the global ‘epidemic space’, which intruded on the pre-existing ‘heritage space’. In this paper, we discuss the differences and disjunctures between ‘heritage’ as it was explicitly and implicitly defined by two organizations positioned very differently in the global epidemic space – UNESCO, and the University of Makeni, Sierra Leone’s first private university. A thematic analysis of documents produced by these institutions reveals that they both placed the themes of human dignity and cultural heritage at the forefront of their responses. It also reveals that they dealt with those themes in sharply disjunctive ways, indicating the limits of cultural compatibility within the global ‘epidemic space’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ebola
• globalization
• UNESCO
• human dignity
• cultural heritage
• University of Makeni

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rosabelle Boswell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7099-7713

Notes

1. It is also a disease of poverty and environmental degradation, one which thrived in the neoliberal economic circumstances of the Upper Guinea Coast (Wallace & Wallace, 2016).

2. As the country’s first private tertiary education institution, UNIMAK represents a late entry into the wave of private universities that has swept across Africa since the 1990s, in association with economic liberalization, social change, and new forms of globalization (O’Kane, 2016, 2017).

3. The concept of incompatibility resonates very closely with those of incommensurability and inconceivability, as barriers to translation between cultures (Povinelli, 2001).

4. In Madagascar, for example, the culturally central ritual of famadihana, or the turning of the bones, has become an exemplary case of contestation between issues of cultural heritage and public health, in a context of persistent underdevelopment. In this ritual the bodies of the dead, as well as their burial shrouds, are ritually exhumed and repeatedly handled, thus restoring social bonds (Graeber, 1995). The role of this practice in the spread of bubonic plague in Madagascar led the country’s government to order, in the 1990s, a seven year hiatus in exhumations (Andrianaivoarimanana et al., 2013).

5. For data on the situation in the south of Sierra Leone, we refer readers to Richards et al. (2015).

6. This means the ‘adaptation of universal Christian truth to actual cultural conditions’ (Moody 2013, p. 404).

7. Interview with Fr. Leonard Bangura, Makeni, October 15, 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David O’Kane

Notes on contributors

David O’Kane, PhD, is a Teaching Fellow at Durham University, in the UK. He has done anthropological research on land reform and nationalism in Eritrea, and on education policy in Sierra Leone. A graduate of Queen’s University Belfast, he has taught in Ireland, the UK, Russia, Eritrea, New Zealand and Sierra Leone. From 2011 to 2016 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany, and he is currently a Research Partner of that institute. In 2016 he was a Guest Scholar at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. His publications include An Eritrean village reacts to land reform, and the edited volume (co-edited with Tricia Redeker Hepner) Biopolitics, militarism and the developmental state: Eritrea in the twenty-first century. He is also co-editor, with Lena Kroeker and Tabea Scharrer, of the newly published volume Middle classes in Africa.

Rosabelle Boswell

Rosabelle Boswell, PhD, is Executive Dean of Arts at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. She is an anthropologist, a National Research Foundation Rated Researcher, and author of Le Malaise Creole: Ethnic identity in Mauritius, Representing heritage in Zanzibar and Madagascar, Challenges to identifying and managing intangible cultural heritage in Mauritius, Zanzibar and Seychelles, and Postcolonial African anthropologies (co-edited with F. Nyamnjoh). In addition to her work on cultural identity, she has done ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, Mauritius, Zanzibar and Madagascar. Her work has been funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research, the South African National Research Foundation, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, and the Organisation for Social Science Research in East and Southern Africa. In 2010, she served as a research team leader for the Mauritius Truth and Justice Commission, examining the legacies of slavery.