Maria Berghs’ War and Embodied Memory: Becoming Disabled in Sierra Leone is a case study of how disability was created as a result of the decade-long (1992–2002) bloody civil war in Sierra Leone. The casualties of the conflict included people who had limbs amputated or suffered other forms of wounding both during the war and in its immediate aftermath when violence had become an everyday feature. Berghs uses a social model framework to analyse the construction of disability in the complex political, social and personal inter-relation of forces that emerged in Sierra Leone post conflict. Her focus is on how civilians disabled by the war recovered from the violence and suffering, and she explores how/if they have reconstructed their lives and have integrated into society. In doing so she provides a chilling account of how disability was politically created in the neoliberal re-building of the nation-state. Despite the humanitarian best intentions of the agencies involved and despite the political activism, agency and passionate desire of the bodily impaired to bring about democratic social and political conditions, it was disciplinary disabled subjectivities and identities that were made available for people to take up.
The book very quickly sets the scene ‘on the ground’ in 2008 when Berghs first arrived to carry out her research (4). She found that those people bodily impaired by violence did not fall into the category described by neo-colonial scholars, namely voiceless subalterns, nor did they conform to stereo-types of invisibility or vulnerability within their own communities. On the contrary, she draws a picture of bodily impaired people as extremely visible, politically active, vocal and media ‘savvy’. Amputees and war-wounded people utilised to their own advantage the myriad journalists, photographers, film-makers, philanthropists, doctors, lawyers, missionaries, military and aid workers attached to the plethora of governmental and international non-governmental humanitarian and religious agencies that had descended upon Sierra Leone post conflict.
The aim of this case study, Berghs informs us, was to find out how people were ‘redefining their positions, identities, and images in society’ (20). Her research involved ethnography and mixed qualitative methods inclusive of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, personal narratives and visual anthropology. She maximised the validity of the information gathered from people by using multiple methods of data collection, by engaging in content analysis, by checking what people had said in the media, past reports and academic sources, and so on. Areas where she undertook ethnographic work included camps, transitional justice, non-governmental organisations, public health interventions (biomedicine) and bodily impaired people’s interactions with new forms of media and consumer technologies of embodiment.
Berghs discovered that in order to survive, amputee and war-wounded people had to participate in new discourses around disability and rights that was problematic for them. Firstly, they did not see themselves as disabled since their impairments were politically sustained as victims of war and they believed they occupied a different moral realm and status from disabled people. Secondly, the discourse and practices of disability were mainly bureaucratic, top-down and not democratic about mainstreaming disability, producing dependency, commodifying identities and producing alienation and new norms and values. However, people had to become very skilled in negotiating the new identities of ‘disabled’ or ‘persons with disabilities’ that emerged from these discursive practices. It was essential to form partnerships with non-governmental organisations, charities, religious organisations and so on that dealt with impairment and from whom they sought resources and support. The creation of identity and position ultimately emerged from an admixture of the transnational context of disabled social activism, the demands for material reparations from the state and multinationals based on new moral identities linked to disability, the neoliberal links between development and disability, and the neo-colonial importation of the disability business, models and technologies. Collectively these arenas provided the conditions for the global and local interplay in the creation of disability, everyday life and embodiment in Sierra Leone.
In conclusion, Berghs addresses the structural and material conditions that have affected the survival of people with disabilities as a result of the civil war in Sierra Leone whilst also taking into account individual and social accounts of how people have survived. She narrates the marginalisation and creation of disability at three levels – the state, the social, and the individual – ‘as well as through the inscription of bodily practices and techniques in a post-conflict society that is moving towards development’ (199). She has demonstrated, however, that whilst people were constrained and disciplined they were not passive victims, but on the contrary were aware of these processes and used them to survive and negotiate the rebuilding of their society in their own terms.
Berghs insists her ethnographic investigation of the construction of disability in Sierra Leone has provided a conceptual framework that can be applied to conflict and post-conflict situations in other African disabled states and people. She concludes with a general statement about any disability research: ‘the focus needed is not just ethnographic studies grounded in local language and traditions but also broad understandings of how big multilateral aid organisations interact with governments, influence policy and create disabled subjectivities’ (192):
Tackling disablement means not only tackling unfair global systems in which ‘rights’ are used to enforce neoliberal economic policies but also understanding how those systems affect local realities’ where the main priority post-conflict is ‘survival and how to bear life. (199)
Berghs insists this requires new interdisciplinary research involving anthropology, sociology and disability studies. Her book, its methodology, conclusions and recommendations are testimony to the richness of this approach.
University of Leicester, UK
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© 2014, Heather Brunskell-Evans
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.919172