Mariane C. Ferme

Anthropology at Berkeley

Anthropology Faculty
Research Interests

My research interests include phenomenological approaches to questions of identity, personhood, and modernity especially in Africa, within the larger fields of political and religious anthropology. I focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between everyday practices on the one hand, and qualities of persons and the world they inhabit on the other hand. At the same time, I also am attentive to how history--particularly colonial history--has shaped the very parameters within which the world can be experienced and changed in postcolonial, modern Africa.

Topics on which I have written and taught over the last few years include political cultures and the public sphere, secrecy, modernity and forms of violence, including in "complex humanitarian emergencies" in Africa and elsewhere; and Muslim diasporas and religious change.
Representative Publications

2004. Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in Sierra Leone and Beyond, with Danny Hoffman. Africa Today 50(4): 72-95.

2004. Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances of the Sierra Leonean State. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, eds. Veena Das and Deborah Poole. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press (in press).

2003. Flexible Sovereignty? Paramount Chiefs, Deterritorialization and Political Mediations in Sierra Leone. Cambridge Anthhropology 23 (2):21-35.

2002. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinee: La regionalisation de la guerre. Special issue of Politique Africaine 88 (lead co-editor).

2002. Combattants Irreguliers et Discours International des Droits de l'Homme dans les Guerres Civiles Africaines: Le cas des "chasseurs" Sierra Leonais (with Danny Hoffman). Politique Africaine 88: 27-48.

2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2001. La Figure du chasseur et les chasseurs-milicens dans le conflit Sierra-Leonais. Politique Africaine 82 (June).

1999. Staging Politisi: The Dialogics of Publicity and Secrecy in Sierra Leone. In Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa. John and Jean Comaroff, eds. Chicago.

1998. The Violence of Numbers: Consensus, Competition, and the Negotiation of Disputes in Sierra Leone. Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 150-152, xxxviii-2-4:555-80.

1994. What "Alhaji Airplane" saw in Mecca, and what happened when he came home: ritual transformation in a Mende community (Sierra Leone). In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. C. Stewart and R. Shaw, eds. Pp. 27-44. Routledge.

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