Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone, The

Mariane C. Ferme. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xii + 287 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. $24.95. Paper.

Mariane Ferme's densely woven analysis of "meanings" in Mende culture is an audacious attempt to weave the history, language, material culture, social practices, memory, and contemporary politics of the Mende into a breathtaking consideration of the "underneath" of Sierra Leone's largest ethnic group.

The author's credentials as an interpreter of cultural meanings in Mendeland derive largely from her fluency with the language and her twoyear (1984-86) immersion in the lives of the people of Kpuawala town, Wunde Chiefdom, in the Bo District of southern Sierra Leone. A Mende friend of mine who assisted Ferme at the time declared years later-with both admiration and surprise-that this American woman named Mariane could indeed speak Mende. Her facility with the language is at the core of this book, the critical component in the immediacy and subtlety of her insights. Her thorough discussions of the multiple levels of meaning of Mende words such as mba (mouth), for example, attest to her nuanced and wide-ranging comprehension of the language. "Hearing" the language brought her into a circle of shared understanding with the people of Kpuawala which she now offers to her readers. The vivid picture she draws of the women of the Kamara "Big House" preparing themselves for sleep in beds draped with patchwork fabrics as protection against mosquitoes, all lit by the glow of hanging kerosene lamps, exemplifies the intimacy of her participant observations of this extended family group. The author returned for shorter visits in 1990 and 1993, when she renewed her "kinship" ties and submitted her insights to temporal analysis as well.

In general, Ferme focuses on the cleavages in Mende society, both the disjunctions that continue over time and those that arise anew out of continuing cultural contradictions sparked by contemporary stimuli. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist anthropological models, Ferme's approach leaves room for ambiguity and the concealed forces that disrupt the "deceptive order of ordinary appearances" (2). The author sees the contradictions, the hidden meanings, as cultural animators that stimulate change and may, at times, give rise to seemingly incomprehensible acts of violence.

The main locations for multiple levels of meaning considered by the author are landscapes, gendered practices, marriage and other forms of dependence, the large family home ("Big House"), important political actors ("Big Persons"), and naming practices of children. With a chapter devoted to each one, the author explains how strategies of concealment, the "underneath of things," shape the appearances of the visible world. In the main chapters, as well as the three "interludes" in which three specific sets of material practices are analyzed, the author presents a complex multilayered analysis that considers the complexities of Mende tradition informed by wide-ranging reference to the literature of cultural studies.

Ferme pays close attention to a long-standing issue in Mende ethnography: the role of women as political actors. Here the author makes a significant contribution to earlier scholarship regarding influential women in Mende society through her gendered discussion of the kpako, or "Big Person." Her analysis centers on the conceptual underpinnings of the status of big personhood, whether male or female, and considers a number of supports, from the role of subordinates in confirming the status of such persons, to the control of " secret" information, to the kpako's ability to incorporate useful substances into the body to enlarge its efficacy and power. Thus Ferme's analysis goes beyond earlier discussions of women's power in this region by linking questions of gender and secret institutions to the "materiality of language, productive technologies and social practices" (11). Rather than merely examining the functionality of women's institutions of power, she considers the wide range of linguistic, social, and material practices that call them into being.

The book's subtitle, "Violence, History, and the Everyday," as well as its introduction, suggest that one of the author's primary aims is to make cognitive sense of the devastating war that raged in the region from 1991 to 2001. Indeed, anyone familiar with Mendeland is haunted by the question of how such an apparently peaceful country in the 1980s could be so thoroughly wracked by violence and brutality in the 1990s. But though Ferme's introduction presents useful insights into the possible roots of violence, this theme remains largely untouched in the succeeding chapters. The author's thoughtful analysis of the contradictions forming the substrata of everyday life help the reader see that conflicts are inherent and indeed concealed within it. And though a glimpse of the secrets underneath the placid surface of normal practices is a valuable contribution, those contradictions do not adequately explicate the extraordinary levels of violence that have accompanied this war. In tackling the mind-numbing chaos of this recent era in Mendeland, the author has promised more than she can deliver.