Embodiment and Emotion in Sierra Leone

In this article, drawing on in-depth multi-sited ethnographic field research, a description is given of how an ‘amputee and war-wounded’ community formed in Sierra Leone after a 10-year civil war from 1991 to 2002. Through the shared experiences of life in a camp, medical care, participation in the rebuilding of the nation-state, to the ‘managing’ of the everyday structural violence of poverty, people find themselves dealing with new local and global spaces created in a post-conflict environment. The way that people understand how to negotiate these new spaces is gendered, embodied and also spiritual. The article thus argues that social recognition in terms of reparations or reintegration has to take into account these understandings. Interventions have to be material, spiritual (visible and invisible) and embodied (true inclusion) to have an impact in reintegrating people who become amputees or are wounded during a conflict.