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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the implications - for residents of a West Afican fishing town -- of managing stretched livelihoods in a social landscape experienced as half-hidden.

Paper long abstract:

One thread in anthropology's recent 'turn' to ontology, has been the criticism that, whenever we re-tell our informants' accounts through the perceptual idiom of "worldviews", we effectively reduce their statements of fact into "mere 'cultural perspectives'" (Henare et al, 2007: 10). However, my own experience in coastal Sierra Leone is that, here, people describe their relationship to the world through similar tropes of perspective and differentially-obscured vision.

In the vibrant rumour-mill which animates conversation throughout Tissana each day, the one anxiety shared by everybody I knew - every trader, fish-processor, boat-owner and chief -- is that they were forced to navigate their tight livelihoods though a landscape of which they were largely ignorant. For, quite aside from the high fences which shield the town's 'secret' societies from uninitiated eyes, this coastal landscape is riddled with other screens, no less opaque. It is known, for example, that a large minority of individuals - amongst them twins, witches and diviners - possess an extra set of eyes ; and that this special vision enables them privileged access to another level of the social world, behind the visible surfaces of the town. Meanwhile, fishermen and traders also move unpredictably, across spaces palpably unknowable to their anxious business-partners in town. As my neighbours constantly speculated as to the elaborate array of covert betrayals enacted beyond their sight each day, this paper explores the lived implications of managing stretched livelihoods and negotiating relationships of half-trust, in a social world so permeated with felt-ignorance.