Composite economies: Extractive relations & moral agency in Sierra Leone’s eastern frontier

This PhD project examines the multiple entanglements between people and forest landscapes in Sierra Leone. Based on the observation that people in Sierra Leone's eastern forest landscapes live both in mutual social dependency as well as ecological dependency in and with forests, this project explores how these dependencies and the uncertainties stemming from them are negotiated. Forest landscapes emerge out of complex interactions between human and non-human actors. This project inquires into these interactions by focusing on the social and economic forms they take, as well as their moral dimensions.

Local forms of (subsistence) agriculture produce secondary forests that can be harnessed for timber extraction. Furthermore, logging as well as diamond and gold mining generate forms of reciprocal exchange that have their origin in the social organization of agriculture. These reciprocal relationships formalize mutual dependencies and, as a result, produce complex patron-client networks and relational subject positions. However, diamond and gold mining promise social mobility through "fast money" and enable the growth of new patron-client relationships outside the narrow confines of kinship and village community. Following young men as they navigate social relationships, this study investigates these spatially and temporally intertwined fields of practice and explores how forest landscapes are made habitable as milieux.

The project explores how forest dwellers care, cultivate, and foster – but also control, exploit, and destroy – ecological relations within their fields of practice. Ecological relations are bound up with ideas and principles about how the common good and well-being are to be achieved. Forest dwellers mobilize such morally infused notions to hold each other accountable for their actions and, in so doing, to negotiate the ambivalence of relationships between people and their environment.

Forms of sociality within the forest cannot resolve uncertainty completely but only shift it. For example, forms of solidarity make it possible to bracket the latent uncertainties associated with subsistence agriculture, such as food shortages, but they also create new dependencies. Being able to hold each other accountable, to criticize and to accuse make these dependencies partially manageable. However, moral arguments can only negotiate the existential dangers of living in interdependent forest environments to a limited degree. At the limits of moralization, forest dwellers turn to different indigenous practices of healing to repair damaged relationships and to cope with their traumas. How to recover from trauma and make space for manoeuvre and becoming adds to the question of how to make forest milieux habitable.
Here, the project takes up debates on decolonization, which address the potential for self-determination in the midst of structural violence and oppression. By placing these debates in dialogue with environmental anthropology, this project suggests potential avenues to address ecological crises from the vantage point of Sierra Leone’s forest landscapes.