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

Rating:
Summary: Academic indeed......
Review: Honestly, I couldn't make heads or tails of this book - and I am an entirely over-educated offspring of academics, a native speaker of English, and a voracious reader. I just didn't understand the words! I purchased this book before moving to Sierra Leone to manage an aid program, hoping to gain insight into the people I would be living and working with. This book, however, was more about anthropological theory than the Mende people; it served to illustrate academic points rather than the cultural world they inhabit. Entire chapters were devoted to such esoterica as the meaning of "twins" and the supreme symbolic significance of placement of hammocks vs. stools within the household. Meanwhile, the prose is peppered with endless usage of such words as "homologous" and "hermeutic" along with liberal sprinklings of Mende words - which are defined the first time they are used, but as there is no glossary to subsequently refer to by the end of the book the reader is lost in linguistic gobbledy-gook.

I am sure that this book has contributed to academic inquiry -- but from my perspective, I have never read an entire book about a people and place and learned so little about them.

Rating:
Summary: Academic indeed......
Review: Honestly, I couldn't make heads or tails of this book - and I am an entirely over-educated offspring of academics, a native speaker of English, and a voracious reader. I just didn't understand the words! I purchased this book before moving to Sierra Leone to manage an aid program, hoping to gain insight into the people I would be living and working with. This book, however, was more about anthropological theory than the Mende people; it served to illustrate academic points rather than the cultural world they inhabit. Entire chapters were devoted to such esoterica as the meaning of "twins" and the supreme symbolic significance of placement of hammocks vs. stools within the household. Meanwhile, the prose is peppered with endless usage of such words as "homologous" and "hermeutic" along with liberal sprinklings of Mende words - which are defined the first time they are used, but as there is no glossary to subsequently refer to by the end of the book the reader is lost in linguistic gobbledy-gook.

I am sure that this book has contributed to academic inquiry -- but from my perspective, I have never read an entire book about a people and place and learned so little about them.