It is not in governmentsponsored truth-andreconciliation commissions, but in the creativity of everyday improvisations What shall we eat? How shall we live?

that postwar reconstruction takes place.

The Real and Symbolic Importance of Food in War: Hunger Pains and Big Mens Bellies in Sierra Leone Susan Shepler

This paper explores the central material and symbolic role of food, during and after the eleven-year war (19912002) in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In postcon ict Sierra Leone, food is often central to narratives about the wartime experience. The point of this work is to use food as a medium to talk about the everyday experiences of the war and to foreground quotidian suffering over the spectacular. I investigate the cultural meaning of food with respect to sociality, reciprocity, and political clientelism. The idiom of food is used to describe the greediness of politicians deemed responsible for the war, as well as personal stories of wartime privation told with reference to hunger. The everyday strategies of food nding under rebel control and in refugee and IDP camps make up the narratives of shifting personal agency under shifting moral regimes. Finally, new methods of food preparation with new ingredients serve as everyday reminders of innovation during displacement and a new cosmopolitanism.

the most tangible description of bread is a description of hunger Tadeusz Rzewicz, Draft of a Modern Love Poem

In early 2001, I was talking with people in Rogbom,1 a village about ten miles outside Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. The war was still officially ongoing, but things had been calm in the area for some time. My purpose was to try to understand the events of less than two years before, when all the children old enough to ght had been abducted and the village had been occupied for months by rebels retreating from the capital after they had attacked on 6 January 1999. After a few weeks in Rogbom, I had gathered abduction stories from some of the children, with one particularly horrifying

story of torture from the village headman. I knew that in the neighboring village, in one bloody day, eight people had been lined up and shot; and I had stood under the coconut tree where these murders had taken place. As often happened to me in these situations, once people had learned that I was there to hear their stories, they came around, one by one, and shared, trying to communicate to an outsider what they had lived through. A woman whose son had been abducted told me,
When the rebels took over our village, life was very hard. They made us work for them. We were totally cut off from the market. Try to imagine: we didnt even have salt to cook with!

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It seemed strange that she would include in the same narrative the atrocities she and the rest of the village had experienced and the seemingly small inconvenience of eating food without salt. I wondered, why was salt so important to her story? This article explores the central material and symbolic role of food, both during and after the war. I investigate how, in postcon ict Sierra Leone, food becomes central to narratives about the war and wartime experience. I tie the centrality of food in war narratives to the cultural meaning of food with respect to sociality, reciprocity, and political clientelism2 by discussing rst what the people ate, then what the rebels ate, and nally what the politicians ate. I describe some of the changing practices of food and what they tell us about the long-term effects of the con ict. The focus on food is important because it allows us to foreground peoples quotidian suffering instead of the spectacular violence we hear so much about. The point is to use food as a lens through which to view the everyday experience of the war. I heard a great many stories from people I met while doing eldwork in Sierra Leone at the tail end of the war (19992001).3 My research was on rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers, and it took me to Interim Care Centres around the country and to a number of communities to which former child soldiers were returning. I was a participant-observer, uent in the language from my time in the Peace Corps a decade earlier. In addition to former child soldiers, I talked with community members of all types, as well as my old friends and colleagues. As an outsider, I was cognizant of the fact that my presence might be assumed to be connected to some official aid program or other, so I always tried to make clear that I was a student gathering information for a degree and not connected to any humanitarian agency or government institution. Sometimes, I was told war stories not because I asked, but because people seemed to need someone to whom they could tell their stories. I draw on this well of stories here. It was not my intention to collect stories about food. It was only many years after this eldwork that I started to think about why I so often heard narratives of suffering that centered on food, and I came to see food as a window on wartime experiences.

As we argue in the introduction to this special issue, this kind of ground-up understanding of war experiences can lead to a more complete understanding of war as a total social phenomenon (Nordstrom 2004). Most observers of postwar societies focus at the level of the state, or security, or legislative changes. This privileging of the formal leaves out the vast terrain of peoples lived experiences, where we believe real social change takes place. We hope to turn from the masculine realms of politics and power toward the feminine realms of the everyday, acknowledging that war is a total social phenomenon, not just a strategic game played by rational (male) political actors with lamentable consequences for the (female) victims of con ict. People in Sierra Leone, drawing on multiple discursive and material resources, are struggling to make their everyday lives, and in the process, remaking their society.

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Why Food?
Jon Holtzman, in his book on food, memory, and politics in Kenya, claims that Food has the uncanny ability to tie the minutiae of everyday experience to broader cultural patterns, hegemonic structures, and political-economic processes (2009: 9). Food is material, but also symbolic, and literally everyday. Our experience of food is a physical, sensual, shared human experience. Food is embodied, mundane, often gendered in its preparation and consumption. It allows the physical reproduction of bodies, but is part of social reproduction. Experience of it evokes recollections that are not simply cognitive, but also emotional and physical. There is a recently growing literature on food and culture, but food studies are not new. Counihan and Van Esteriks reader Food and Culture includes foundational texts in food studies from Margaret Mead, Roland Barthes, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Michel de Certeau, and others. They ask why food studies have exploded in the last decade, and offer the following explanation: Without a doubt[,] feminism and womens studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures. ... Scholars have found food a powerful lens of analysis (2008:1). This approach is in line with our focus on everyday life as a kind of feminist move. As far as I can tell, interest in food has not yet extended to explorations of food and war. Indeed, in the review article on Anthropology of Food and Eating, the authors conclude, the role of warand the roles of many kinds of social changeshas [sic] been relatively neglected in food studies. These are areas ripe for research (Mintz and Du Bois 2002:105).4 When theorists do think about food and war, it is in the context of food as an element of a human-security framework (Pottier 1999; Richards 2002; Sikod 2008). Some have talked about food shortages as a cause of con ict.5 For example, Flynn states, Nothing prompts civil unrest faster than the rising cost of staple foods (2005: 2).6 There is a kind of loop posited in this

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literature where con ict is a cause of hunger, and hunger is a cause of conict. This literature includes calls for con ict-concerned strategies in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and programs that have been proposed in response to food crises (Messer 2009: 13). There is policy-relevant scholarship about food security and risk of con ict, and on how aid can affect food security, but this article is neither. This article has a more anthropological and phenomenological bent: it is concerned with how food and stories about food can offer ways to understand the personal experience of war, and thus t well within the framework of this Special Issue, on Everyday Lives in Postwar Sierra Leone. Food studies now constitute recognized subdisciplines in the elds of anthropology, sociology, history, culture studies, medicine, and business. Food studies begin with the premise that food practices are implicated in a complex eld of relationships, expectations, and choices that are contested, negotiated, and often unequal (Watson and Caldwell 2005:1). Watson and Caldwell argue that attention to the most mundane and intimate aspects of peoples ordinary livesin this case, how they relate to foodcan help us understand the big issues of twenty- rst-century politics, including state formation and collapse, global ows and antiglobal reactions, and new notions of identity and the rebirth of nationalism (2005: 2). Food and memory are linked in interesting ways. In Remembrance of Repasts, Sutton (2001) observes that his informants on the Greek island of Kalymnos frequently remember far-off events through food. Indeed, his works biggest contribution is a demonstration of how the sensuality of food causes it to be a particularly intense and compelling medium for memory. Experience of it evokes recollectionwhich is not simply cognitive, but also emotional and physical.

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What the People Ate

To my knowledge, there is no de nitive text on Sierra Leonean foodways, as there are about Nigerian food, for example (Ikpe 1994; Okere 1983). The general meal for Sierra Leoneans is rice with an oily, spicy sauce on top; sometimes various greens are added (cassava leaves, sweet potato leaves, and so forth), and ground peanuts usually serve as a thickener. People add what protein they can, with dried sh (more prevalent along the coasts), chicken, goat, pig, cow, and the occasional bush meat. Cassava is boiled or roasted, or prepared into fufu (a doughy, starchy base for sauce) or gari (grated and dried for ease of storage). Millet is cultivated in small quantities. Undoubtedly, the most important element of the diet is rice. A Sierra Leonean who happens not to eat rice during the course of a day, even if he has eaten other little snacks, will say he has not eaten.7 The United Kingdoms Overseas Development Institute notes that rice was rst cultivated in Africa 3000 years ago, and that the rst writings on rice in West Africa were from Leo Africanus, who traveled through the region in the 1560s. Scholars have

speculated that West Africans deep history of rice cultivation put them in great demand as slaves along the rice-growing regions of South Carolina in the United States (see Fields-Black 2008 for a summary). The rstand most obviouseffect of the war on Sierra Leoneans experience of food was scarcity. People went hungry much of the time. When they could not afford to cook rice for their families, they would mix it with bulgur, a gift from the people of the USA. The resulting mixture was called combat. It was not their usual food, and not something they generally enjoyed eating. In a way that is hard to understand to one who has not experienced war or great hunger, several informants explained to me that their hunger forced them to take dangerous decisions. A woman in the East End of Freetown told me during the invasion of January 1999, we never left our home. There was shooting everywhere. We only went out to try to nd food. Indeed, what emerges is the centrality of hunger to their experience of the war. A teacher-friend from Kono District, in the east of the country, told me how her father had been killed in front of her, and how she and her mother and smaller sister had ed into the bush to survive. As above, with the story of the salt, her story was brought home through the details of the difficulty of eating while in the bush. She said,
We lived on bananas and bush yams, whatever we could nd in the bush. We didnt dare light a cook re for fear that the rebels might nd us. Eventually we made it to Freetown and to safety. I will never forget how we suffered, and I dont really like to eat bananas now.

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Food is descriptive. It is through the language of food that people most powerfully, and yet humbly, can describe their suffering. Holtzman, in a review article entitled Food and Memory, asks what facets of foodor what conguration of its varying facetsrender it a potent site for the construction of memory? Which kind of memories does food have the particular capacity to inscribe? (2006:362). I am interested in comparing the memory practice of testimony in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, with the memory practice of my friend turning away from bananas in the marketplace. Formal testimony is extraordinary, and it happens only once. Memories based in food are inescapable, and they happen every day.

What the Rebels Ate

Sierra Leone was a poor country, even before the war. It now ranks close to the bottom of the most recent UNDP Human Development Index (UNDP 2010), above only a handful of other African countries. During the war, rebels took from civilians in rural settings what they had been denied as marginalized youth: vehicles, radios, clothes, metal window frames, and so on. They wanted more and better food than they had known, so they stole cows, goats,

and other foodstocks, mainly rice and palm oil. One young former rebel, around 18 at the time we met, while telling me about the difficulty of his reintegration process revealed how rebels ate during the war:
When we were in the bush, we ate meat every day. Now, here in the center,8 we have to eat combat (half bulgur, half rice) with very little meat in the sauce. Before, I used to command people like this to cook for me; now I have to be patient.

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THE REAL AND SYMBOLIC IMPORTANCE OF FOOD IN WAR

I am reminded of the famous greed-or-grievance debates among economists about the causes of civil war (Berdal and Malone 2000). That model is based on the assumption that rebels ght because of low opportunity costs to rebellion, and because they rationally expect that they will be able to loot primary commodities for pro t. In Sierra Leone, was it greed for hungry people to want to eat as they never had before? The rebels of the Revolutionary United Front initially claimed that they were bringing a revolution. Many informants told me that they agreed at the beginning of the war that a change was needed, but that the rebels lost public support when they took it too far and were too violent against the people. I heard from informants that often, to demonstrate that they were on the civilians side, when the rebels killed a cow (slaughtering it not in the usual way, but using the tools at hand, shooting it with an AK-47), they would share the meat with people in the town or village where they were staying; or when they broke open some rich persons rice store, they would sometimes call surrounding people to come and share in the bounty. This was meant to win people over to their side, but most people told me they were not fooled. The rebels were too unpredictable to trust, though people certainly enjoyed the food when it came.

What the Politicians Ate

Politiciansthe big men of the countryare the villains of the economists grievance model. To describe all kinds of petty corruption, people will say, He ate the money. Big menknown for their big bellieseat the nations resources. A famous song by the young Sierra Leonean musician Emerson9 entitled Borboh Belleh (literally Belly Boy) draws on that symbolism to talk about the big mens corruption: Borboh Belleh youre greedy. Havent you lled up your belly enough? Do you feel that Sierra Leone is a farm to encourage all kinds of thieves? Wrong! It goes without saying that wealthy people in Sierra Leone eat more and better-quality food than poor people, but more important to our discussion is that food and overeating are common symbols of corruption and patrimonialism gone astray. As in Bayarts ([1993] 2009) and Geschieres (1997) writings on respectively, the politics of the belly and the eating of the state in contemporary Cameroon, Shaw explains how her informants conceived of politics

in terms of eating. One of her informants states, Politicians and other big persons ... consume the foreign aid intended for the poorest people of Sierra Leone, diverting it for the exclusive use of their own families. ... Their families eat it ... thereby turning proper circulation into improper accumulation (2002:258). Next, I turn to these notions of proper circulation and improper accumulation with respect to patrimonialist politics.

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Rice Is Not the Same as Money

In Paul Richards early work, before his much-cited Fighting for the Rainforest (1996), he was concerned with rural rice farming. In Coping with Hunger: Hazard and Experiment in an African Rice-Farming System, he points to the central importance of indebtedness in local rural political systems, with the most important aspect being rice loans. He notes that there is little stigma attached to these loans, as
preventing rice from leaving [the area] in the period prior to the main rice harvest is something that both borrowers and lenders see as desirable. When the hungry season is severe[,] the village and chiefdom authorities enact by-laws [sic] to forbid the sale of rice to external traders. Local traders are allowed to buy because their stores [are local], and should hunger become widespread[,] the rice is on hand to be loaned[,] rather than exported. Local traders are willing to loan rice[,] rather than sell it[,] because they have a stake in village politics. Gaining clients through loaning rice is as valuable to them as cash in hand from sales to the national market. (1986:127128)

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According to my informants, successful farmers in previous eras could use their rice stores to build political clout in rural settings. Richards agrees: Rice loans and money lending today substitute for older forms of political patronage, e.g.[,] the protection provided by a warrior. A patron uses these resources to sustain a group not unlike an extended family, which provides in return domestic, political, and economic support (1986:128). He determines that the system of food entitlements grounded in patronclient relationships seems to be both buoyant and durable, having adapted to the monetisation [sic] of many aspects of economic and social life in the 20th century (1986:129). The point here is that rice, though available for purchase in most markets, is not the same thing as money. Rice has a longer history as the basis of clientelist political networks than money does; and in some ways, especially during the crisis of war, rice was more important than money, both for survival and as a payment in a patronclient relationship. Soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army always received their monthly one bag of rice, no matter the pay. One could argue that rice and money were exchangeable for each other, but the bag of rice was in some ways more

important than the money. Even today, to be paid in rice is understood to be an important bene t of government work. Why? I argue that rice is more than a commodity, as Mauss argues in The Gift: in a gift economy, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on the part of the recipient, the basis of patrimonialism. Ferme (1992:229281) has weighed in on the usefulness of food as one means of distinguishing rural power networks. She describes the importance of a big persons capacity for expansion and circulation . . . through, for instance, the generous distribution of food and money among dependents. She later writes about the importance of the big pot to the preparation of food for big events, and the ways in which local power relations can be read by the circulation of the pots: The big pot underscored the centrality of food for occasions ranging from the mundane [farmwork parties] to the ritual and esoteric (2001:130). Food is not equivalent to money. It is the actual food that is used to bring about loyalty. The Gada rice story is interesting, given this understanding of the material basis of clientelism. Apparently, Colonel Muammar Gada of Libya sent a boatload of rice to the suffering people of Sierra Leone immediately after the war. The governing Sierra Leone Peoples Party did not tell the people, and instead sold the rice in another African country to get money to fund a social security system, a new program. The secret came out when Gada visited Sierra Leone in 2007 and mentioned his gift in a speech. News of the gift was a surprise to the people, and they started investigating. Unfortunately for the ruling party, Gada s visit took place right before the presidential elections and became an issue in the election season. People protested the ruling party by throwing rice at them as they campaigned in the streets. I believe the protestors reaction was not just against corruption: it was about food. Other donors had sent money for postwar rebuilding, money that similarly had been eaten by the government, but it was shrugged off: though there was consternation, there was not the same visceral reaction. With the rice protests, in the wake of wartime hunger, the protesters were telling the government it was wrong to equate rice with money. I am saying that food, and rice in particular, is more than a symbol, and that close attention to food can provide insight into not only the experiences of war, but the underlying political structures at issue during the con ict and in the postcon ict period.

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Changing Foodways
Holtzman notes that Dietary change marks epochal social transformations in a wide range of contexts, serving as a lens both to characterize the past and to read the present through the past (2006: 371). But studies of changing foodways seem to be mainly about changes wrought by modernization or globalization. In the case of Sierra Leone, the changes were wrought by displacement and social rupture. In the sections that follow, I give examples

of elements of Sierra Leonean food culture that were affected by the war and by the postwar. It is my hope that each of these stories will contribute to a more grounded understanding of everyday life before and after the war. A friend in Makeni, the capital of Northern Province and home to the Temne ethnic group, told me about the changes that had happened during the rebel occupation:

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First they killed all our cows, then our goats; then they ate all the dogs. As you know, the Mende people [of the south] were many among the rebels, and after a while we mixed with them. We Temne dont eat frog, but the Mende people do. So eventually, out of desperation, we started eating frog as well. People would prepare it and carry it around to the palm-wine bars for people to eat. They started calling it waterfowl. The funny thing is, even though the war is over, people are still preparing it and eating it at the palm-wine bars.

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Many dietary changes introduced during wartime remain in the postwar period. Immediately after the war, things started to go back to normal, but that process meant some strange sights. For the rst time, people started carrying chickens from the city to the countryside. (The normal route had always been to bring fresh chickens from the farm for the city folks.) A number of times while riding on public transportation, I heard people laughing about the chickens going up country. The same thing was true of the livestock, which had been almost completely depleted by the rebels: now, people were buying cows from neighboring Guinea and walking them into Sierra Leone. A positive element for meat eaters was the fact that bush meatwild dear, boar, and monkeyshad a chance to breed without being hunted for years, and the numbers of these animals exploded during the war. Finally, people returned to their villages after having been refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs) with new skills and new ideas about food preparation. Some of this came from being packed together in camps with people from different ethnic groups with different recipes and different local ingredients (as in the frog story above). Some of it came from skillstraining programs offered by relief agencies. In a village of about fteen families where I did some of my eldwork, the people were just returning after ve years in an IDP camp near the capital, and they were having to rebuild their houses and clear brush to start new farms. The headmans wife had learned to bake bread in the IDP camp, and she now made bread to sell to the community every morningan enterprise that had never existed in the community before the war.10 Another dietary innovation from abroad is achieke (or attik in Francophone countries), gari soaked in oil and vinegar, with fresh tomatoes and sh or a range of other toppings. The story is that it came from Cte dIvoire with West African peacekeepers. When I was staying in Kenema, in the east of Sierra Leone, in 2009, I ate it several times at Obama Restaurant. Now it

has spread all over Sierra Leone and even Guinea and Liberia. As a new kind of fast food that is not rice, it is surprisingly popular, and a decade after the war it seems to be in the market to stay. One could say that war and displacement have made Sierra Leonean food more cosmopolitan. With warnings of an impending world food shortage, people are again suffering from hunger. As the human-security literature warns, this could lead to renewed violence, in Sierra Leone and in other poor parts of Africa. Although I said this article was not concerned primarily with food and security, perhaps some of the exibility in food preparation that came from the war can help alleviate some of that tension.

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Conclusions
This article has engaged disparate themes relevant to postwar Sierra Leone, connected mainly by the fact that each theme is examined through the prism of food. Though the themes are perhaps somewhat disconnected, by using food as a way to address them all, I have connected memory practices, corruption, and cultural transformation in ways not otherwise possible. In addition to sharing stories of peoples everyday experiences of war through the lens of food, I have made three arguments:
1. Memory is a practice, and the everyday practices of food preparation and eating can be powerful sites for memories of war.

I have discussed the presence of food in narratives of suffering, and pointed to ways that the everyday practice of food preparation and consumption can be sites for memories of war. More precisely, I have drawn a connection to the bodily memory of discomfort. But I am not arguing that the everyday supersedes other loci of memory. Narratives of wartime experience use both material and symbolic registers. As Basu argues in his discussion of palimpsest memory in Sierra Leone, the memoryscape is continually overwritten, resulting in an accretion of forms ... constantly being excavated and reburied, mixing up the layers, exposing unexpected juxtapositions, and generating unanticipated interactions (2008:254). Memory of the war happens at multiple levels all at once. In a way, I am privileging the everyday because it is so often ignored, even though memories of the war are a combination of spectacular and mundane events (for example, I remember the day the rebels attacked our village, but I also remember the daily boredom and hunger of hiding in the bush for months afterwards). Memorialization practices, transitional justice, and all forms of reconciliation after con ict must take all these levels into account.

2. Food and eating can be symbols of corruption, but that is only because food is at the base of clientelist networks that make up political power in Sierra Leone.

I have shown that food can be a powerful symbol of power, hierarchy, gender, and social capital. The big belly is a ubiquitous symbol of corrupt politicians. But beyond its use in the symbolic realm, I have shown that attention must be paid to actual food as the material basis of patrimonial networks. It is an error to focus on either the material or the symbolic at the expense of the other. As security-studies scholars tell us, the population needs food, and if it is not provided, people will revolt. Food is political, and food security is human security.
3. War has changed the foodways of Sierra Leone, and this may bring a new exibility and be an enduring cultural shift.

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The new exibility in using ingredients and new knowledge about methods of food preparation will help Sierra Leone feed itself if food becomes scarce. This is a way of addressing the human-security issue of food shortages as a cause of con ict. Changing foodways is just one aspect of how everyday practice has changed after the war. I believe there is a greater cosmopolitanism in many areas of culture and social life. Indeed, the other articles in this issue point to some of those areas. Many of these changes may help Sierra Leone face the challenges ahead. Changing foodways are obviously about changes in the way people prepare and eat real food, but also about the symbolic, in that they may also be changing elements of ethnic and national identity related to food choice. Ferme suggests that the impact of war will be found in decades to come in everyday practice, much as precolonial violence affects the present: The everyday objects, words, and places of war will nd their way into narratives and social relations, in a manner analogous to those of slavery and violence left behind by a buried past (2001:228). In the collection of essays entitled Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, Carol J. Greenhouse points us toward the importance of everyday creativity in the face of war: the determined momentum of improvisation even in previously unimaginable circumstances makes meaning itself a mode of social action and not merely a reaction (2002:3). I argue that it is not in government-sponsored truth-and-reconciliation commissions, for example, but in the creativity of everyday improvisationsWhat shall we eat? How shall we live?that postwar reconstruction takes place.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Field research from 1999 to 2001 was supported by a Rocca Scholarship in Advanced African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A follow-up research trip was funded by an American University Faculty Research Grant in 2007. Thanks to Aisha Fofana Ibrahim, Wusu Kargbo, and Raymond June for fruitful discussions on this topic. Thanks also for useful comments from the anonymous reviewers and from participants in Food in Zones of Conict, a conference of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, held in Leiden in August 2011.

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NOTES
1. 2. A pseudonym to protect the identities of my informants. I write more about what happened to that village and those children in Shepler (2005). Clientelism is a political system at the heart of which is an asymmetrical relationship between patrons and clients. The postcolonial African state has been understood by many scholars as essentially neopatrimonial or clientelist in character. 3. There are now several excellent book-length explorations of the war, how it started, and how it was carried out. See in particular Abdullah (2004), Gberie (2005), Keen (2005), and Richards (1996). 4. 5. 6. An interesting exception is Powles (2002), who presents the story of a Zambian refugee, all of whose stories are tied up with what food was available at each stage of her displacement. Neighboring Liberias Truth and Reconciliation Commission goes back to the event they call the rice riots, when people protested a hefty increase in the price of rice. Flynns work is notable for focusing on the lack of food and strategies for getting by when food is hard to come by, and on foodways in an African urban setting; most focus on the rural production of food. 7. 8. 9. 10. This is true all along the Upper Guinea Coast. See Joanna Davidsons work (2010) on the importance of rice to identity in the region. This was an Interim Care Centre for former child combatants and other separated children, a stop on the way to eventual reintegration. See Shepler (2010) for more on Emerson and other young musicians in postwar Sierra Leone. See also Spencer, this issue. Other innovations made this American researcher happy. While the UN peacekeeping troops were stationed in the country, they received food from a central UN purchasing office. The soldiers were primarily from Africa (Kenya, Zambia, and later Bangladesh). They were not interested in corn akes, canned peas, or jam, and would trade their food with local women for fresh local produce whenever possible. This food would nd its way onto the black market and into the stomach of the American anthropologist for an occasional break from rice.

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Abdullah, Ibrahim. 2004. Bush Path to Destruction: The Origin and Character of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF/SL). In Between Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War, edited by I. Abdullah. Dakar: CODESRIA. Basu, Paul. 2008. Palimpsest Memoryscapes: Materializing and Mediating War and Peace in Sierra Leone. In Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, edited by Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press. Bayart, Jean-Franois. [1993] 2009. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Berdal, Mats, and David Malone, eds. 2000. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Counihan, Carol, and Penny van Esterik. 2008. Introduction. In Food and Culture: A Reader. 2nd ed., edited by Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik. New York: Routledge. Davidson, Joanna. 2010. Sacred Rice: Identity, Encounter, and Development on the Upper Guinea Coast. In The Upper Guinea Coast in Transnational Perspective. Halle, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Ferme, Mariane. 2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fields-Black, Edda L. 2008. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Flynn, Karen Coen. 2005. Food, Culture, and Survival in an African City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gberie, Lansana. 2005. A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Richmond, VA: University of Virginia Press. Greenhouse, Carol J. 2002. Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives. In Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, edited by Carol J. Greenhouse, E. Mertz, and K. B. Warren. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Holtzman, Jon D. 2006. Food and Memory. Annual Review of Anthropology 35(1): 361378. . 2009. Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ikpe, Eno B. 1994. Food and Society in Nigeria: A History of Food Customs, Food Economy and Cultural Change 19001989. Stuttgart: Steiner. Keen, David. 2005. Conict and Collusion in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey. Messer, Ellen. 2009. Rising Food Prices, Social Mobilizations, and Violence: Conceptual Issues in Understanding and Responding to the Connections Linking Hunger and Conict. National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin 32(1):1222. Mintz, Sidney, and Christine M. Du Bois. 2002. The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31(1):99119. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2004. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Proteering in the TwentyFirst Century. California Series in Public Anthropology, 10. Edited by Robert Borofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press. Okere, L. C. 1983. The Anthropology of Food in Rural Igboland, Nigeria: Socioeconomic and Cultural Aspects of Food and Food Habit in Rural Igboland. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.
SUSAN SHEPLER

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Pottier, Johan. 1999. Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Powles, Julia. 2002. Refugee Voices: Home and Homelessness: The Life History of Susanna Mwana-Uta, an Angolan Refugee. Journal of Refugee Studies 15(1):81101. Richards, Paul. 1986. Coping with Hunger: Hazard and Experiment in an African Rice-Farming System. London Research Series in Geography, 11. London: Allen & Unwin.

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THE REAL AND SYMBOLIC IMPORTANCE OF FOOD IN WAR

. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone. African Issues. Edited by Alex de Waal. Oxford: James Currey. . 2002. Youth, Food, and Peace: A Reection on Some African Security Issues at the Millennium. In Africa in Crisis: New Challenges and Possibilities, edited by Tunde Zack-Williams, Diane Frost, and Alex Thomson. London: Pluto Press. Shaw, Rosalind. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shepler, Susan. 2005. Conicted Childhoods: Fighting over Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. . 2010. Youth Music and Politics in Post-War Sierra Leone. Journal of Modern African Studies 48 (4):627642. Sikod, Fondo. 2008. Conicts and Implications for Poverty and Food Security Policies in Africa. In The Roots of African Conicts: The Causes and Costs, edited by Alfred Nhema and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. Oxford: James Currey. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford and New York: Berg. UNDP. 2010. Human Development Report 2010: The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development. New York: United Nations Development Program. Watson, James L., and Melissa L. Caldwell. 2005. Introduction. In The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, edited by James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell. Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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