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At a guest lecture given at Rutgers University in 2003, renowned anthropologist Tania Li made the point that she had not gone to the field seeking to write about violence in Southeast Asia. Instead, violence found her already in the field and demanded her response as an anthropologist.
Paul Richards found himself in a similar position in 2014 when Ebola virus came to Sierra Leone. With over 40 years of research and life experience in Sierra Leone, and extensive personal and professional connections between Sierra Leonean and UK universities, governments, and communities, Richards and his colleagues found themselves at the center of a firestorm of debates over how to lead a response to the West African Ebola epidemic. To respond to the Ebola epidemic, Richards drew upon his 40 years of life and fieldwork in Sierra Leone to craft this memorable, approachable, and accessible guide to the grassroots experience of Ebola outbreak and response. The book itself is divided into six chapters with an appendix that is not to be ignored. zed Books commissioned Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic to give anthropologists a platform to analyze the West Africa Ebola epidemic and its international response with an anthropological orientation towards community-based experiences, population health, sociocultural factors, and international and local capabilities and limitations. This work is distinct in the growing oeuvre of Ebola anthropology and Ebola epidemiology for its qualitative attention to rural communities' knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and practices.
In the introduction and Chapter 1, "The World's First Ebola Epidemic," Richards sets forth the context of the Ebola outbreak, and offers a classical anthropological framing for understanding the axis of mutual misunderstanding and miscomprehension that failed both the clinical and epidemiological responses, and local communities in the early onset of the outbreak. He asserts that any understanding of the grassroots experience of Ebola requires consideration of both global scientific and local sociocultural and moral priorities. Richards calls on the international community to recognize the existence of a "people's science"—the capacity of local communities to engage...