The collection of anthropological data can be as much an art as a science. Interviewing subjects, asking probing questions, listening to answers and then contextualising and making sense out of people's perspectives and stories, requires more than just being familiar with the various ethnographic data collection methods and techniques. In Love and Survival in Sierra Leone, the anthropologist Catherine Bolten performs both the art and science of anthropology. Seven out of the eight chapters in this monograph are dedicated to the life histories of a small selection of Sierra Leoneans and their experiences of living through the decade-long armed conflict in the 1990s. We encounter and learn to know a soldier, a rebel, a student, a trader, an evangelist, a father and a politician. These detailed and sometimes quite intimate stories reveal above all how real people navigate the muddy and quickly changing landscape characterising political instability and armed violence. And through these histories we learn how some of the grander events – the rise of the Civil Defence Forces, the 1997 military coup or the 1999 attack on Freetown – that made national or international headlines were experienced on a more personal level. An additional insight is added by Bolten through her choice of fieldwork location. Her research and interviewees are living in Makeni, the headquarter town of the Northern province, which escaped most of the war‘s devastation during the first half of the conflict. But this changed dramatically following the 1997 military coup and even more so when the rebel Revolutionary United Front moved its headquarters from Kailahun in the far eastern part of the country to Makeni in 1998. In addition to the life-stories of the seven characters mentioned above, Bolton tells the ‘life-story’ of Makeni. From a rather neglected town during most of the colonial and post-colonial era – not incorporated in any significant national development effort – Makeni more recently has had its population accused of collaborating with the rebels, following the RUF's occupation. The book shows that part of ‘anthropology as art’ is in choosing interesting research locations.

In her work Bolten uses the conceptual framework of love – ‘a Krio [lingua franca] term expressing the bonds of mutual identification, sacrifice, and need between individuals and groups of people’ (p. 2). Love captures both the more patrimonial structured relations as well as the horizontal relations between social and economic equals. This works well for interpreting and understanding the experiences of the interviewees, but it would have been interesting to hear if Bolten feels that this is a useful concept to analyse conflicts in other countries, in Africa or even outside the continent more generally. And there are other types of bonds during wartime and immediately afterwards, that can perhaps result in some interesting insights if analysed through the lens of ‘love’. I visited Makeni – almost by accident – in 1996 to witness the opening of an ‘orphanage’. Sponsored by a British NGO/charity, the war-induced orphan children had their own compound with proper buildings, a school, games and toys, a generator for electricity, care-takers cooking for them, etc. For sure they were well ‘loved’ by these overseas well-doers. How ironic (if not cynical) was it that about 100 metres further down the road there was a ramshackle internally displaced camp with many children who lacked nearly everything that these orphan children had in abundance. The children affected by war in the IDP camp were not loved, but just surviving.