Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• U20123:  Anthropology of Ritual
• U20128:  Research Methods in Social Anthropology
• U20104:  Introduction to Social Anthropology
• U20133:  Social Anthropology Theory

 

My formative ethnographic fieldwork was based in Tissana: a multi-ethnic frontier fishing town in Southern Sierra Leone. In this research, I traced the story of the successive waves of young migrants who, for several decades, have been arriving on the coast from rural areas seeking an alternative to the indentured labour conditions of a farming economy still shaped by the legacy of domestic slavery. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing post-war economy, and in an ecological context in which fish stocks are in treacherous decline, I explore the intersection between people’s everyday struggles for economic survival and their taken-for-granted knowledge of the substance of the world within which those fragile livelihoods play out.

More recently, I have been working with colleagues in Sierra Leone and at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) on research examining the role of men and boys in activist movements for gender equality. I also co-authored a policy paper reflecting on the gendered dimensions of the Ebola crisis, and have an emerging research interest in the political economy of infant and maternal health in the post-Ebola context.

 

Books

• Diggins J, Coastal Sierra Leone: Materiality and the Unseen in Maritime West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9781108471169 eISBN: 9781108555647
  Abstract

  Against the backdrop of a threadbare post-war state and a global marine ecology in treacherous decline, Jennifer Diggins offers a dynamic account of post-war Sierra Leone, through the examination of a precarious frontier economy and those who depend on it. The book traces how understandings of intimacy, interdependence, and exploitation have been shaped through a history of indentured labour, violence, and gendered migration; and how these relationships are being renegotiated once more in a context of deepening economic uncertainty. At its core, this is about the material substance of human relationships. One can go a long way towards mapping the town's shifting networks of friendship, love, and obligation simply by watching the vast daily traffic in gifts of fish exchanging hands on the wharf. However, these mundane social and economic strategies are often inflected through a cultural dynamic of 'secrecy', and a shared sense of the unseen forces understood to inhabit the material world.--Provided by publisher.

  Website 

Journal articles

• Diggins J, 'Collapsing Fish Stocks, Gendered Economies, and Anxieties of Entrapment in Coastal Sierra Leone'
  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (4) (2019) pp.721-737
  ISSN: 1359-0987 eISSN: 1467-9655
  Abstract

  This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish; tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret ‘medicines’ to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyze how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone’s history of domestic slavery.
  

  Website 
• Diggins J, 'Potato rope families: sharing food and precarious kinship in a West African fishing town'
  Social Anthropology 25 (4) (2017) pp.493-508
  ISSN: 0964-0282
  Abstract This article examines the considerable material work men and women in coastal Sierra Leone invest in the attempt to nurture the webs of relations which, they hope, will catch them when their catches fail. From the raw fish handed to a stranger on the wharf to the intimate sharing of cooked rice at home, huge volumes of food circulate through Tissana's gift economy each day, in patterns that map each person's evolving network of friendships and romances. These networks of relationships are sometimes referred to locally as ‘potato rope families’, referring to their fast-growing, ‘rhizomorphous’ forms. As the article progresses, I explore the ‘darker’ side of this flexible mode of reckoning social belonging. Huge anxiety is generated by the knowledge that, in the absence of gifts to hold them together, many of these intimate relations would atrophy and collapse as rapidly as they were formed. In other cases, a gift of rice is not only the substance of survival and kinship, but also a potent expression of power.Website 
• Diggins J, 'Economic Runnaways: patronage, poverty and the pursuit of 'freedom' on Sierra Leone's maritime frontier'
  Africa 85 (2) (2015) pp.312-332
  ISSN: 0001-9720
  Abstract

  As a result of the autopsy of Sierra Leone's civil war, we have become familiar with a rather dystopian vision of ‘traditional’ economic life in that region. Combatants often described their family villages as spaces where profound inequalities were hidden within households; where labour exploitation was woven through kinship relations. This article follows several young men who fled conditions of bonded labour in their rural homes: not to join the war but to seek a new life in the commercial fishing economy. Elsewhere across the postcolonial world, there is a rich ethnographic literature illustrating that people on the fringes of the global capitalist order respond with profound unease as their economic lives become ever more strongly regulated by impersonal market forces. Less often acknowledged is the possibility that, for some people, in some contexts, severing social relations might be exactly what they want, and that therein lies the greatest appeal of an economic life characterized by market transactions. For the young men described in this article, commercial fishing appeared to offer a level of personal ‘freedom’ unimaginable within the patron–client structures of village life. However, most find themselves drawn rapidly back into new forms of extractive relationships.

  Website 

Other publications

• Mills E, Nesbitt-Ahmed Z, Diggins J, Mackieu DT, '"They Call Me Warrior": The Legacy of Conflict and the Struggle to End Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Sierra Leone'
  (2015) Website 
• Diggins, J., Mills, E., 'The Pathology of Inequality: Gender and Ebola in West Africa'
  (2015) Website 

Conferences

• February 2015,  ‘The Pathology of Inequality: Gender and Ebola in West Africa’, Ebola and Lessons for Development: Inequality, Structural Violence and Zoonotic Disease, The Wellcome Trust, London
• August 2013, ‘Worldviews’ and (Partially Obscured) Views of the World, from coastal Sierra Leone', IUAES Congress, University of Manchester.
• September 2012, ‘Material Words: Blessings, ontology, and substance of survival in coastal Sierra Leone’, Global Studies Doctoral Lecture Series, University of Sussex.
• September 2011, ‘Fleshy Fish and Hidden Worlds: The tangible and the intangible in coastal Sierra Leone’, ASA Conference, University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.
• May 2010, 'Research Transparency and Researching Secrecy in Sierra Leone’, Researching Africa Day, St Anthony’s College, Oxford.