This talk is based on a book project on the ways in which industrial enclaves and largescale commercial agricultural projects established in the midst of rural landscapes affect agrarian livelihoods. In areas previously occupied by peasant communities of subsistence farmers, whose experience of spacetime was shaped by the seasonal alternation of manually cultivated and rotated food crops, and the longer periodicity of fallows that produced a mosaic of cultivated plots and secondary forest growth, and farming was supplemented by hunting and gathering, “new enclosures” are dramatically reshaping relations with time and place, including removal of ancient villages to new locations, and abandoning ancestral graves and sacred ritual forest groves. Local peasants have adopted a number of different strategies to accommodate, modify, or resist these changes, and several cases from Sierra Leone and Liberia will be examined here. 

Mariane C. Ferme is a sociocultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the political imagination, violence and conflict, and access to justice in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, after studying Political Science at the University of Milano, Italy, and majoring in anthropology at Wellesley College.