ABSTRACT
Introduction: Liberia and Liberian Queen Rallies Since early 1990, the small West African nation of Liberia has been literally torn apart by civil war, ethnic massacres, the dissolution of the central government, occupation by foreign troops, and increasing fragmentation of the contesting armed parties. Carried on in the shadow of better known conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Kuwait, Somalia, and Rwanda, the Liberian tragedy has been largely ignored by the rest of the world. While not surprising, given its small size and lack of strategic importance to the major powers, the fact that Liberia has been the site of such complete dissolution has come as a shock to researchers concerned with the region. As the oldest independent republic in Africa, with 133 years of ostensibly "democratic" tradition and no obvious longstanding "ethnic" tensions of the kind purported for Bosnia or Rwanda, Liberia seems an unlikely candidate for catastrophic political turmoil. In a recent article, Anna Simons has raised the question of why anthropologists seem unable to come to terms with the problem of state dissolution, even as more and more of us find our field sites consumed by this process (1994, 818, 822). This essay is part of a broader attempt to confront this question.
