ABSTRACT

This chapter draws from ethnographic work in northern Sierra Leone to discuss how incorporating methods of community mapping can contribute to decoloniality by unsettling assumptions of what counts as ‘knowledge.’ The maps I asked communities to make involved representations, demonstrations, and the bringing of objects in response to asking questions about how people relate to one another, the land, and ancestral sprits through ritual practice, objects, and crops. What emerged are multi-dimensional representation of space, relations, and practice, where objects and non-human beings (chickens and goats) are explained in terms of the relations they create or sustain. The use of objects in mapping helps to reveal what is knowable and how it is known in Temne communities, but it also helps to destabilise and challenge my own ways of knowing. In this sense, material objects are enunciations of concepts within Temne worlds. The method of mapping I used provided enactments and enunciations of Temne realities, and therefore challenges me to consider them, but this is claiming to know of them, rather than to know them. Such moves are necessary both intellectually as a means to destabilise Western knowledge claims, but also politically to undermine the ongoing colonial relations.