For the last fifteen years – beginning with the publication of Paul Richards's Fighting for the Rain Forest – the Upper Guinea Coast has figured as a zone of particularly vibrant ethno-historical research and writing, inspired predominantly by the waves of violence wracking Liberia and Sierra Leone. Composed of an introduction and thirteen richly textured contributions by scholars representing an array of theoretical and empirical concentrations, The Powerful Presence of the Past stands as a welcome and challenging reminder of just how vast the possibilities for original historical and ethnographic work across this sub-region continue to be.

Seeking to advance forms of inquiry that contest and reach beyond dominant trends in the ‘analysis of wars and violence’, the editors present the volume as an initiative to expand or refine historically attuned understandings of ‘social mechanisms that affect both the processes of integration and conflict at the local, regional, and national levels’ (p. 1). Novel or modified approaches to classic political-anthropological themes such as the sources and trajectories of patrimonial authority, landlord–stranger reciprocities, and creolization figure prominently in several of the essays.

While the contributions are grouped under four thematic clusters – ‘(Pre-)colonial legacies’, ‘Revisiting the politics of elite culture’, ‘The power and politics of memories’, and ‘Continuity and change in intergenerational and gender relations’ – many readers are likely to explore and respond to The Powerful Presence of the Past in more geographical terms. Read this way, the volume comprises four main territorial foci: Liberia, the Liberian-Guinean border, Sierra Leone, and the coastal region of the Republic of Guinea. (Single essays are also devoted to the Casamance and Guinea-Bissau.) New perspectives emerge in the work on each of these areas, generating sharpened appreciation of patterned and asymmetrical experiences and understandings of socio-political transformations occurring in localities spanning extensive swathes of the sub-region.

The chapters on Liberia – by Elizabeth Tonkin and Stephen Ellis – challenge readers to grasp manifold forms of marginality, opacity and violence that have structured local collective conflicts and social imaginaries from the early nineteenth century to the present. In his remarkable discussion of the volatile roles of ‘imaginary weapons’ in Liberian society and politics, Ellis poses one of the most vital interpretive challenges facing scholars of the Upper Guinea Coast as a whole: ‘It is unsatisfactory to view societies with reference to what they are not, as is done when they are classified as ‘stateless’. It is far better to find models of what they are or were, in other words to indentify structures or ideas that have been central to the historical experience of these societies’ (p. 185). Through their detailed case studies of the workings of Mandingo collective memory and political-military tactics along the Liberian-Guinean border, James Fairhead's and Christian Højbjerg's chapters contribute further to the volume's depictions of the range of real and imagined communities that have come into being over the course of different chapters of Liberian nation building and war.

While deeply concerned with wide-ranging socio-historical factors shaping recent conflict, the chapters on Sierra Leone – by Jacqueline Knörr, Susan Shepler and Krijn Peters – are likely to prove of exceptional interest to readers seeking new perspectives on the travails and possibilities facing the post-war nation. Knörr's discussion of the historical vicissitudes and recently increased visibility and attractiveness of Krio cultural legacies among Sierra Leonean youths of diverse backgrounds creates substantial optimism for broader political renewal. By contrast, Peters's portrayals of the ‘post-slavery conditions of social dependency and vagrancy’ that functioned over time to forge a youthful ‘rural underclass … ripe for militia recruitment’ generate a far more sobering picture of the depths of injustice and resentment that Sierra Leone's current government and civil society will have to somehow confront, appease and strive to overturn for a long while to come (p. 325).

The volume's emphasis on contemporary Guinean affairs is to be welcomed, for a variety of reasons. Among the more interesting conjectural points raised in the introduction is: ‘Why did the breakdown of the state in Guinea-Bissau and the state's incapacity to satisfy the basic needs of citizens of the Republic of Guinea not result in the bloody violence and atrocious warfare that ensued in Sierra Leone and Liberia?’ (p. 13). More broadly, are there different routes to (relative, unstable) peace in much the same way that there are distinct, overdetermined routes to war? Neither Ramon Sarró's nor David Berliner's perceptive studies of culture change and ethnic tensions in the coastal region north of Conakry resolve these questions. They do however track a complex ascendance of rhetorics of autochthony and rigidifying social-territorial identities among communities once known for their incorporative, rather than exclusivist, dynamics. These contributions' resonances with ongoing work documenting the formation of violent ethnic divisiveness in Côte d'Ivoire – not to mention some of the well-known facts of Liberia's civil war – are troubling to say the least. But grim prognostications for Guinea's – or any other nation's – future would go very much against the compellingly anti-deterministic spirit of the volume as a whole.