Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia by Danny Hoffman (review)

In this handsome volume, with more than one hundred images, most of them well-produced, glossy color photos, visual ethnographer Danny Hoffman, an anthropologist who has spent years documenting the impact of war on the city and on the lives of its youth, undertakes the explication of the life of and in four iconic buildings in Monrovia. As in his previous work, he focuses principally on the youth, especially those who fought in the war, and how they "inhabit the material world around them" (xviii). The book is a welcome hybrid, combining ethnography with visual documentation and architectural analysis to articulate how lives are shaped by and shape the city in which they are lived. It adds to a growing body of anthropological studies of the built environment and contributes to theoretical discussions of the materiality of architecture as an anthropological subject (e.g., Buchli 2013; Ingold 2013; Van der Horn 2009). It follows Hoffman's 2011 book, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which scrutinized life in the barracks as an organizing principle. This book explores the decade after the cessation of war, with its changes in demographic flows, access to capital, and global trends in structures of labor and profit.

Hoffman highlights three assumptions that form the basis for this book. Following Heidegger's assertion that "mortals must ever learn to dwell," Hoffman asserts that individuals' ways of living in urban space evolve through experiment and repetition. In Monrovia, recent experimentation has resulted from urban warfare that changes the physical, psychic, social, and economic systems, but also fosters radicality and reactionary conservatism as a creative response to war's destructive consequences. During such periods of profound change, politics and economics may move in entirely different directions.

In his introduction, Hoffman offers an overview of how these assumptions will be illustrated and supported in the following chapters. The ability to "dwell" that his youth subjects must acquire no longer aims to produce innovative forms; it is, instead, a learning of how to "inhabit ruins" (4). Chapter 1, "Live Dangerously, My Brothers: Ex-Combatants and Political Economy of Space," is an ethnography through vignettes of young citizens who have recently laid down their arms to attempt to survive a precarious residence in a city with few assurances of security or motivations for innovation to offer. The next four chapters offer a Tedlockian narrative through photowriting about the political economy of four edifices. Each of these photo-essay chapters ends with a "photographic postscript," the author's interpretation of the photographs displayed therein. Chapter 2, "The Ministry of Defense: Excessive Architecture," explicates, through ten photos and eighteen pages of text, the rise and fall of a brutalist monument to Samuel Doe and his generation's aspirations to permanent power. Chapter 3, "E. J. Royce: The Corporate (Post)Modern," describes a towering structure built to testify to Liberia's modernity and support of American-style free enterprise—the blind from which, just two decades later, Charles Taylor and his troops hunted the rebel forces as they entered the city. Hoffman argues that both uses served violent economies. Chapter 4, "Hotel Africa: The Uncritical Ruin," speaks of a former international landmark in the city, one that has been consumed from the inside and is now simply "dust holding shape" (116), with little significance beyond the lack of any meaning in the city's skyline, other than a reminder of the city's decline. Therein lies its purpose in this book: to stand in contrast to the other buildings whose stories of ruination abound. Chapter 5, "Liberia Broadcasting System: Three Utopias," describes another type of postwar building, one that is not in ruins, but also not in use.

Chapter 6, "Finding Urban Form: A Coda," attempts to offer insight on the future of African urban built forms, such as those elucidated in the previous chapters. Although certain possibilities for dwelling have...