How to Live Safely with Bats? Ignorance(s) in post-Ebola Risk Communication (Guinea, Sierra Leone)

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) The 2013–6 Ebola disease epidemic in West Africa drove a surge of environmental communication campaigns in regions considered at-risk for Ebola, despite uncertainty about the disease's transmission pathways from animals to humans. This article examines fractures in knowledge produced through the communication of an unstable truth about the risk of contracting Ebola from an animal source. It presents sources arising from efforts of risk communication in Guinea: excerpts from community outreach materials and documented scenes of verbal jousting between communication agents and their audience, in which the status of animals, and in particular bats, as the reservoir of the Ebola virus is an object of controversies between US infectious disease experts, Sierra Leonean and Guinean project employees and residents of Forest Guinea. Several types of ignorance structure community outreach activities: reductionism inherent to "risk behaviour" research, strategic ignorance in risk communication, ignorance as an epistemic marker of social status, and the socio-political uncertainty in which post-Ebola interventions take place. Using insights from the anthropology of ignorance and development studies, I argue that asymmetries in ignorances, plural and contingent, structure risk communication and its impotence in reforming local lifeways defined as "risk behaviours."