89. A Dialogue on Love 2: How to Live with Violent Love?

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual violence, sexual assault, imprisonment, and intimate partner violence. This episode is the second installment of our mini-series on love and anthropology. What happens when love and violence are not experienced as opposites but as deeply entangled? In dialogue with Dr. Luisa Schneider, whose work examines love, violence, and legal intervention in Sierra Leone, we explore how intimate relationships are negotiated under conditions of insecurity, inequality, and post-conflict rebuilding. Through the striking local metaphor of teeth and tongue jammed together, Dr. Schneider reveals how love operates as something frictional, relational, and irreducible to simple narratives, and what is at stake when legal systems attempt to govern it. Her research also reveals how laws designed to protect can, without local grounding, produce new forms of harm by criminalizing the relationships they claim to safeguard and silencing the voices they intend to amplify. We hope this conversation deepens the investigation of love within our discipline begun in our first episode, and illuminates the importance of grounded and contextual understandings of love and its entanglements.