Books by Henni Alava
Bloomsbury Academic, 2022
Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda sheds critical light on the complex an... more Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda’s largest religious communities, it maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. It shows how churches’ responses to the war were enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet churches’ embeddedness in structures of historical violence made their attempts to nurture peace liable to compound conflict. At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ‘confusion’, which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates ‘confusion’ as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence.
Honorable mention, 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion
Journal articles by Henni Alava
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2023
This article develops the concept of citizenship moods to analyse citizens’ emotional (dis)engage... more This article develops the concept of citizenship moods to analyse citizens’ emotional (dis)engagements with the state in Uganda. Through a reflexive analysis of ethnographic and media material from 2019–2021, we claim that around the time of the 2021 elections, after 35 years of rule by Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, the most prevalent moods among Ugandans were fear, contentment, cynicism, anger, hope, and despondency. Prior to the elections, hope soared, but this gave way to despondency following the state’s violent crack-down on its opposition. Building on work on citizenship, affect, emotion, and politics, we theorise that citizenship moods are experienced both individually and collectively; coexist, transform, and fluctuate over time; and affect and are affected by political and societal change. In Uganda, a key change is the growth of intersecting ethnic, regional, generational, and class inequalities. Analysing how citizenship moods structure, transform, and vitalise the relationship between the state and its citizens contributes to imagining the possibilities of democratic change in Uganda and beyond. The article introduces a method of cartoon-powered sociopolitical analysis. The inherent attunement of cartoons to bodily postures and expressions enables analytical insight and effective communication of research results, and can contribute to advancing research justice in Africa-centred academia.
Suomen Antropologi - Journal of the Finnish Antropological Society, 2022
Rules concerning romantic relationships and sex-what we term 'purity rules'-are central to Pentec... more Rules concerning romantic relationships and sex-what we term 'purity rules'-are central to Pentecostalism in Uganda. In public church arenas, the born-again variant of the rules laid down during Uganda's 'ABC' response to HIV/AIDS-'abstain till marriage and be faithful once you marry'-are presented as clear and non-negotiable. Yet in church members' lives, and in their conversations with each other or in small church groups, space is often created for interpretation and deliberation about the officially strict rules. In this article, we use ethnographic material from fieldwork in urban Pentecostal churches in Uganda to describe how rules work on people, and people work on rules. We describe this process of relational 'rulework' as taking place at the nexus of an individual's relationship to the church, to small groups at the church, and to God. The dynamics of rulework become particularly evident at occasions where rules are transgressed, or where the nature of the rules-and thus of possible transgressionis questioned. Three central axes of rulework can be identified: first, the (claimed) transgressor's position in church hierarchy; second, the level of publicity at which their transgression is made known to others; and third, their relationship to God. Approaching rules as objects of anthropological analysis foregrounds how what Morgan Clarke (2015) has called the 'ruliness' of religious traditions, and what we describe as the messiness of religious adherents' lives, exist in parallel with each other. Where 'ruliness' and 'messiness' interact is where rulework takes place and where it can most productively be ethnographically observed.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2022
In 1977, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Janani Luwum, was killed under orders from Presi... more In 1977, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Janani Luwum, was killed under orders from President Idi Amin following his public criticism of Amin's reign of terror. This article offers an ethnographic case study of a choir named in Luwum's honour to extend existing research on the interrelations of Christianity, citizenship, and politics in contemporary Uganda. To do so, I draw a number of conceptual tools-tiny citizenship, authentic citizenship, twisted politics, and love-from work by and referencing Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and Gary Alan Fine. First, analyzing the choir's participation in the national commemoration of Janani Luwum Day at Uganda's State House in 2021, I argue that the possibility of authentic citizenship in the Ugandan national public is constrained by twisted politics. At the State House, the Church of Uganda effectively dismissed Luwum's activist legacy and consolidated its clientelist relationship with the increasingly authoritarian NRM state, thus contributing to the further shrinking of political space in Uganda. Second, I analyze the Janani Luwum Choir's daily practices, and the ideals and rhetorics nurtured at them, as an example of a tiny public. I argue that the tiny citizenship fostered by the choir is compatible with the expectations the Ugandan state has of its citizens. Yet in a national, regional, and church context marked by long-term conflict, exclusionary politics, and low levels of trust, the choir also stands out. As a space characterized by love, care, egalitarianism, and the maintenance of harmony, it offers its members a vision and experience of a different world.
African Journal of Gender and Religion, 2022
Many feminist scholars have experienced receiving critique for what are claimed to be overly narr... more Many feminist scholars have experienced receiving critique for what are claimed to be overly narrative, emotional, or insufficiently scholarly pieces of writing. This piece speaks to this experience. The text was originally read as a presentation in a webinar on 'Patchwork Ethnography'. In resisting the coerciveness of dominant academic rhetorical codes, the paper calls for researchers to be more transparent about the devastating effects of patriarchy and neoliberal academia on their personal and professional lives. The choices we make about what and how we research; what and where we publish; and how we write; can and should contribute to countering those effects, and envisioning and enacting a world where being an academic doesn't hurt.
Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2019
This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for
thinking thro... more This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for
thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic Church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at times discordant and contradictory sounds, and cannot be consigned to single-cause explanations such as ‘trauma’ or ‘recovery’. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between these modes of amplification calls for reflection on the temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.
Development and Change, 2019
Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over... more Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to church land in contemporary Uganda draw on: 1) notions of belonging to the land; 2) views about the nature of churches as communities;3) discontent regarding whether customary land owners gave churches user rights or ownership; and 4) assessment of the churches’ success in ensuring that the land works for the common good. The article develops a novel approach to analysing the changing meaning of the landholdings of religious institutions, thus extending ongoing discussions about land, politics,development and religion in Africa.
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2016
Religion has influenced Ugandan politics ever since colonial times. While the interrelations of r... more Religion has influenced Ugandan politics ever since colonial times. While the interrelations of religion and politics have altered since the coming to power of president Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), religion continues to influence Ugandan public culture and formal politics in important ways. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Kampala and Acholi, as well as analysis of media reporting and discussions in social media, this article focuses on the role of religious leaders during Uganda’s 2016 parliamentary and presidential elections. We argue that the striking differences between Ugandan clerics’ teaching on politics relate in part to genuine differences in religious beliefs, but also to patronage, intimidation, and ethnicity, and to the strategic calculations religious leaders make about how best to affect change in a constricted political environment. In discussion with previous research on religion and politics in Africa, and utilising analytical concepts from the study of publics, the article proposes a model of religious (de)politicisation, whereby both the politicising and depoliticising effects of religion are acknowledged. To do so, the analysis distinguishes between NGO-ised and enchanted planes of religion, and shows that on both planes, religion contributed simultaneously to enhancing and diminishing the space for public debate in election-time Uganda. While many religious leaders actively or silently supported the incumbent regime, religious leaders also took vocal public stands, fostered political action, and catered for vernacular imaginaries of political critique, by so doing expanding the space of public debate. However, by performing public debate that remained vague on crucial issues, and by promoting a religious narrative of peace, religious leaders participated in the enactment of a façade of political debate, in so doing legitimising the autocratic facets of Museveni’s hybrid regime. Acknowledging religion as an important constituent of public culture contributes to more nuanced understandings of election dynamics in Eastern Africa.
Critical African Studies
Christian churches have played crucial but diverse roles in public debates over homosexuality in ... more Christian churches have played crucial but diverse roles in public debates over homosexuality in Africa. In contrast to the vocal and explicit homophobia witnessed in many Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs), homosexuality has until recently been an overwhelmingly silenced issue in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda, and an almost complete non-issue in the local Catholic Church. This article suggests that while this silence in part relates to the temporal proximity of the Northern Ugandan war, the absence of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) activism in the region, and the hesitance of mainline churches to talk about sex, it is also embedded in what are considered to be customary Acholi understandings of sexuality. Offering an analysis of Acholi Catholic teaching on peace and the family, the article suggests that Catholicism has entrenched heteronormative patriarchy in Acholi society. However, as illustrated by the unpopularity of church weddings, the norms that govern sexuality are negotiated in the dynamic space between religion and what are contemporarily understood as ‘modern’ and ‘customary’ Acholi moral sensibilities. The article emphasizes the need for scholarship on religion and homosexuality to extend beyond PCCs and capital cities, and beyond the most explicit forms of public homophobia in Africa.
Suomen Antropologi - Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2022
Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignifican... more Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignificance, their strictness or laxness, and their rigidity or flexibility in the face of change are constant themes of debate, both within and outside religious communities. Yet they have arguably not been given the attention they deserve within recent anthropology. Since the rise of practice theory, rules have more often been considered something to look past in the search for agency. Where the new anthropology of ethics has addressed religious orthopraxy, it has largely been through the lens of the cultivation of virtuous self, or the ways in which moral rules may become especially salient in extraordinary circumstances, such as moments of radical cultural transformation. But religious rules are not just a function of ethical crisis or virtuoso projects of the self. They are also a taken-for-granted part of everyday life for millions of people worldwide. In this introduction and the case studies that follow, we thus aim to move beyond current perspectives, reflecting on both the nature of religious rules themselves and the ways in which they are negotiated in believers’ everyday lives.
Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 2019
F ew things inspire the anthropologist’s imagination and analytical speculation as much as silenc... more F ew things inspire the anthropologist’s imagination and analytical speculation as much as silences and secrets encountered in fieldwork. They compel one to ponder whether something interesting might lie beneath what appears to be covered by silence or secrets, and if so, through what means that something might be uncovered. Relatedly,
few things launch the anthropologist into more profound methodological, ethical, and political deliberations than the silences one does unveil and the secrets one is made privy to in the field, many of these converging in the
question of how secrets and silence should be treated in one’s writing. This special issue delves into the interconnections between these two: silences and secrets in fieldwork encounters, and the silences that are produced through the knowledge we gain within them. The articles examine how secrets and silences are embedded in social structures: how they include and exclude people and map the operations of power, and how they are reproduced, transformed, and broken in the narratives people tell about
themselves.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2022
This special issue showcases four analyses of lived citizenship in Uganda – a country previously ... more This special issue showcases four analyses of lived citizenship in Uganda – a country previously known as a donor darling but, recently, better known for its steady slide towards authoritarian rule (Ssentongo 2021, Tapscott 2021, Wilkins et. al. 2021, Wiegratz et. al. 2018). Individually, the articles draw on and contribute to diverse strands of debate within the field of citizenship studies. As a collection, however, they serve to illustrate a space characterized by three different knowledge interests in development-related research on African societies. A central contention is that the very notion of ‘development-related research’ requires definition; as a field, it is constituted and its boundaries are defined by different actors’ considerations of what is relevant for either the policy, practice, critique, or the very definition of ‘development’. When conducted on societies in Africa, it intersects with African studies and anthropological contributions.
Chapters in edited books by Henni Alava
Learning, Philosophy, and African Citizenship , 2022
This chapter contributes to understanding the space between religion, gender and citizenship thro... more This chapter contributes to understanding the space between religion, gender and citizenship through a focus on teaching and learning about marriage in Ugandan churches. While pastors focused marriage teaching on the primacy of a church wedding, sexual purity and harmony through hierarchy, church-going women saw cohesion, spirituality and physical survival as cornerstones of an ideal relationship. By juxtaposing how women saw themselves as having learned these ideals, and how pastors saw themselves as teaching theirs, we illustrate that teaching and learning about gender, relationships and citizenship—and the character-moulding concomitant within these processes—occurs more in everyday lives than in places formally set out for the purpose. To achieve contextualized understanding of citizenship in religious contexts, it is important to pay attention to both religious teaching and practice and to develop methodological tools that identify how men and women actually learn about their worth, rights and responsibilities as citizens.
Practices of Citizenship in East Africa. Perspectives from Philosophical Pragmatism, 2019
Drawing on ethnographic research in the Acholi town of Kitgum in northern Uganda, this chapter il... more Drawing on ethnographic research in the Acholi town of Kitgum in northern Uganda, this chapter illustrates how citizenship practices are embedded in particular relationships between the state and its citizens. Two key arenas for learning are identified: the everyday, which in this region is tinged by memories of past violence and fears of its recurrence, and moments of spectacular state performance such as the burial of a prominent politician. The chapter shows how practices of citizenship are learned through embodied experiences: by taking part in public debate, by voting, or by greeting a flag, but also by running away from a soldier, or by staying quiet due to fear. The chapter’s overall aim is to show why any attempts to foster growth into citizenship must commence from recognition and analysis of the everyday practices and spectacular events through which existing modes of citizenship have emerged.
What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa. Brill, 2018
This chapter analyses how the public discourse of ‘lost youth’ in post-war Acholiland manifests a... more This chapter analyses how the public discourse of ‘lost youth’ in post-war Acholiland manifests and is engaged with, particularly among well-educated Catholic and Protestant youngsters and young adults in the region who considered themselves ‘not lost’. I argue that the discourse of ‘lostness’ emerged in relation to my young informants’ disillusioned views on formal politics and the Ugandan state, and suggest that in distinguishing themselves from those who are ‘lost’, and in suggesting solutions to ‘lostness’, young Catholics and Protestants were expressing a particular kind of political agency: not being lost was seen as a prerequisite to being able to contribute to societal development and, ultimately, to being a politically engaged citizen. Finally, I demonstrate that, although the discourse of ‘lostness’ expressed a moral-panic type concern with the perceived uncontrollability of youth (Diouf 2003), embodying desires for rather conservative societal transformations, the discourse was also employed as a tool of critique against the ruling government.
"Ethnography of silence and confusion in Northern Uganda". In Jeremy Gould & Katja Uusihakala "Re... more "Ethnography of silence and confusion in Northern Uganda". In Jeremy Gould & Katja Uusihakala "Researcher in front of the mirror. Reflexivity and ethnographic knowledge" Gaudeamus, 2016
("St Mary's mission: a 100-year node of politics, development and religion in Northern Uganda". I... more ("St Mary's mission: a 100-year node of politics, development and religion in Northern Uganda". In Elina Vuola (ed.) "Religion and development. Perspectives to Finnish development assistance and research" SKS Tietolipas, 2015)
Encyclopedia article by Henni Alava
Howard Chiang (ed.) Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) History. , 2019
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Farmington Hills, MI.
Publications for professional audiences by Henni Alava
For Better for Worse. The Role of Religion in Development Cooperation, 2016
What should development organisations take into account when
considering whether to provide fund... more What should development organisations take into account when
considering whether to provide funding to a long-established church
in the Global South, or to an organisation affiliated with such a church?
Drawing on research in Northern Uganda, this article suggests that the key
to addressing this question is in recognition of churches’ unique historical,
social and religious embeddedness in local societies. From the point of view of donor organisations, this embeddedness is paradoxical: the same things that enable churches to ‘deliver development’ in an unusually effective and meaningful way, make churches appear as challenging grassroots partners for development. This is because the spiritual, historical and political embeddedness of churches makes the effects of their activities greater than of organisations lacking such embeddedness – whether those effects be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The notion of embeddedness draws attention to the need for donors to cease to think of churches in negative terms, as foreign impositions. The history of missionary churches is inseparably embroiled in the history of colonisation. However, the religious faiths and practices initially brought by missionaries to many parts of Africa are now an integral part of the life of many local adherents. Church members experience churches as their own – often much more so than they do the UN, NGOs, or secular discourses of human rights and development.
Academic theses by Henni Alava
This study explores how the Catholic and Protestant (Anglican) Churches have influenced the negot... more This study explores how the Catholic and Protestant (Anglican) Churches have influenced the negotiation of societal co-existence in the aftermath of over two decades of brutal war in northern Uganda. Drawing from a total of nine months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2016 that focused on a Catholic and a Protestant parish in Kitgum town, this study provides a historically grounded ethnographic analysis of the relationship between mainline churches and politics in Acholiland. It argues that churches, as socially, politically, and materially embedded institutions, have performed as sites of, and provided individuals and communities resources for, narrative imagination.
The two churches were at the forefront of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI), which gained global acclaim and local respect for its efforts to draw the international community’s attention to the war, and to convince the warring parties to embark on peace talks. Yet the churches, which have been deeply entangled in Ugandan politics since the country's independence, were themselves hard-hit by the war and, as this study shows, their political and societal role in its aftermath has been complex.
First, rather than being the monolithic actors they are often perceived to be, churches are deeply woven into networks of ethnicity, kinship, party politics, government, patronage, and friendship, and the criss-crossing lines of division that cut across society also run through the churches themselves. Second, although public church events function as platforms for performances of statehood, they also provide arenas for genuine political debate and critique of Uganda’s ruling government. Third, while churches have taken part in forging a powerful and at times healing utopian vision of a peaceful future in post-war Acholiland, this utopia lends itself to entrenching boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, both within the churches, and within society.
To make these claims, the study draws analytical tools from debates in the anthropology of hope and of the good, in political theology, in studies on political narratives and utopias, and in multidisciplinary research on Christianity and politics in Africa. The thread followed throughout is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ‘confusion’, which emerges as both a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty, and as a state of affairs within a community. By analysing public church events at which elaborate political narratives are woven, as well as quotidian moments in which silence, fear, and hope are encountered and expressed, the study highlights how ‘confusion’ diminishes the possibilities of crafting hopeful imaginaries for a less violent future – yet also the multiple ways in which confusion and violence are addressed.
The notion of confusion is also employed as an epistemological and ethical device. Acknowledging the challenges of studying violence and its aftermath; the futility of claims to absolute knowledge in situations characterised by uncertainty and silence; and the difficulty of transforming the experiences of others into text in an ethically uncompromised way; the study advocates scholarship that embraces hesitance and experimentation rather than certainty and disciplinary rigidity. In a world increasingly framed by oppositional extremes, there is a need for research that, instead of seeking clear-cut answers, asks questions that provoke recognition of complexity and confusion, and explores the ways in which communities and individuals orientate themselves towards the future in the face of them.
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Books by Henni Alava
Honorable mention, 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion
Journal articles by Henni Alava
thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic Church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at times discordant and contradictory sounds, and cannot be consigned to single-cause explanations such as ‘trauma’ or ‘recovery’. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between these modes of amplification calls for reflection on the temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.
few things launch the anthropologist into more profound methodological, ethical, and political deliberations than the silences one does unveil and the secrets one is made privy to in the field, many of these converging in the
question of how secrets and silence should be treated in one’s writing. This special issue delves into the interconnections between these two: silences and secrets in fieldwork encounters, and the silences that are produced through the knowledge we gain within them. The articles examine how secrets and silences are embedded in social structures: how they include and exclude people and map the operations of power, and how they are reproduced, transformed, and broken in the narratives people tell about
themselves.
Chapters in edited books by Henni Alava
Encyclopedia article by Henni Alava
Publications for professional audiences by Henni Alava
considering whether to provide funding to a long-established church
in the Global South, or to an organisation affiliated with such a church?
Drawing on research in Northern Uganda, this article suggests that the key
to addressing this question is in recognition of churches’ unique historical,
social and religious embeddedness in local societies. From the point of view of donor organisations, this embeddedness is paradoxical: the same things that enable churches to ‘deliver development’ in an unusually effective and meaningful way, make churches appear as challenging grassroots partners for development. This is because the spiritual, historical and political embeddedness of churches makes the effects of their activities greater than of organisations lacking such embeddedness – whether those effects be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The notion of embeddedness draws attention to the need for donors to cease to think of churches in negative terms, as foreign impositions. The history of missionary churches is inseparably embroiled in the history of colonisation. However, the religious faiths and practices initially brought by missionaries to many parts of Africa are now an integral part of the life of many local adherents. Church members experience churches as their own – often much more so than they do the UN, NGOs, or secular discourses of human rights and development.
Academic theses by Henni Alava
The two churches were at the forefront of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI), which gained global acclaim and local respect for its efforts to draw the international community’s attention to the war, and to convince the warring parties to embark on peace talks. Yet the churches, which have been deeply entangled in Ugandan politics since the country's independence, were themselves hard-hit by the war and, as this study shows, their political and societal role in its aftermath has been complex.
First, rather than being the monolithic actors they are often perceived to be, churches are deeply woven into networks of ethnicity, kinship, party politics, government, patronage, and friendship, and the criss-crossing lines of division that cut across society also run through the churches themselves. Second, although public church events function as platforms for performances of statehood, they also provide arenas for genuine political debate and critique of Uganda’s ruling government. Third, while churches have taken part in forging a powerful and at times healing utopian vision of a peaceful future in post-war Acholiland, this utopia lends itself to entrenching boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, both within the churches, and within society.
To make these claims, the study draws analytical tools from debates in the anthropology of hope and of the good, in political theology, in studies on political narratives and utopias, and in multidisciplinary research on Christianity and politics in Africa. The thread followed throughout is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ‘confusion’, which emerges as both a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty, and as a state of affairs within a community. By analysing public church events at which elaborate political narratives are woven, as well as quotidian moments in which silence, fear, and hope are encountered and expressed, the study highlights how ‘confusion’ diminishes the possibilities of crafting hopeful imaginaries for a less violent future – yet also the multiple ways in which confusion and violence are addressed.
The notion of confusion is also employed as an epistemological and ethical device. Acknowledging the challenges of studying violence and its aftermath; the futility of claims to absolute knowledge in situations characterised by uncertainty and silence; and the difficulty of transforming the experiences of others into text in an ethically uncompromised way; the study advocates scholarship that embraces hesitance and experimentation rather than certainty and disciplinary rigidity. In a world increasingly framed by oppositional extremes, there is a need for research that, instead of seeking clear-cut answers, asks questions that provoke recognition of complexity and confusion, and explores the ways in which communities and individuals orientate themselves towards the future in the face of them.
Honorable mention, 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion
thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic Church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at times discordant and contradictory sounds, and cannot be consigned to single-cause explanations such as ‘trauma’ or ‘recovery’. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between these modes of amplification calls for reflection on the temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.
few things launch the anthropologist into more profound methodological, ethical, and political deliberations than the silences one does unveil and the secrets one is made privy to in the field, many of these converging in the
question of how secrets and silence should be treated in one’s writing. This special issue delves into the interconnections between these two: silences and secrets in fieldwork encounters, and the silences that are produced through the knowledge we gain within them. The articles examine how secrets and silences are embedded in social structures: how they include and exclude people and map the operations of power, and how they are reproduced, transformed, and broken in the narratives people tell about
themselves.
considering whether to provide funding to a long-established church
in the Global South, or to an organisation affiliated with such a church?
Drawing on research in Northern Uganda, this article suggests that the key
to addressing this question is in recognition of churches’ unique historical,
social and religious embeddedness in local societies. From the point of view of donor organisations, this embeddedness is paradoxical: the same things that enable churches to ‘deliver development’ in an unusually effective and meaningful way, make churches appear as challenging grassroots partners for development. This is because the spiritual, historical and political embeddedness of churches makes the effects of their activities greater than of organisations lacking such embeddedness – whether those effects be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The notion of embeddedness draws attention to the need for donors to cease to think of churches in negative terms, as foreign impositions. The history of missionary churches is inseparably embroiled in the history of colonisation. However, the religious faiths and practices initially brought by missionaries to many parts of Africa are now an integral part of the life of many local adherents. Church members experience churches as their own – often much more so than they do the UN, NGOs, or secular discourses of human rights and development.
The two churches were at the forefront of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI), which gained global acclaim and local respect for its efforts to draw the international community’s attention to the war, and to convince the warring parties to embark on peace talks. Yet the churches, which have been deeply entangled in Ugandan politics since the country's independence, were themselves hard-hit by the war and, as this study shows, their political and societal role in its aftermath has been complex.
First, rather than being the monolithic actors they are often perceived to be, churches are deeply woven into networks of ethnicity, kinship, party politics, government, patronage, and friendship, and the criss-crossing lines of division that cut across society also run through the churches themselves. Second, although public church events function as platforms for performances of statehood, they also provide arenas for genuine political debate and critique of Uganda’s ruling government. Third, while churches have taken part in forging a powerful and at times healing utopian vision of a peaceful future in post-war Acholiland, this utopia lends itself to entrenching boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, both within the churches, and within society.
To make these claims, the study draws analytical tools from debates in the anthropology of hope and of the good, in political theology, in studies on political narratives and utopias, and in multidisciplinary research on Christianity and politics in Africa. The thread followed throughout is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ‘confusion’, which emerges as both a sense of ambivalence and uncertainty, and as a state of affairs within a community. By analysing public church events at which elaborate political narratives are woven, as well as quotidian moments in which silence, fear, and hope are encountered and expressed, the study highlights how ‘confusion’ diminishes the possibilities of crafting hopeful imaginaries for a less violent future – yet also the multiple ways in which confusion and violence are addressed.
The notion of confusion is also employed as an epistemological and ethical device. Acknowledging the challenges of studying violence and its aftermath; the futility of claims to absolute knowledge in situations characterised by uncertainty and silence; and the difficulty of transforming the experiences of others into text in an ethically uncompromised way; the study advocates scholarship that embraces hesitance and experimentation rather than certainty and disciplinary rigidity. In a world increasingly framed by oppositional extremes, there is a need for research that, instead of seeking clear-cut answers, asks questions that provoke recognition of complexity and confusion, and explores the ways in which communities and individuals orientate themselves towards the future in the face of them.