Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda

Abstract

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.

‘All in good faith?’ An ethno-historical analysis of local faith actors’ involvement in the delivery of mental health interventions in northern Uganda

“…These studies include LFAs as one actor among many. Despite a few notable exceptions (e.g., Alava, 2022), studies on faith tend to emphasise the individuated aspects of interventions that resemble Western therapies (Williams & Meinert, 2020). Constrained by time, most studies have focused on a single church or religious group, and few inquiries have examined individual therapeutic outcomes in conversation with their wider social, moral and political actions.…”

The ‘marketplace of post‐conflict assistance’ in northern Uganda and beyond

“…Indeed, across Acholiland, a growing number of small Pentecostal churches are offering healing services for various malaises connected to the conflict, with many ‘people turning here for solace, recovery, community’ and assistance (Williams, 2019, p. 176). Nevertheless, the Protestant and Catholic Churches remain the largest religious institutions in Acholiland (Alava, 2022), maintaining a substantial influence and providing much to local communities, including those searching for help and healing.…”

“…Different types of churches normally put forward various religious and/or spiritual interpretations and corresponding solutions (Alava, 2017). For instance, whereas many charismatic Pentecostal churches may often view misfortune as caused by demons, requiring prayers (Williams and Meinert, 2020), the Catholic Church in Acholi propagates and adapts a fairly Western‐centric understanding of suffering as trauma and as part of the human condition (Alava, 2022; see also Whitmore, 2019).…”

Introduction to the special issue

“…The way that rules take us back not only to fundamental questions of individual freedom, but also inter-personal justice and social community (Pirie and Scheele 2014), can extend debates on the anthropology of suffering and of goodness more broadly (Robbins 2013;Venkatesan 2015). And by rejecting hackneyed analyses of rules as either causing individuals suffering through their subjectivation, or the breaking of rules as instances of individual agency-that is, by pushing analysis beyond demonisation and idealisation, and instead accommodating multiple, at times contradictory, Henni Alava, Morgan Clarke & Alessandro Gusman aspects within one analytical frame (Ortner 2016;Alava 2022), we seek to practice a moral anthropology that reflects on anthropology's own prejudices (Fassin 2008).…”