Dirty things: spiritual pollution and life after the Lord’s Resistance Army

Victor, Letha; Porter, Holly

doi:10.1080/17531055.2017.1373441

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Years of armed conflict have transformed into new problems, such as widespread alcoholism, domestic violence, and poverty (Meinert & Whyte, 2017). The many "bad deaths" (otoo marac) from the violence and killing during the years of war were widely seen as having generated various kinds of spiritual problems (Finnstr€ om, 2008;Victor & Porter, 2017). Spiritual problems related to war and violence are traditionally known in Acholi as cen, a haunting of the past, in the form of either the spirits of people who died unjustly or a more general spiritual disturbance of an area or family (Meinert & Whyte, 2017).…”

Section: Background and Field Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Pentecostal-charismatic Christian discourses on spirits and demons have much in common with elsewhere in Africa (Meyer, 1998(Meyer, , 1999 and globally (Robbins, 2004b). These conceptions often blend together with more traditional notions of cen and with psychiatric discourse, for example with the concept of trauma (Meinert & Whyte, 2017;Victor & Porter, 2017;Williams & Meinert, 2017). However, in daily discourse such issues will often be referred to with non-specific demonstratives such as "these things" or "it" (Meinert & Whyte, 2017).…”

Section: Background and Field Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

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“An automatic Bible in the brain”: Trauma and prayer among Acholi Pentecostals in northern Uganda

Williams

2021

Transcult Psychiatry

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This article examines the role of prayers for traumatized survivors of war within a Pentecostal-charismatic community in post-conflict northern Uganda. It argues that becoming part of a church group and learning certain regimes of prayer can work toward symptom relief and recovery for people suffering from traumatic experiences. The study builds on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural northern Uganda, with extensive participant observation of religious practices and interviews with rural church congregants. The article attempts to show, through a single case narrative, how individual prayer practices are trained and learned and to identify features of prayer that may alter the individual experience of distress. Analytically, the article builds on Tanya Luhrmann’s scholarship on prayer and applies this conceptual framework to a post-conflict context. The study expands on Luhrmann’s concepts of prayer as an emotional technology in order to understand how psychiatric symptoms are managed within a Pentecostal-charismatic community. The article further argues that a conceptual focus on training of skills can contribute to debates on the universal versus particular characteristics of psychiatric expression and concepts of mind. This argument contributes to current debates on non-clinical ways of managing traumatic experiences and to debates about models of mind in different cultural settings.

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Section: Background and Field Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Field Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

“An automatic Bible in the brain”: Trauma and prayer among Acholi Pentecostals in northern Uganda

Williams

2021

Transcult Psychiatry

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“…We therefore take a basic phenomenological approach to the problems experienced by the people we have interacted with in the course of research. We strive to take things 'as they are' (Jackson 1996), not searching for empirical 'truth' or 'existence' of the spiritual force of a curse, but how they work as social realities, having observed that our respondents do not experience all spiritual phenomena as supernatural, but as arising from both ordinary and extraordinary events, local histories, and social processes (Victor and Porter 2017).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naked Bodies and Collective Action: Repertoires of Protest in Uganda’s Militarised, Authoritarian Regime

et al. 2019

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How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes-and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with countryor region-wide political action.

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“… 8 See, for example, Crazzolara (1938: 99), p’Bitek (1971), Finnström (2008: 159) and Victor and Porter (2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 16 This behaviour is known as one of many types of kiir , or abominations (Victor and Porter, 2017). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Those who go underwater: Indignation, sentiment, and ethical immanence in northern Uganda

Victor

2019

Anthropological Theory

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Anthropologists have engaged in a sustained discussion on the parameters and temporality of ethical life. If one understands the ethical as intrinsic to ordinary acts and practice, rather than solely evident in moments of crisis or ‘discursive interaction’, then ethnographers have been tasked with better describing and locating practical judgment in the lived experiences of their interlocutors, who daily encounter existential ambiguity. In situations where chronic violence makes crisis itself quotidian, and the appearance of ‘moral breakdown’ is mundane, the waters of anthropological ethics become even more muddy. This article takes up that consideration by examining ongoing ethical projects amongst Acholi residents of socially disrupted northern Uganda, where ethnographers are also called to relate and deliberate. It describes the problem of purported spirit attacks and witchcraft at a secondary school for girls in the town of Gulu, which many of the pupils judge to be the work of lute ceto pii (‘those who go underwater’), a category of devil worshippers thought by many Ugandans to be the source of ill-gotten wealth, power and fame, to cause misfortune, and to signal an imminent end to life as they know it. Reminiscent of the slave revolt detailed by Nietzsche, wherein a new type of morality is founded upon a ressentiment of the powerful, in contemporary Uganda acts of acknowledgment, passion, irony and ritual nevertheless reflect ethical underdeterminacy. I argue that interpreting and responding to such rancour is a question not just of tracing the genealogy of moral sentiment or indignation, but of acknowledging and acting (despite) the underdeterminacy of affective forces that inflect the palimpsest of Acholi ontologies.

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Dirty things: spiritual pollution and life after the Lord’s Resistance Army

Cited by 23 publications

References 20 publications

“An automatic Bible in the brain”: Trauma and prayer among Acholi Pentecostals in northern Uganda

“An automatic Bible in the brain”: Trauma and prayer among Acholi Pentecostals in northern Uganda

Naked Bodies and Collective Action: Repertoires of Protest in Uganda’s Militarised, Authoritarian Regime

Those who go underwater: Indignation, sentiment, and ethical immanence in northern Uganda

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