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

Abstract

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.

Occult Economies, Demonic Gifts, and Ontological Alterity: An Evangelical Biography of Evil and Redemption in Rural South Sudan

“…Legitimate exchange establishes relations that promote or produce society and culture, while illegitimate exchanges such as those with demons or witches are ultimately only destructive. As with similar accounts of satanic dealings elsewhere (Meyer 1995;Taussig 1980;Victor 2019), Acholi South Sudanese evangelicals were quick to recount stories in which naïve but greedy individuals make a pact with the devil and later regret that decision. As Bonhomme argues, in Africa, where witchcraft and perverted gifts are intimately interconnected, such exchanges are often really 'sacrifices disguised as gifts ' (2012, 220).…”

“…Under the water, there are demon cities. This is also taken to be common knowledge across much of sub-Saharan Africa (Allen 2015;De Boeck 2005;Meyer 1995;Pype 2017;Victor 2019), including in the Acholi-speaking area of South Sudan where I undertook PhD fieldwork during 2013 and 2014. Indeed, you only need attend to the wickedness of the world to see how these two everyday facts of evangelical life are intimately connected.…”

“…Therefore this paper links Acholi demonic narratives to aspects of the occult economy, demonstrating that, at least partially, they are local manifestations of wider attempts to understand those mutually reinforcing processes known by such terms as colonialism, globalisation, or modernisation. However, as well as the usual economic analyses of African narratives about zombie workers and demon pacts, I highlight how local systems of meaning incorporate wider regional and global cosmological figures, practices, and understandings such as underwater demon worlds (Allen 2015;Apter 2012;Bonhomme 2012;De Boeck 2005;Eni 1987;Meyer 1995;Pype 2017;Victor 2019) or evangelical notions of spiritual warfare (Rio 2010;Robbins 2004). In this way, although I link local demonic narratives to global processes, my analysis goes beyond those studies that seem to begin and end with the occult economy or its material effects.…”

“…It is also important to note that in many of its specific dimensions te pii is as much an old cultural and symbolic terrain as it is a new cosmo-ontological construct: it is old in a broader regional comparative sense in which, across Africa, large bodies of water are connected to powerful spiritual forces (Evans-Pritchard 1956;Kenny 1977;Lienhardt 1954;Seligman and Seligman 1932). On the other hand, the exact dimensions of this specific manifestation of te pii are relatively new within the Acholi South Sudanese world-likely only since the conjoint experience of exile and evangelical Christianity from the late 1980s-although it is now somewhat standard across the wider region, especially among evangelicals (Allen 2015;Apter 2012;Bonhomme 2012;De Boeck 2005;Meyer 1995;Pype 2017;Victor 2019).…”

Fear and fainting in Luanda: paranoid politics and the problem of interpretative authority in Angola

“…So the regime's evident and publicly asserted mistrust of young, ‘disrespectful’ confusionistas (troublemakers) would lend credence to the theory that the government was, in fact, testing out non‐lethal means of controlling and subduing ‘the youth’. In that sense, the rejection of psychological interpretations and the insistence on being acknowledged as victims of a sinister political intention begs acknowledgement and ‘reinjects indeterminacy’ (Victor 2019: 399) into a discourse dominated (though not controlled) by ‘competent authorities’.…”