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Abstract
This paper studies power through data focusing on gender–age relations gathered ethnographically among the Acholi of northern Uganda. It analyses these data through a framework combining Haugaard’s notions of dispositional, episodic and discursive/tacit power, with Arendt’s ideas on authority, and Bourdieu’s on disposition and habitus. I suggest using ethnographically collected data makes an important contribution to studying power and propose replacing the idea of gender and power as a simple binary relationship with the concept that gender–power relations are always crossed with multiple modalities, among which, for gerontocratic settings like most in Africa, age holds particular significance. I conclude that gender analysis based on the local habitus is critical for empirical explorations of social interactions.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the people of Kwor Ber and Kwiri as well as the field workers who carried out the data collection and the education project. Thanks also to Mark Haugaard and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments. I am particularly grateful to Jenny Pearce for her most valuable critiques of earlier drafts of this paper and her encouragement in its writing.
Notes
1. To protect the population’s privacy, all names have been changed.
2. For more details of this project see Harris (Citation2012a).
3. Following Bourdieu (Citation1977), I use this term to denote how humans are socialised into taking on certain patterns of behaviour both physically and psychologically, in ways appropriate to the particular context in which they are raised. Gender is clearly an integral part of this.
4. I disagree with those sources that consider gerontocracy applies only to males (e.g. Spencer Citation2004). In my experience, in such societies older women also attain power, even though it may be exerted largely within the household, while men’s pertains to public spaces too (See also Herbert Citation1993, Miescher Citation2007).
5. The term older is obviously relational and there is no clear age at which people may be said to achieve this status. In Acholiland, it seemed to be applied to married heads of household, with children and their wives. The villagers put the cut-off at roughly 35 but it depended on experience, living circumstances and self-presentation, not on chronological age alone. Thus, William (see below) is conceptualised as an older man despite his age.
6. This section is based on Girling (Citation1960) except where otherwise stated.
7. I am assuming Pido is himself Acholi and, therefore, has direct experience of the culture he describes and that he is not merely copying from Girling.
8. Personal communication from George Openjuru of Makerere University, Kampala, himself an Acholi.
9. This section is based on Finnström (Citation2008), Dolan (Citation2009) and Branch (Citation2011). Taken together, these three authors present an excellent picture of this war.
10. Similar claims were made by male Burundian Hutu refugees in camps in Tanzania (Turner Citation1999). Both in Tanzania and Uganda, this did not actually mean that (older) women came to occupy a position superior to that of men but rather that the latter experienced a rise in female status as destabilising traditional gender power hierarchies. This is of course not only restricted to African refugees but has also been expressed by western men anxious about rises in women’s status there (Faludi Citation1991).
11. Whether or not one agrees that all this amounted to deliberate torture, the fact remains that conditions in the camps must have been appalling, judging by the extraordinary number of excess deaths occurring there, estimated at some 50,000 a year. When one considers that a high proportion of the population was incarcerated for a decade or more that represents an extremely significant ‘attack’ on the Acholi people (CSOPNU Citation2006, p. 16).
12. Traditions are sedimented repetitions that have come to appear timeless and immutable but that in fact are constantly subject to variations, each too small to be noticed (Harris Citation2004, p. 15). In Acholiland as I suggest above, even before the war the introduction of waged labour had disturbed traditional gender relations, raising the status of those younger men in formal employment as well as of wives who assumed the running of their family farms. This produced clashes with male elders, who insisted that cultural traditions accorded them rights of domination (see note 9). It was this remembrance of how things were supposed to be that the men in particular carried with them throughout their experience in the camps.
13. This was frequently cited as additional evidence of female inferiority, even if it was a somewhat suspect claim since it clearly bore no relevance to Acholi traditions (see Harris Citation2012b).
14. While all discussions took place in the local language, Luo, the data were written down by the fieldworkers and facilitators in English.
15. Such notions of a golden past are common to other people suffering from the destabilising effects of socio-economic change (see e.g. Cornwall Citation2003).
16. Although Arendt insists that once lost, authority cannot simply be reclaimed in this way (Citation1969, p. 45). Perhaps this subconscious realisation makes these men all the more desperate in their attempts to do so. This goes some way to explain why it is men, unable fully to claim dispositional power, for instance unemployed urban inhabitants, who are most likely to join gangs or participate in riots. This may be less for pecuniary benefit than to escape being ‘dissed’ (disrespected) by positioning themselves to (re)claim the dispositional power position they believe themselves entitled to as men.
17. See note 16, second paragraph.
18. For details of how this functioned see Rogers (Citation1988).
