Haunted Families after the War in Uganda: Doubt as Polyvalent Critique

ABSTRACT

With a point of departure in a Ugandan grandmother’s questioning and critique of the state of continuing illness and misfortune in her family after the war in Northern Uganda, this article explores ideas about haunting, trauma and contagious connections in kinship. The article contributes to anthropological debates about hauntology, trauma, phenomenology and kinship. It provides a contribution to the hauntology discussion by pointing out how a phenomenological perspective can offer an indigenous polyvalent critique of kinship connections and larger political issues simultaneously. It argues against functionalist explanations of witchcraft beliefs, by drawing attention to the fact that doubt and uncertainty are central to these forms of knowledge, and therefore provide ‘not too dangerous’ ways of raising social critique. The article contributes to kinship studies, with a phenomenological perspective on the double dynamic of nutritious and poisonous connections in family relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Haunting
• trauma
• kinship
• doubt
• critique

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments to an earlier version of the paper from Robert Desjarlais, Cheryl Mattingly and Susan Reynolds Whyte, and for comments to the article from the three anonymous reviewers as well as from the Ethnos editor Nils Bubandt, and my co-editor of this special issue Lone Grøn.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Like many others in post-conflict northern Uganda, Adong often uses the biomedical term trauma and cen spirits interchangeably when speaking in Acholi about mental problems. The term trauma seems to have entered the local vocabulary during the intensive influx of NGOs and donor organisations providing therapeutic narratives and help in the aftermath of war. Elsewhere we have written about the overlap between ideas of cen and ideas of trauma (Meinert & Whyte 2017). The term mental illnesses in the Ugandan health system refers to broad categories of psycho-social problems ranging from depression, anxiety, PTSD, psychosis and neurological disorders such as epilepsy.

2 This article is a contribution to a special issue called ‘It runs in the family’ focusing on contagious connections and kinship. The themed issue proposes to conceptualise and develop an analytic of some of the many forces that flow and sieve through families as contagious connections. The issue raises questions about how to understand the fact that some phenomena tend to run in certain families, lineages and other forms of kinship structures (see the introduction to this special issue). The special issue is one of the outputs of EPICENTER: Center for Cultural Epidemics funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation.

3 The biomedical definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), originally known as ‘shell shock,’ is an anxiety-related mental health disorder that occurs after an extremely stressful event, such as a sexual assault, physical violence, or military combat. PTSD was officially recognised as a mental health disorder in 1980 in the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder.

4 In this patrilineal and virilocal kinship system, wives are sometimes considered to be ‘strangers’ in the patrilineal clan and are sometimes experienced to be a threat, because they access land through their husbands, and can nowadays legally inherit this land if their husband passes away.

5 Twins in Acholi are considered to have jouk a strong life force that connects them to the divine. They have to be treated with extra respect and when they die and are buried, they have to be put in pots with holes above the ground to air their ‘hot spirits’ (See Seebach & Meinert 2014).

6 In their article ‘Genres of witnessing: Narrative and Violence between generations’ in this issue Brandel and Han explore ‘how we might ethnographically render the inheritance of violence and loss in families, particularly from the perspective of those who were not there to directly experience such events, i.e. the children of survivors’. One of the ways in which this can be explored ethnographically in Northern Uganda is through stories about haunting in lineages.

7 In 1986 Alice Lakwena started the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, a rebel army fighting against both ‘external and internal evils’. These evils included soldiers from the National Resistance Army and returned Acholi soldiers who had fought in Luwero. The returned soldiers were considered impure due to their contact with dead bodies. Alice Lakwena exclaimed that these soldiers had brought back, not only AIDS, but also cen spirits because they had not submitted to the cleansing rituals after their return (Behrend 1999: 28–29).

8 The research that this article draws upon started in Northern Uganda in 2008, when I and colleagues from Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen started the first of three long term collaborative research projects with Gulu University: ‘Changing Human Security: Recovery after war in Northern Uganda’ 2008–2012, ‘Governing Transition in Northern Uganda: Trust and Land’ 2013–2018, and ‘Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda’ 2019–2022. All projects were funded by the Danish research council for development research.

9 Catan in Acholi refers to the English term Satan, but is spelled and pronounced with c.

10 A team from Gulu University did a small study of health facilities offering treatment for trauma and made an inventory of NGOs in Acholiland working with PTSD or ‘trauma’ (Whyte et al. 2015).

11 In Bantu kinship structures in other parts of Uganda, women remain affiliated to their father’s clan, even when they get married (see e.g. Whyte 1997). These differences between Nilotic and Bantu kinship structures have significant consequences, not only for women if they divorce, but also for the children and their access to land and other resources (see e.g. Meinert 2009).

12 Bernhard Leistle (2014) has pointed out that spirit possession may be conceptualised as a cultural technology, a way of appropriating alien experiences and giving them a symbolic form. Cen spirits can be regarded as a cultural technology or symbolic way of dealing with the alien. Yet again, let me underline that this is not the same thing as believing firmly in spirits, because these experiences are characterised instead by doubtfulness and uncertainty about the existence of something (see Bubandt 2014), uncertainty about how to understand these phenomena and what to do about them when they disturb.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research made possible by EPICENTER: Center for Cultural Epidemics funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation, and fieldwork carried out as part of the TrustLand project: Governing Transition after war in Northern Uganda funded by the Danish Research Council.