Lotte Meinert
Biographic Data
| ID | 76763 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lotte Meinert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lotte |
| FAMILY NAME | Meinert |
| SIGNATURE | MEINERT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3912-8445 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 203 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Introduction. Ageing time beings: Temporality and ethics in old ages
What can we learn about temporality by studying different ways of measuring time, institutional time regimes, and (a)typical experiences and creations of time when growing older? This introduction sets perspectives on this question from the anthropologies of ageing, ethics, and temporality. Understanding humans as time beings, we argue that attention to connections between large‐scale history, collective temporal registers, and small‐scale singul…
Time poetics and ageing in the Ik mountains: Seeing Time Disappear
In the Ik mountains in Uganda, only few old people still have the skills to 'see time' with sundials. Common ways of knowing time and age now include phones and ID cards in digital registers. I follow the elder seer Komol to explore how changing the measures of time influences the experience of time and age. How do being a 'time being' and ideas about 'the good life' change with age, technology, and history? What (dis)appears when ways of trackin…
Time and ADHD in Danish Families: Mutual Affect Through Rhythm
Based on fieldwork in Danish families living with ADHD, we expand on Nielsen's insight that ADHD is experienced as a state of desynchronization by showing how family members' rhythms mutually affect each other. We argue that ADHD is not only a biological and psychiatric condition, but also a temporal and socially responsive phenomenon. The intensity of ADHD is influenced by mutual affect in families and by general life circumstances. Families con…
Sharing Land, Sharing Faith: Ground Ethics amongst Missionaries and Ik in Uganda
When do ethics of sharing, or ‘something for something’ logics of exchange, apply? This article explores this question based on fieldwork amongst the Ik community and missionaries in Uganda. It examines interactions of sharing and exchange and how situational communities of belonging and resonance are created, but also pays attention to tensions between groups. A variety of sharing ethics form the basis for everyday interactions within the Ik com…
Ethics of Sharing - Gesamtausgabe/Complete Issue
Thihs file contains the complete issue "Ethics of Sharing
Anthropology and Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of th…
Tinkering with Time versus Being under the Spell of Time
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish pediatric oncology ward we explore how children - as cancer patients - respond to the time constraints of cancer treatment that may save their lives but simultaneously hold them under a spell of time. Children respond through practices of what we have called "tinkering with time," which enable them to seize control not of life, but of time. We suggest that tinkering be understood as time work throug…
Alien Guts? Exploring Lives of and with Irritable Bowels in Denmark
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a health challenge in Denmark, especially among young and middle-aged people. It raises questions about control, alienation, responsiveness, and responsibility in relation to the body in welfare societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged Danes diagnosed with IBS inhabit and relate to their bodies. Previous studies have described how IBS patients experienc…
Textures of precarity: Repurposing in a Ugandan refugee settlement
Palabek Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda hosts more than 40,000 refugees from South Sudan. They receive plots of land upon which they must build their own houses, as well as a few relief items and minimal food rations. The people who cross the border are not passive recipients of humanitarian aid. They creatively repurpose items often associated with precarity and helplessness in ways that challenge images of refugee victimhood. UNHCR tarpau…
Introduction: Beyond precarity in sub-Saharan Africa
Ann Cassiman is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven. She works on urban kinship, relatedness and material culture in WestAfrica. Her email is [email protected]. Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His email address is [email protected]. Lotte Meinert is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and currently leads the EU-funded ANTHU…
Pandemic precarity
This editorial highlights how the Covid-19 pandemic has magnified precarity as a global life condition. At the same time, it has also emphasized inequality and exposed how some lives are more precarious than others. Those working in the so-called informal economy have been proportionally harder hit. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the economy is informal, many rely on improvisation tactics for everyday survival and well-being. Yet, in order …
Legacies of Violence: The Communicability of Spirits and Trauma in Northern Uganda
Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency
Can epidemics be noncommunicable
This article argues that the concept of communicability that is central to the distinction between communicable diseases (CDs) and noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is poorly conceptualized. The epidemic spread of NCDs such as diabetes, depression, and eating disorders demonstrates that they are communicable, even if they are not infectious. We need to more critically explore how they might be communicable in specific environments. All diseases wit…
It Runs in the Family'. Exploring Contagious Kinship Connections
In this introduction we conceptualise phenomena that tend to 'run in the family' as contagious kinship connections arguing that experiences of such contagious connections often resemble experiences of haunting. We propose that enigmas about what family is, and what happens in the sociality and practice of kinship and descent, can be understood as forms of social contagion and affective transmission. The empirical contributions of this issue exami…
Haunted Families after the War in Uganda: Doubt as Polyvalent Critique
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 ph…
Elusive Adulthoods: The Anthropology of New Maturities
Social Sensations of Symptoms
The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a 'social body' - a family, a couple, a network - a unit that transcends the individ…
These Things Continue: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda
After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war …
Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological and "Experience-Near" Explorations
We open the special issue by asking: how are groups of people affected by similar conditions, even when these are not biologically contagious? This is linked to broader theoretical and empirical questions of how we are influenced by others and by the specific times and places in which we live. We describe the history and etymology of the concepts of epidemics and contagion and argue that we need to reclaim some of the pre-Hippocratic meanings of …
Obstruction and Intervention as Creative Methods in Anthropological Research
Could it be that creativity thrives under the methodological asceticism of imposed limitations? Drawing on von Trier's and Leth's film experiment The Five Obstructions, this introduction outlines the creative potentialities of rethinking anthropological methodology through interventions and obstructions into the works of one's peers
Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull'sThe Mountain People
Drawing upon the method of peer obstruction, this article revolves around understanding experiences of hunger among the Ik of northern Uganda by reflecting upon Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People together with community elders. The article debates the ethical dilemmas of discussing potentially unpopular ethnographic accounts locally, and the anthropological hesitation of using ethnic categories such as the 'Ik'. The article contributes to …
Introduction: Questioning Boundaries and Belonging
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Cement, Graves, and Pillars in Land Disputes in Northern Uganda
Cement pillars and graves play significant roles as land markers in disputes over land in postconflict northern Uganda. Contemporary land cases from Acholi and Ikland display different histories of land use and conflict. In Acholi, cemented graves constitute concrete indices of belonging in wrangles. In Ikland, national nature authorities have brought cement pillars into the landscape. We explore how cemented graves and cement pillars are used fo…
Land belongs to the people of Uganda: Politicians' Use of Land Issues in the 2016 Election Campaigns
Politicians running for the 2016 elections in Uganda used land issues in various ways to mobilize votes. We explore the ways in which land was politicized during election campaigns, by examining the personal manifestos and rallies of candidates in the districts of Kaabong and Gulu, and in Kampala. Our main argument is that land was often constitutive of programmatic political debate, and was not only used in instrumental and patrimonial ways to m…
Tests for life chances: CD4 miracles and obstacles in Uganda
This article discusses the relationship between technologies, socialities and inequities based on case material from a recent study about the first generation of people living with ART - Antiretroviral Therapy - in Uganda. The authors discuss how the diagnostic technologies of HIV tests, 'CD4 counts', and weight measuring produce results and numbers that are appropriated by people living with HIV to reflect upon their lives, bodies and relationsh…
Remaining Internally Displaced: Missing Links to Security in Northern Uganda
The 20-year war that displaced more than 90 per cent of the population of Acholiland has drawn to a close and most people have left the IDP camps and returned to their rural homes. But some remain behind, unable to ‘re-place’ themselves in the traditional patterns of Acholi belonging to homes and land. Socially mediated access to land has been weakened by the death of husbands and parents; conjugal partnerships and children’s affiliation were not…
It Runs in the Family'. Exploring Contagious Kinship Connections
In this introduction we conceptualise phenomena that tend to 'run in the family' as contagious kinship connections arguing that experiences of such contagious connections often resemble experiences of haunting. We propose that enigmas about what family is, and what happens in the sociality and practice of kinship and descent, can be understood as forms of social contagion and affective transmission. The empirical contributions of this issue exami…
These Things Continue: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda
After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war …
Epidemic Projectification: Aids Responses in Uganda as Event and Process
This article explores the responses to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda as events and processes of projectification. AIDS projects became epidemic. Prevention and treatment projects supported by outside donors spread to an extent that made it hard for some to see the role of the Ugandan state and health-care system. We describe the projectified AIDS landscape in Uganda as projects make themselves present in the life of our interlocutors. We argue that…
Treating Aids: Dilemmas of unequal access in Uganda
The price of antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Uganda has fallen dramatically in recent years and more people are under treatment. By mid-2003 it was estimated that 10 000 people were taking ARVs. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews, work with key informants and document reviews, we seek to map out the channels through which ARVs are being made available to people and to describe and assess the social implications of the pr…
The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children's rights
The civilization of the children of the "savages" in the colonial world was seen as a crucial issue from early on was an inherent part of the colonization project in Africa, America and Oceania in the 19th century. The idea of civilizing "the savages," today's South, through children has continued in the post-colonial era with the development of mass-schooling systems and various child-focused development projects. This has led to an export of in…
Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological and "Experience-Near" Explorations
We open the special issue by asking: how are groups of people affected by similar conditions, even when these are not biologically contagious? This is linked to broader theoretical and empirical questions of how we are influenced by others and by the specific times and places in which we live. We describe the history and etymology of the concepts of epidemics and contagion and argue that we need to reclaim some of the pre-Hippocratic meanings of …
Haunted Families after the War in Uganda: Doubt as Polyvalent Critique
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 ph…
Land belongs to the people of Uganda: Politicians' Use of Land Issues in the 2016 Election Campaigns
Politicians running for the 2016 elections in Uganda used land issues in various ways to mobilize votes. We explore the ways in which land was politicized during election campaigns, by examining the personal manifestos and rallies of candidates in the districts of Kaabong and Gulu, and in Kampala. Our main argument is that land was often constitutive of programmatic political debate, and was not only used in instrumental and patrimonial ways to m…
Cement, Graves, and Pillars in Land Disputes in Northern Uganda
Cement pillars and graves play significant roles as land markers in disputes over land in postconflict northern Uganda. Contemporary land cases from Acholi and Ikland display different histories of land use and conflict. In Acholi, cemented graves constitute concrete indices of belonging in wrangles. In Ikland, national nature authorities have brought cement pillars into the landscape. We explore how cemented graves and cement pillars are used fo…
Resources for health in Uganda: Bourdieu's concepts of capital andhabitus
Based on long-term fieldwork in rural Eastern Uganda, this paper explores the use of Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus to analyse local understandings of resources and strategies for health. In this local Ugandan context health cannot be taken for granted, but requires persistent effort. In local terms, health is broadly described as having a 'good life' and this is experienced as a social achievement conditioned by access to a variety o…
Understanding Hunger with Ik Elders and Turnbull'sThe Mountain People
Drawing upon the method of peer obstruction, this article revolves around understanding experiences of hunger among the Ik of northern Uganda by reflecting upon Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People together with community elders. The article debates the ethical dilemmas of discussing potentially unpopular ethnographic accounts locally, and the anthropological hesitation of using ethnic categories such as the 'Ik'. The article contributes to …
Anthropology and Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of th…
Alien Guts? Exploring Lives of and with Irritable Bowels in Denmark
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a health challenge in Denmark, especially among young and middle-aged people. It raises questions about control, alienation, responsiveness, and responsibility in relation to the body in welfare societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged Danes diagnosed with IBS inhabit and relate to their bodies. Previous studies have described how IBS patients experienc…
Introduction: Beyond precarity in sub-Saharan Africa
Ann Cassiman is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven. She works on urban kinship, relatedness and material culture in WestAfrica. Her email is [email protected]. Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His email address is [email protected]. Lotte Meinert is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and currently leads the EU-funded ANTHU…
Social Sensations of Symptoms
The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a 'social body' - a family, a couple, a network - a unit that transcends the individ…
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war: Editing for effect in northern Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
After two decades of conflict and internment in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), the Acholi people have returned to their homes and are trying to heal their wounds after the long war in northern Uganda. Bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, cultural organizations, and religious institutions are involved in the politically and personally sensitive work of reconciliation. Yet for most people, the actual restoration of peace lies in …
Urbanisation by subtraction: The afterlife of camps in northern Uganda
As peace returns to northern Uganda, a unique arithmetic of development is evident in the former Internally Displaced Persons camps. Small trading centres whose populations multiplied as they became camps now envision futures as Town Boards. Subtraction is necessary: the displaced people and the dead buried in the camps are being returned to their rural villages. Urban planners have produced meticulous drawings that envisage the division of land …
Can epidemics be noncommunicable
This article argues that the concept of communicability that is central to the distinction between communicable diseases (CDs) and noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is poorly conceptualized. The epidemic spread of NCDs such as diabetes, depression, and eating disorders demonstrates that they are communicable, even if they are not infectious. We need to more critically explore how they might be communicable in specific environments. All diseases wit…
"Half-Trust" and Enmity in Ikland, Northern Uganda
This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat-and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. "Half-trust," as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. W…
Tinkering with Time versus Being under the Spell of Time
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish pediatric oncology ward we explore how children - as cancer patients - respond to the time constraints of cancer treatment that may save their lives but simultaneously hold them under a spell of time. Children respond through practices of what we have called "tinkering with time," which enable them to seize control not of life, but of time. We suggest that tinkering be understood as time work throug…
Obstruction and Intervention as Creative Methods in Anthropological Research
Could it be that creativity thrives under the methodological asceticism of imposed limitations? Drawing on von Trier's and Leth's film experiment The Five Obstructions, this introduction outlines the creative potentialities of rethinking anthropological methodology through interventions and obstructions into the works of one's peers
Introduction: Questioning Boundaries and Belonging
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Introduction: A Caveat on Caveats
In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium "Peace by Other Means," the journal's editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis (1521), that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed cav…
Usund Viden? Sundhedsundervisning og medicinsk praksis blandt itesobøm i Uganda
Skolesundhedsprogrammet i Uganda har til formål at forebygge sygdom og fremme sundhed. Det antages, at bøm kan viderebringe sundhedsbudskaber til deres familier og derved igangsætte sygdomsforebyggende adfærd i lokalsamfundet. Ideerne bag programmet bygger på tre internationale politiske diskurser om 1) børns rettigheder, 2) forebyggelse frem for behandling og 3) sundhed for alle og er baseret på idealet om et velfungerende og tilgængeligt sundhe…
Treating Aids: Dilemmas of unequal access in Uganda
The price of antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Uganda has fallen dramatically in recent years and more people are under treatment. By mid-2003 it was estimated that 10 000 people were taking ARVs. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews, work with key informants and document reviews, we seek to map out the channels through which ARVs are being made available to people and to describe and assess the social implications of the pr…
Resources for health in Uganda: Bourdieu's concepts of capital andhabitus
Based on long-term fieldwork in rural Eastern Uganda, this paper explores the use of Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus to analyse local understandings of resources and strategies for health. In this local Ugandan context health cannot be taken for granted, but requires persistent effort. In local terms, health is broadly described as having a 'good life' and this is experienced as a social achievement conditioned by access to a variety o…
The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children's rights
The civilization of the children of the "savages" in the colonial world was seen as a crucial issue from early on was an inherent part of the colonization project in Africa, America and Oceania in the 19th century. The idea of civilizing "the savages," today's South, through children has continued in the post-colonial era with the development of mass-schooling systems and various child-focused development projects. This has led to an export of in…
Tests for life chances: CD4 miracles and obstacles in Uganda
This article discusses the relationship between technologies, socialities and inequities based on case material from a recent study about the first generation of people living with ART - Antiretroviral Therapy - in Uganda. The authors discuss how the diagnostic technologies of HIV tests, 'CD4 counts', and weight measuring produce results and numbers that are appropriated by people living with HIV to reflect upon their lives, bodies and relationsh…
Pillars of the Nation. Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development
Håbets Fælde? Fortryllelse og universel skolegang i Uganda og Tanzania
Lotte Meinert & Mette Kølner: The Trap of Hope? Enchantment and Universal Education in Uganda and Tanzania This article challenges the apparent global consensus, hope and belief in schooling as a primary tool for making the world a better place. Schooling is enchanting as an idea, because it entails a promise of improvement in the future - at political as well as individual levels. Based on missionary accounts and empirical cases of schooling in …
Well-faring towards Uncertain Futures: A Comparative Perspective on Youth in Marginalized Positions
The article explores how societal contexts create different possibilities for faring well towards the future for young marginalized people. Based on a comparative project including ethnographies from Brazil, Uganda, Georgia and Denmark the authors discuss well-faring as a time-oriented process based on individual as well as societal conditions. The article argues that in order to understand well-faring it is important to analyse how visions and s…
Chronic Homework in Emerging Borderlands of Healthcare
Enquete: Frem-timing
Intet resumé
Remaining Internally Displaced: Missing Links to Security in Northern Uganda
The 20-year war that displaced more than 90 per cent of the population of Acholiland has drawn to a close and most people have left the IDP camps and returned to their rural homes. But some remain behind, unable to ‘re-place’ themselves in the traditional patterns of Acholi belonging to homes and land. Socially mediated access to land has been weakened by the death of husbands and parents; conjugal partnerships and children’s affiliation were not…
Antropologiske Perspektiver På Usikkerhed
Smitte som analytik
Life
Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified
"As we experience and manipulate time...be it as boredom or impatience...it becomes an object: something materialized and social, something that affects perception, or something that may motivate reconsideration and change. The editors and contributors to this important new book, Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, have provided a diverse collection of ethnographic studies and theoretical explorations of youth experiencing time in a variety o…
Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war: Editing for effect in northern Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
After two decades of conflict and internment in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), the Acholi people have returned to their homes and are trying to heal their wounds after the long war in northern Uganda. Bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, cultural organizations, and religious institutions are involved in the politically and personally sensitive work of reconciliation. Yet for most people, the actual restoration of peace lies in …
Epidemic Projectification: Aids Responses in Uganda as Event and Process
This article explores the responses to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda as events and processes of projectification. AIDS projects became epidemic. Prevention and treatment projects supported by outside donors spread to an extent that made it hard for some to see the role of the Ugandan state and health-care system. We describe the projectified AIDS landscape in Uganda as projects make themselves present in the life of our interlocutors. We argue that…
Urbanisation by subtraction: The afterlife of camps in northern Uganda
As peace returns to northern Uganda, a unique arithmetic of development is evident in the former Internally Displaced Persons camps. Small trading centres whose populations multiplied as they became camps now envision futures as Town Boards. Subtraction is necessary: the displaced people and the dead buried in the camps are being returned to their rural villages. Urban planners have produced meticulous drawings that envisage the division of land …
In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments
Events are “generative moments” in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world—varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management—this volume analyzes generat…
"Half-Trust" and Enmity in Ikland, Northern Uganda
This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat-and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. "Half-trust," as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. W…
Introduction: A Caveat on Caveats
In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium "Peace by Other Means," the journal's editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis (1521), that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed cav…
Land belongs to the people of Uganda: Politicians' Use of Land Issues in the 2016 Election Campaigns
Politicians running for the 2016 elections in Uganda used land issues in various ways to mobilize votes. We explore the ways in which land was politicized during election campaigns, by examining the personal manifestos and rallies of candidates in the districts of Kaabong and Gulu, and in Kampala. Our main argument is that land was often constitutive of programmatic political debate, and was not only used in instrumental and patrimonial ways to m…
Elusive Adulthoods: The Anthropology of New Maturities
Social Sensations of Symptoms
The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a 'social body' - a family, a couple, a network - a unit that transcends the individ…
These Things Continue: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda
After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war …
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