School of Social and Political Science

Description

Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda's largest religious communities, it maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. It shows how churches' responses to the war were enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet churches' embeddedness in structures of historical violence made their attempts to nurture peace liable to compound conflict. 

At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, 'confusion', which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates 'confusion' as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence.

When: Tuesday 5th December 2023 (2pm-3.30pm)

Venue: Hugh Robson Building, Lecture  Theatre G.04

Hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Anthropology of Christianity working group, School of Social and Political Science

Speaker Biography:

Henni Alava is an Academy Research Fellow in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Tampere University. Drawing on ethnographic research in Northern and later Central Uganda, her work has explored the intersections of Christianity, politics, gender and citizenship. Her current research maintains her interest in how individuals and families navigate hope and suffering in institutional and everyday settings; a theme she now explores through an ethnographic study of pediatric persistent pain and its care in Finland.