Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda

There is Confusion

Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda

There is Confusion

Henni Alava (Author)

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Description

Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Ugandasheds 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.

Introduction: working with confusion
1. The Gun and the Word: Missionary-Colonial History in Acholi
2. Church, State, War
3. Learning to Listen to Silence and Confusion. Fieldwork in the Aftermath of War
4. 'To Stand Atop an Anthill'. Performing the State in Kitgum
5. The Underside of the Anthill
6. 'My peace I give you'. Utopian Narratives of Inclusion and Boundaries of Exclusion
7. Confusion in the Church
8. Navigating Confusion, Hope and Complexity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published	Mar 10 2022
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	288
ISBN	9781350175822
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	10 bw illus
Series	New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Henni Alava

Henni Alava is an Academy Research Fellow at Tampe…

A welcome addition to and extension of the anthropology of northern Uganda and that of Christianity ... Alava has a gift for holding herself back just enough while paying attention, allowing the research participants the time and space to unfold themselves.

Journal of Religion in Africa
Alava's work [is] an engaging form of scholarship - anthropology as accompaniment - that both questions and extends the boundaries of the discipline. Scholars interested in the relation between church and state, and in the role Christianity plays in Africa's social history marked with violence and political uncertainty, will have a lot to learn.

The Living Church
Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda is a significant contribution to the literature on religion and politics in Africa. Henni Alava nicely balances an openness to both the religious claims of her research subjects and the embeddedness of church structures in political realities. Highly recommended.

Todd Whitmore, Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Christian Ethics, University of Notre Dame, USA
The messiness and mundanity of life lived in the aftermath of war is the subject of Henni Alava's sensitive and insightful book. With perspicacity, she illuminates how Catholics and Anglicans in Acholiland, Uganda talk about confusion as they seek peace and observe political conflict within the institutions that offer them hope.

Emma Wild-Wood, Senior Lecturer, African Christianity and African Indigenous Religions, University of Edinburgh, UK
This book presents a captivating experience of slow ethnography, skilfully utilizing and expanding local tropes such as the vivid meanings behind "confusion" and "standing atop an anthill." These locally generated concepts are truly thought-provoking and have a captivating effect on the reader's imagination. Within its pages, the book delves into the ethical and methodological dimensions of silence after war…. [It] is abundant in ethnographic depth and theoretical sophistication.

En-Chieh Chao, member of Geertz Prize Committee
Those seeking comparative and theoretical food for their own thought … will be richly rewarded by ambitious conceptual work, from the subjunctivity of hope to utopias.

Suomen Antropologi