Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the idea of embodied storytelling to consider how young people in Pibor in eastern South Sudan are narrating individual and collective pasts, and simultaneously making claims to the promises of modernity and globalisation, especially through song and body art.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on the idea of embodied storytelling to consider how young people are narrating their individual and collective pasts, their presents and their futures. The stories told through permanent body scarification cannot be untold; the designs and images inscribed on the body cannot be undone. These are interwoven with the songs young people are composing and sing as privileged means of individual and collective storytelling: narrating pasts, representations of the present and allusions to visions of the future. Together, these mediums of embodied storytelling are part of a repertoire of communication that young people across the countryside of Pibor draw on to assert personhood, individual and collective identity and claim their place in a changing society and global world. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Pibor in eastern South Sudan, the paper discusses how young people have, since the early 2000s, been incorporating new images and symbols of power and modernity into traditional practices of body scarification and to traditional genres of songs, ranging from symbols of and references to network towers, pens and water pumps to mobile phones and Ak-47s. The paper explores what these means of embodied storytelling and shifting iconography reveal in relation to the militarisation of society and, subsequently, fragmentation of social institutions, and, in turn, to inter-generational relations and transformations.