Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the intersection of healing and justice within the different approaches of individuals who have been directly or indirectly involved in the violent conflict in Northern Ireland to speaking about experiences of accountability and suffering through publicly performed testimony.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the slow-moving struggle of political leaders to design an effective strategy of how to come to terms with a violent past, Northern Ireland's post-conflict society has found its own approaches on a community level. One of those foregrounds creative spaces in which individual experiences of suffering are performed in public.

Through a long-term ethnography on two community drama projects that placed the story of 'ordinary' people who were directly involved in and/or suffered from the conflict at the centre of their focus, motivations of and impacts on those who spoke out as well as those who listened were explored. The paper critically examines notions of healing and justice and argues that there are, in fact, three approaches to dealing with experienced violence which can be, but are not necessarily consciously interlaced. In this context, the incentive for former combatants to speak in public is also taken into consideration. While for some storytellers recovery from trauma (that might include guilt) and thus individual healing is clearly prioritised, for others, their own well-being is willingly sacrificed for justice or the broader socio-political peace building process.

Although the driving forces for 'getting the story out there' may differ in detail, the argument is developed that the concept of witnessing, of having their own or a loved one's suffering recognised and acknowledged by their society, appears to be the crux of giving testimony of personal experiences of war.

Paper short abstract:

Explanations of misfortune among Acholis in northern Uganda are often attributed to social or cosmological transgressions. The paper explores how responses to suffering even when plausibly attributable to human causes are often less about accountability and more about addressing symptoms of distress.

Paper long abstract:

Since the guns have fallen silent in 2006 and the work of creating a new normal is steadily underway in northern Uganda many people continue to live with a staggering level of physical, mental, spiritual and ontological distress--much of which might be understood as being caused or at least exacerbated by the 20-year war. As they pursue greater wellbeing people search for and assign causes to their suffering. These interpretations in turn determine fitting responses. This paper reflects on ethnographic work over the past seven years of living in the Acholi sub-region focused on gender and violence, particularly rape, notions of sexual transgression and what takes place afterwards. I have come to find that often in the wake of violence and issuant suffering, the answer to the proverbial question "why?" from those who experienced it is unexpected. The causes of misfortune are commonly found in social or cosmological transgressions. In the lives of many of my informants a particularly dangerous and endemic social malady appears to be jealousy.

Rooted in the broader ethnographic context, the paper reflects at length on the story of a woman who recounted the terrifying experience of rape in the spiritual world by a malevolent spectre allegedly sent by jealous relatives. The paper explores how responses to suffering, even when plausibly attributable to human causes (whether intentional or not) are often less about accountability and more about addressing symptoms of distress.

Paper short abstract:

Understandings of the spirit world, religion, the allocation of accountability, and wealth accumulation relate to local notions about egregious acts. Very different conceptions of wrong-doing and redress prevail in the region to norms associated with formal judicial processes.

Paper long abstract:

Several murders have occurred in Gulu, northern Uganda. There are stories about the victims having their blood sucked out, and there are tales about child sacrifice, terrifying witchcraft, satanic rites, zombies and the use of evil magic. An election was organised to select the culprit, in which everyone could vote in secret. The alleged perpetrator is referred to as Mr Red, because he wears red clothes and likes blood. The deaths and the rumours have triggered a moral panic, with vigilante mobs seeking the culprit and destroying his property. By contextualising these events, the paper shows how understandings of the spirit world, the allocation of accountability, religion, and wealth accumulation relate to local notions about egregious acts. No conventional evidence has been found to show that the man accused of being the wicked Mr Red is responsible for the crimes, but he has spent time in prison and has had threats on his life. The Mr Red case illustrates widespread phenomena which are too often set aside and ignored, and draws attention to the ways in which local elites, including the Anglican and Catholic Churches, the police and both elected and appointed officials draw on strategies of moral populism to establish and maintain their public authority. The paper also highlights the point that very different conceptions of wrong-doing and redress prevail in the region to norms associated with formal judicial processes.

Paper short abstract:

Many Acholi concepts around health link with witchcraft and sorcery. This paper describes Acholi ideas about medicine, magic and misfortune, arguing affect and intention are important dimensions in Acholi notions of health and that healing involves the individual as well as the social body.

Paper long abstract:

Post-independence life in South Sudan is difficult at the best of times, and the 2013 outbreak of ethnopolitical violence has only increased people's sense of danger and uncertainty. Not all dangers are visible or known, however - indeed, many of the worst are not - and Sudanese Acholi rightly fear the work of sorcerers and witches living among them. Acholi understandings of magical phenomena provide the foundation of a cosmological system oriented toward maintaining cooperative sociality between all entities, physical and spiritual (Baines 2010; Finnstrom 2008). This is important precisely because 'bad feelings' such as jealousy and anger often lead to poisonings, curses, or other magical occurrences practices falling under the anthropological categories of witchcraft and sorcery.

Thanks largely to Evans-Pritchard (1976), it is well-known African witchcraft helps to understand and make sense of otherwise unexplainable happenings: those seemingly random occurrences Evans-Pritchard termed 'extraordinary events'. Less well understood, however, are the intrinsic and wide-ranging connections between medicine and poison, magic and accountability. Based on 16 months fieldwork within a South Sudanese Acholi community, this paper delineates the multiple Acholi concepts related to witchcraft and sorcery, demonstrating their simultaneous connection to the world of medicine and healing, and likewise elucidating the linkage between medicine, magic, illness, and misfortune. It is argued that affect and intention are especially important considerations in understanding Acholi conceptualisations of illness and well-being and that Acholi notions of responsibility and accountability involve healing not only the individual but also the social - and thereby the relational - body.

Paper short abstract:

Northern Uganda has been affected by war and conflict for decades, with around 30,000 young people being abducted or joining the Lords' Resistance Army between 1996 and 2000. This paper asks: what happened to those people that subsequently escaped and passed through reception centres on their way ‘home’?

Paper long abstract:

Northern Uganda has been affected by war and conflict for decades, with around 30,000 young people being abducted or joining the Lords' Resistance Army between 1996 and 2000. Many of these people subsequently escaped or were captured by the Ugandan army; and they passed through reception centres on their way 'home'. These reception centres were managed with the support of international humanitarian agencies but no-one knows what subsequently happened to them. They have been much more invisible than the so called 'invisible children' that have been the focus of media campaigns about the situation in the region. This paper presents research that has found out where they are now, and how they are surviving. Drawing upon long term ethnographic research and interviews with 234 people (who were selected by taking a 10% random sample of records at a reception centre in Gulu), the paper highlights aspects of social integration and exclusion in the post war setting of northern Uganda. One problem that many encounter is cen, a kind of malevolent emanation from those that have experienced or perpetrated violence. It can make social healing a fraught process. Another issue is the relative insignificance of local reconciliation rituals that have been a prime focus of those advocating local justice. Overall, the paper highlights the discrepancies between the lived experiences of those who have been caught in the war and the normative assumptions of those running assistance programmes that are purportedly aimed at helping them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an analysis of the interplay between health, violence and the sense of justice at the Medical Committee for the Exiled (COMEDE) in Paris, which provides treatment to asylum seekers, along with medical certificates attesting to the fact that the patient is a torture victim.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between health, violence and the sense of justice at the Medical Committee for the Exiled (COMEDE) in Paris, which provides treatment to asylum seekers, along with medical certificates - to be attached to the asylum request - attesting to the fact that the patient is a torture victim.

The patient population examined consists of Sri Lankan Tamils. The data come from ethnographic fieldwork that was carried out on the Tamil community in Paris between 2008 and 2014, and at the COMEDE between March and July 2009.

First, by explaining how war traumas are treated and medical certificates for asylum requests drafted, I will illustrate how the patients are cast in the role of victims. It is a matter of understanding in what way and for what reasons treatment is inseparable from a well-defined sense of justice, and the will to uphold the rights of those exiled. What social features mark the victims "produced" in the medical certificates? What are the social consequences of treating a torture victim by applying the nosological label of PTSD?

Secondly, I will focus in greater detail on the social role played by the COMEDE. Asylum seekers are a liminal population: they are neither members of their host society nor complete outsiders. My hypothesis is that by treating patients as victims, a category which elicits empathy, the COMEDE is seeking to reverse the feeling of distrust which surrounds asylum seekers when it comes to their reasons for wishing to remain in France.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores help-seeking around, and conceptualisations of, mental disturbance and distress in the Acholi community of northern Uganda following the 20-year LRA conflict, and how these impact on community survival in the face of overwhelming levels of mental suffering and dysfunction.

Paper long abstract:

The Acholi community of northern Uganda has seen a massive increase in peko ma wic, 'problems of the head', over the last few years. The forms these take are in the main familiar (an exception being the recently identified 'nodding disease'), but very high incidences of the conditions known or described as cen, (possession by a vengeful spirit) and the self-descriptive 'over-thinking', and suicide, are widely associated with aspects of the twenty year Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) conflict, which ended on Ugandan soil in 2006. In particular, the experience of extended displacement and the associated loss of social capital is seen as catastrophic, even to a greater extent than war violence.

In all cultures, forms of mental disturbance and distress are often deeply frightening, disorientating and debilitating to those around. Conceptual frameworks of madness, whether moral, spiritual or medical, function to control this fear. This presentation seeks to put the observed help-seeking behaviour of Acholi people around mental disturbance and distress into the context of the conceptual frameworks available to them. There can be a temptation to conflate locally culturally defined conditions with specific psychiatric entities and categories of Western culture where there is some overlap of symptoms, but this can obscure the enormity of the difference in the underlying conceptual frameworks. In particular there is a need to consider how these frameworks are functioning at a social level in a community that at times can seem about to be overwhelmed by mental suffering and dysfunction.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses contemporary versions of Catch-22 experienced by American soldiers who deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Paper long abstract:

The Catch-22 originally described -- in Joseph Heller’s eponymous novel — a situation where it is impossible to get exempted from combat duty on the grounds of insanity due to the fact that officers judged the very wish to seek such exemption as proof of a sane mind. Since 9/11 much has changed in the moral economy of mental health care in the American military. There have been major efforts to lessen the stigma of post-traumatic stress disorder and remove barriers to treatment. Nevertheless, some soldiers today perceive versions of the Catch-22: darkly amusing ironies and double binds in their experiences of programs to screen and treat psychosocial problems related to combat. Such contemporary Catch-22s reflect not just the well-known tradition of military black humor in the face of death and injury, but also differences in the way that clinicians and soldiers reason about the lived effects of war.