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.