and gifts from civilians; they kept minutes of meetings and composed reports on the individual battles. And the chief clerk, Alice’s secretary; wrote down what the spirits had to say when they took possession of Alice, their medium. Individual soldiers also noted in school notebooks the twenty Holy Spirit Safety Precautions, rules the spirits imposed on them, as well as prayers and church hymns. And pharmacists, nurses, and paramedics noted the formulas for various medications invented by the spirit Lakwena.
The HSM documented itself and produced its own texts in answer to the mass media. Composing these writings was an act of self-assertion, an attempt to have their truth, their version of the story prevail against others. In a certain sense it was also a magical act with which they fixed a reality that became more real through the very act of writing.
But even the attempt to shed the images and stereotypes of the mass media had to take their power into account. Some of these images remained powerful even in the opposing texts.
Field Research in a War Zone
Ethnography is currently conducted in a world in which the commodities of the Western and Eastern industrial countries – such as Coca-Cola, transister radios, sunglasses, clocks, cars, etc. – are found everywhere, including on the peripheries. And although it appears as if the differences between the various cultures are increasingly being levelled to produce a homogenous world (Kramer, 1987:284), ethnographic works have shown (cf., for example, Taussig, 1980; Appadurai, 1988; Werbner, 1989:68; Comaroff and Comaroff 1990) that the people of the so-called Third World adopt and transform these wares in their own independent way. The commodities develop their own life-history and their own meanings; sometimes they are transformed into status symbols or are integrated in a sacred exchange, thus even losing their character as commodities. Torn from the context of our culture, they confront us again in another context, one which is foreign to us. We think we recognize them as our own, and yet, when we look at them closely, they appear alien or at least alienated.
It is no longer ethnographic comparison that brings the objects of our culture and of other cultures together; rather, they confront us side by side, already brought into a new context in cultures which are foreign to us. Perhaps recognizing familiar things in a foreign context allows us to define more precisely the difference that exists between the meanings which are familiar to us and the new meanings in another context.
Not only goods produced in the West, but also mutual information and knowledge of each other reach the peripheries of our world via the mass media. In this way, the anthropologist and the subjects of his field research are a priori familiar and known at the same time as they are strange to each other (Marcus and Fischer, 1986:112). As already noted, the mass media also affect what we have up to now called ethnographic reality. They deliver pre-formed images to be relived. They create feedback. Ethnographic reality can no longer be assumed to be ‘authentic’; rather, we anthropologists must consider how it is produced – and what models it imitates.
Since centres and peripheries influence each other, we can no longer speak of independent, self-sufficient cultures, which were long the classic analytical units of ethnology (ibid). And thus the dichotomy, so customary in anthropology, between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ has also lost its validity (cf. Ranger, 1981).
It is already becoming apparent that in future, anthropologists will increasingly be confronted with an (ethnographic) reality that they themselves (together with the subjects of their research) have created. When I talked with Acholi elders in northern Uganda, I could not fail to note that my discussion partners had already read, and were reporting to me from, books and articles that missionaries, anthropologists, and historians had written on their culture and history. Thus I encountered in their answers not so much authentic knowledge as my own colleagues – and, in a sense, myself. I also discovered that a number of local ethnographies and historiographies already existed that had been written by Acholi like Reuben Anywar, Alipayo Latigo, Noah Ochara, Lacito Okech, and R. M. Nono,5 to mention but a few. The texts of Europeans, especially those by missionaries from the Comboni Mission, by Crazzolara on the history of the Lwo (1937), and by Pelligrini on the history and ‘tradition’ of the Acholi (1949) found entry into these indigenous texts. So I had to ask myself whether the Acholi elders were telling me their or our story (cf. Bruner, 1986:148f.) and what that meant for distinguishing the interior (emic) from the exterior (etic) view (ibid). Bruner, who sought an answer to these questions in his research on the Pueblo Indians of the United States, assumes that Pueblo Indians and the anthropologists who write about them share the same discourse.
My position is that both Indian enactment, the story they tell about themselves, and our theory, the story we tell, are transformations of each other; they are retellings of a narrative derived from the discursive practice of our historical era (Foucault 1973), instances of never-ceasing reflexivity. (Bruner, 1986:149).
I agree only with part of this statement. For one thing, Bruner neglects the historical perspective, which is precisely where we can trace how a dominant discourse takes over. For those ethnographed, the subjects of our field research, do not share our discourse from the beginning. They put up resistance to their colonization and ‘invention’ (Mudimbe, 1988) and designed counter-discourses, even if (as will be shown in this study) these finally confirmed the hegemony of the European discourse (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:18). But it is precisely the history of the hegemony of our discourse which also makes clear the difference that arises from the often original interpretation of the dominant discourse that the ethnographed come up with. In future, noting this difference as precisely as possible may be the ethnographer’s primary goal.
From the outbreak of the fighting in May and June 1986, northern Uganda became increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. The NRA government declared the Acholi District a war zone. Roadblocks controlled access. Transport and trade collapsed almost completely towards the end of 1987. As early as March, the NRA forced a large part of the population in Acholi to leave their farms and take ‘refuge’ in camps or in the city. But, I was told, many fled less from the so-called ‘rebels’ than from the soldiers of the NRA, who plundered, stole livestock, and burned houses, supplies, and fields.
In November 1989, I was able to visit northern Uganda – Acholi – for the first time. Most of the more than 150,000 refugees the war had created had now returned to their villages and begun to cultivate their fields. Following a government offer of an amnesty and a peace treaty with another resistance movement, the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), thousands of ‘rebels’ left the bush, returning to their villages or joining the NRA and militias to fight against their former allies. A few bushfighters who refused to surrender joined up with the Holy Spirit soldiers of Joseph Kony. They conducted a guerrilla war, staging ambushes here and there or daring an occasional attack.
The NRA seldom managed to catch Holy Spirit soldiers, and all too often vented their frustration on the local populace. After each defeat, they took vengeance on innocent people. The result was that the population indeed sympathized more or less with the Holy Spirit soldiers, though they too degenerated more and more into marauding bands of thieves.
In November 1989, Gulu, the capital of Acholi District, was a city ‘occupied’ by the NRA. Trucks carrying soldiers and weapons careered down the main street. Soldiers sat in small bars, rode bicycles, or strolled the streets in groups, singing songs. Some had tied chickens they had acquired to the handlebars of their bicycles, carried them in their knapsacks, or strapped them to the counter of the bar while they drank. The traces of the war had not been eliminated. Many houses lining the main street had been destroyed, their facades burned, the pavements torn up, the street signs perforated by bullets and twisted, and the central roundabout, once planted with glowing red bougainvillea, now consisted of nothing but a heap of stones. The scantily covered dead were carried on stretchers through the city followed by weeping relatives. One woman told me there had been too many dead taken by the war and now by AIDS as well.
While the
