LIFE IS PRICKLY. NARRATING HISTORY, BELONGING, AND COMMON PLACE IN BOR, SOUTH SUDAN
A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
by Brendan R. Tuttle January 2014
Examining Committee Members:
Dr. Paul Garrett, Advisory Chair, Anthropology Dr. Mindie Lazarus-Black, Department of Anthropology Dr. Marilyn Silberfein, Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University Dr. Heather Sharkey, External Member, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
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ABSTRACT
An ethnography based on research carried out between 2009 and 2010 in the vicinity of
Bor Town, the capital of Jonglei State, in what was then Southern Sudan, this dissertation is primarily concerned with people’s reflections on making agreements with one another during a period when the nature of belonging was being publically discussed and redefined. It examines historical narratives and discussions about how people ought to relate to the past and to each other in the changed circumstances following the formal cessation of hostilities between the
Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in 2005. This dissertation departs from much of the literature on Southern Sudan by focusing on the common place, the nature of promises and ordinary talk, as opposed to state failure and armed conflict.
After 21 years of multiple and overlapping conflicts in Sudan, a Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (CPA) was signed in January of 2005. The agreement stipulated national elections during a six-year Interim Period, at the end of which, the people of Southern Sudan were to hold a referendum on self-determination to decide whether to remain united with Sudan or to secede.
This dissertation examines questions where were on many people’s minds during Sudan’s national elections and the run-up to the referendum, a time when questions of history, belonging, and place were very salient.
The dissertation begins with a discussion of jokes and other narratives in order to sketch out some popular attitudes toward speech, responsibility and commitments. Most of the body of
ii the dissertation is concerned with everyday talk about the past and with sketching out the background necessary to understand the stakes at play in discussions about citizenship and the definition of a South Sudanese citizen: Did it depend upon one’s genealogy or one’s place of birth, or one’s commitments to a particular place, or their having simply suffered there with others?
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for my parents and my brother, Barrett, and Madit
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Fieldwork in Bor (2009-2010) and archival research in Juba were made possible by financial support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The
Department of Anthropology at Temple University and Temple University’s Center for the
Humanities provided financial and other support.
I owe much to the help of many friends. I thank Majur Aguto for bringing me to Bor and
Madit Jol Makuei for being a friend, constant companion and source of ideas.
I am more fortunate than I can acknowledge for Paul Garrett’s unfailing patience, care and encouragement, careful attention, humor, and continual prodding; I’m grateful to him for always having my best interests in mind and for his example, and for much else. I owe my greatest debts to my committee and readers, Paul Garrett, Marilyn Silberfein, Heather Sharkey, and Mindie Lazarus-Black—all read multiple drafts and helped me to formulate the ideas presented here and gave generously of their time, guidance, knowledge and insight.
I thank Marilyn Silberfein for making the writing process fun and for many discussions and comparisons with other settings and for much else. My gratitude goes to Heather Sharkey not only for showing confidence in the potential of this work, but also, among all else that she did, for many excellent suggestions. I thank Mindie Lazarus-Black for keeping me going and for much critical support.
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I am also grateful to John Mccall and David Sutton, who introduced me to anthropology, and Sydney White, Juris Milestone, Judith Goode, Patricia Hansell, and Muriel Kirkpatrick. I have benefited from the advice, encouragement, emails, and help of Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Anne
Bartlett, Richard and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Douglas Johnson, Jay Spaulding, Benaiah Yongo-
Bure, and all of the members of the Sudan Studies Association. And Daniel Beaumont. And
Gordon Witty. And finally, although I have never met her, I feel very grateful to Bambi
Schieffelin for providing “a model of what a mentor should be.”
From the beginning of my interest in Southern Sudan I have received advice and assistance from Dr. Aleer M. Yol, Machuei Mabil, John Tot, Ayuen Ajok, Garang Deng, and many others. I am especially grateful to Benjamin Abeny Gai Mayen, Mandela (Gai-Manoon)
A.P. Mel, Alak Jacob Gai, Ayol Gai-Manoon, and Majur Aguto for organizing for my travel to and stay in Southern Sudan. In Kampala, Diing Char Nhial, especially, and Yar Gai, Ayen
Garang, and Yar Garang generously welcomed me into their home. For housing me in Bor
Town, I thank Nyicak and Guala, specifically Mac Lual Mac and the late Kuol Ajak. He will be missed. For making me welcome, I thank Peter Pac Alier Agot and Ator. I am grateful to Biong for hospitality and guidance and a thousand other things.
I cannot possibly list all of the many people who have generously helped me in Southern
Sudan, but I must mention at least a few. I would particularly like to thank Mabior Makuei
Mabior. I am privileged to have benefited from his encouragement, good humor, and intellect. I must thank Deng Dekuek and M.G. Ajak for the title of this dissertation. I also thank Mamer
Alier Riak, Maker Ayom Mabior, Aciek Anyeth Mabior, Ateny Pec Ariik, Jok Manyang Jok,
Ateny Agot Ayom, Chol Benson, Ayuen Panchol Ajang, Mayen, Yar (Mary), Isaiah Ngok
Ayom, Ayor Adehok Maluth, Atongdit Ajok, Angeer Ajak, Riak Deng Mabior, Mayom Pandak,
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Alier Michael, Ayuen Kuch Amiot, Dhieu Dau (David Cry) and MC Valient Jam (and the puotpuot community), Ayuen Magot Buol, Simon Akena, Hussain Mac Ayuel, Dau Deng
Malual, Abraham Diu, Mabior Arok, Maker Chol Madol, David Diing Magot, Romeo Riak
Ajang, Angang Ngong, Chol Michael, John Jol Buol, Chiengkou, Aboi, Gai Korwel Dhal, Mabil
Jongkor Chol, Aciek Kual, Majer Mac, Deng Kuat, Majak Alith Majak, Kuk Alat Kuk Kor,
Mawut Garang Ajak, Philip Awow Lek, Abany Ahok Gai, Lual Bol Yuot, Fatinadit Atier,
Anoon Akol Chiengkou, Sam Ayuen, Paul Nhial, Osman Flus, Ateny Pec Ariik, Panchol Maciek
Deng, Kuat Afar, and many, many others who have provided more kinds of support and encouragement than I can name. Their welcome and hospitality is why I always return.
I thank MaryBeth Chrostowsky for her company, insight, and expertise in Bor Town.
Brooke Bocast, Zoe Cormack, Christian Doll, Diane Garbow, Qingyan Ma, Abdel Karim
Mohammad, and Juan Luis Rodriguez Aponte—all, knowingly or not, contributed to this project.
I could not have completed this dissertation without the love, confidence, and support of my parents and brother. Finally, Reilly Wilson added to my education in more ways that I can acknowledge. For her, it is probably impossible for me to adequately express my love and gratitude.
While none of these people is responsible for its errors or shortcomings, all share credit for whatever is good in this dissertation.
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NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY
Dinka (Thuɔŋjäŋ) is Western Nilotic language of the Nilo-Saharan family with more than four and a half million speakers. Bor Dinka (Thuɔŋbor) is a distinct dialect within this group of mutually intelligible language varieties generally referred to by outsiders simply as Dinka.1
Whatever small ability in Bor Dinka I managed to acquire would not have been possible without the generosity of my teachers. I must specifically thank Madit Jol, Reverend Daniel Garang
Ayuen, Ayuen Ajok, and Mamer Alier.
I have generally followed the alphabet and spelling conventions developed by the
Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Since SIL’s alphabet is based on the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and I have not tried to transcribe tones, most of the characters I use to
represent Bor Dinka speech do not require special clarification, with the exception of the
“breathy vowels” (indicated by an umlaut: ä ë ɛ̈ ï ö ɔ̈ ),th and c, , dh, nh, and ny. Characters
followed by h (th, dh, and nh) represent dentalized consonants. Ny is a palatal nasal [ɲ], as in
canyon. C is a voiced palatal stop, pronounced like the ch in church.
Glossary of a few common terms
akuma Usually translated “government,” this term derives from an Arabic root referring to the bureaucratic sphere with its particular order and control.
1 “Dinka” is an exonym that has since become a widely used ethnic category referring comprehensively to Thuɔŋjäng-speakers. There is a great deal of regional and generational variation within Thuɔŋjäŋ. That many people refer to the language spoken near Bor with a different term both illustrates the false picture of homogeneity given by the term “Dinka” as well as how the historical importance of Bor Town as a regional center has registered enough to give a particular variety its name.
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In Southern Sudan, it refers to a bundle of practices related to government courts and punishment in contrast to rural domains of “home.” baai Usually translated “home” or “village,” this term is commonly used to refer to inhabited rural areas to imply a sense of community in contrast to the domain of akuma. boma Term for the smallest unit of local government under SPLM/GoSS administration dhien A cattle herding group or a cattle hearth. Jonglei State A term referring to a territorial division of southern Sudan and used in the vicinity of Bor Town (the capital of Jonglei State) to refer to the town plat. kɔc pan tok “People of one dwelling-place;” a term used to refer to relatives or to imply a sense of community. mac thok “Cooking hearth;” more expansively used to refer to relatives by virtue of their shared descent from a single woman. panjieng “People country;” a term used in contrast to the domain of akuma. payam Intermediate unit of local government between the county and boma wut A cattle village
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
page ABSTRACT ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY ...... viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... x LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi LIST OF ACRONYMS ...... xii STUDY AREA ...... xiii INTRODUCTION ...... xiv
CHAPTER 1. “TYING SPEECH” AND JOKES ...... 1 2. HEAVINESS ...... 32 3. EVOLUTION OF RULE ...... 57 4. A FISHERMAN’S HISTORY ...... 90 5. FATINADIT ...... 155 6. HUSAIN MAC ...... 160 7. THIS LAND WILL FINISH US...... 194 8. MABIOR MAKUEI...... 231 9. OBLIGATIONS AND OBJECTS ...... 246 10. LIFE IS PRICKLY ...... 281 WORKS CITED ...... 297
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. A boat named "servant of people." ...... 23
Figure 2. Captain Grant leaving Karagwe ...... 36
Figure 3. Looc Miir...... 41
Figure 4. adolcɛrec ...... 48
Figure 5. Britannia and King Theodore II ...... 68
Figure 6. Bor Town, major roads...... 92
Figure 7. Mading Bor...... 122
Figure 8. Bor payams and bomas...... 142
Figure 9. Fish bundle (detail)...... 144
Figure 10. SPLM/A party poster, “unity… equality… diversity…” ...... 149
Figure 11. NCP party poster...... 149
Figure 12. Pïïr tueeŋ de alɛ Mïäk yennëkë ë mane! ...... 149
Figure 13. Fisherman at Bor Town’s north port fish market ...... 155
Figure 14. Colonial Bor Town, numbered...... 162
Figure 15. Bor, 1870s...... 168
Figure 16. The old town in the rows of neem trees ...... 203
Figure 17. Schematic representation of Mabior’s narrative ...... 273
Figure 18. Majer...... 283
Figure 19. Isaiah's diagram of a Dinka marriage...... 306
Figure 20. Kakuma Refugee Assistance Project...... 308
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LIST OF ACRONYMS
CMA Civil/Military Administrator CPA Comprehensive Peace Agreement GoNU Government of National Unity GoS Government of Sudan GoSS Government of Southern Sudan LWF/DWS Lutheran World Federation/Department for World Service MP Member of Parliament NCP National Congress Party NGO Non-Governmental Organization SPLM/A Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNMIS United Nations Mission in Sudan WFP World Food Program
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STUDY AREA
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INTRODUCTION
This dissertation is a study of people’s efforts to create a sense of agency and normalcy in
uncertain circumstances. It is based on ethnographic research carried out between 2009 and
2010 in the vicinity of Bor Town, the capital of Jonglei State, South Sudan.2 Since the 1880s, the Bor region has intermittently made front-page headlines in international newspapers, first as an area of colonial interest, later because of Sudan’s long-running wars. The image of Southern
Sudan produced since the 1880s—as a place whose people “were incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern world” (Johnson 1981:40-41)—has changed little: from the picture of an inaccessible swamp inhabited by archetypal savages in nineteenth-century exploration literature through early twentieth-century depictions of its subject population as “an intractable problem that impeded the peaceful establishment and efficient running of a new colonial administration” (Johnson 1981:508) to sporadic accounts of a war-torn region of refugees and victims of systematic violence during the 1980s and ‘90s.
The general questions that researchers have posed for themselves mainly relate the hows and whys of dramatic violence, its root causes, principle antagonists, and chronologies. Most recently these questions have turned on whether Sudan’s and South Sudan’s wars have ended, whether they are failed states, and, if so, whether either can be considered a “successfully failed
2 The semiautonomous Southern Sudan became the Republic of South Sudan on 9 July 2011. The people commonly identified as Dinka refer to themselves as Jieng (people). I will echo the Jieng idiom and use the phrase “Bor people,” after the phrase kɔc Bor, to refer to the residents of the floodplains fanning out eastward across the Upper Nile plains from Bor Town along the Bahr al-Jebel (a tributary of the White Nile) who are the subject of this dissertation.
xiv state” (Prunier and Gisselquist 2003). Framing our questions in terms of the root causes of violence risks pathologizing South Sudanese (youth, especially) by understanding them only through “the lens of violence” (Kelly 2008:356); and this danger has not always been avoided
(for an extended critique of violence as a framing device see Leopold 2005). Following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, accounts of escalating violence and mass killings in Jonglei State have usually ascribed the region’s problems to a “culture of violence” involving cycles of cattle raiding and revenge, inflated bride-prices and Murle infertility (see Rolandsen and Breidlid 2012 for a critical overview of this literature).
I do not attempt to answer these kinds of questions about the causes of violence. The reason is partially because Sudan’s civil wars were not created by the people I met there (though, many eventually did take part, more often in an effort to defend their homes and families than to settle old scores). But mainly the reason is that my theoretical concerns have more to do with the ways in which people’s efforts to cope with violence are continuous with daily life: how people put up impediments to violence by making promises to one another and creating a sense of the ordinary in their everyday lives.
Scholarship on collective belonging in South Sudan has tended to focus on links between homeland attachments and the emergence of “ethnic fiefdoms” in settings marked by wider instability, the reorganization of local governance, and resource competition (Schomerus and
Allen 2010). My point is not to challenge this scholarship, much of which is cited below; nor is my aim to provide another analysis of the root causes of Southern Sudan’s wars. (Douglas H.
Johnson has masterfully reviewed this literature in The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars
(2003). As his title indicates, Sudan’s wars have been multiple and their causes and consequences cannot be adequately understood without considering Sudan’s changing place
xv within networks that have spanned large parts of the globe.) I think that there is room for anthropologists to make a contribution, and a need for the particular attention to small-scale social relations, coherence, moral codes and attachments and systems of knowledge which anthropologists bring to their subject matter. My aim is to draw attention to experiences of place and belonging that have often been neglected by a focus on violence which risks exaggerating the importance of participation in armed conflict, ethnic division, and abstract images of patrilineal affinity. Indeed, while violence and ethnic division dominated much of what was written about Jonglei state in 2009 and ‘10, many people living there talked about things that were much less dramatic: the price of lumber and cement, marriages, children, their families, tedium and frustration. I have tried to present these practices as I encountered them in Bor country, meaningful, nurtured and taken seriously—rather than as simply the products of resistance or invented traditions. For many Southerners, abstract claims to land, belonging, and authority were rooted much more in the practical responsibilities of daily life to family and neighbors, than in participation in armed conflict or, even, descent (ethnicity).
Most of the people I spoke to in Bor talked about their collective identities in ways that often de-emphasized descent, focusing instead on common history and shared commitments to building stable, predictable lives with their neighbors. Tim Allen and David Turton (1996:13) dealt with this point in talking about return migration and how the problem of creating durable communities of attachments to places and other people is in large part a problem of restoring responsibility and accountability, one of the most difficult things to repair after a prolonged war.
“If the resources and political will are forthcoming” roads and buildings can be rebuilt, shops can be repaired and fields cleared and replanted, Allen and Turton write (1996:13-14). “But those things which really make social life viable are hard … to pin down: little gifts, the sharing of
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knowledge about soils and plants, the acceptance of hierarchies and moral codes, the recognition
of avoidance customs, a sense of duty, a network of debts, consensus about how to settle
squabbles, understanding the distinction between flirting and harassing, or between teasing and
abusing, a common experience of the spirit world”—all aspects of that process by which culture
is continually produced, through practices with their own histories and modes of reproduction.
Dissertations are often written in reverse, with introductions last, imposing an order on
ethnographic materials where everything fits and builds up to one’s conclusion. This is not how
things happen. What follows is something of an attempt to lay out some of the ideas that helped
me to make sense of my time in Southern Sudan after I had returned—it falls into three parts.
First, I will briefly contextualize this dissertation in light of some current research about
migration and belonging, partly in order to sketch out some of the questions I took with me to
Southern Sudan; second, I will indicate how my research fits thematically within the
contemporary ethnography of Southern Sudan; and third, I will outline the chapters of this
dissertation. Taking these things up in that order, I begin with a discussion of return migration,
the topic which originally led me to Southern Sudan.
Return migration
Like any other student of anthropology, I came to my research through my own set of relationships. Mine grew out of friendships with young men and women who had left the vicinity of Bor in the 1980s and gained refugee status in North America in the late 1990s. I am not only deeply indebted to my friends who tolerated my intrusions, but also to their families in
Southern Sudan and Uganda who welcomed me into their homes. In the late 1990s, Southern
Sudanese in the United States also provided an important lesson about the concept of
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globalization and the idea that because the world is connected everyone (and everyplace) is
uniformly linked and accessible. Many people in Kakuma, a refugee camp in northwest Kenya,
or even in Juba, in Southern Sudan, found it easier to communicate with people in Philadelphia
than with family in rural Jonglei State. In spite of their connectedness—their affective ties,
shared language, remittances, and frequent phone calls and videos—few of the young men and
women I knew in the United States had any concrete idea of what passed for ordinary life in their
natal villages in South Sudan.
I first went to Bor because I wanted to understand return migration. When I was there in
2009 and ’10, the town was a settlement of roughly forty thousand people. In 1991 Southern
military unity collapsed when the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) divided into warring
factions. During what came to be known as the ruɔ n capoth ‘season of the lone survivor’, almost the entire population fled the town when the region was laid to waste by SPLA-Nasir soldiers and irregulars. The Government of Sudan captured Bor town in 1992. Living nearby was risky.
, م) A few children stayed behind with elderly relatives in a district called Hai Salaam
“peace quarter”) at the edge of town, and earned a little money selling cigarettes to the soldiers stationed there.3 (By 2009, most people translated the toponym “surrendered place.”) It was only after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 that people began to settle there in substantial numbers. After 2005, the town’s proximity to river and air transportation led it to be chosen by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) as a repatriation way-station where displaced people gathered before moving on to rural areas. Many remained in Bor Town for protection from rural insecurity. When I arrived in
3 See Douglas Johnson’s (2003:145-6) discussion of “peace villages” which were part of a program to produce “a dependent and portable labour reserve who serve a double purpose: 1) to implement the government’s “pacification” programme through resettling and reclaiming territory formerly contested by the SPLA, and 2) to extend political and economic control over the resources of these groups through agricultural schemes owned and operated by interest groups currently represented in the army and government.”
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August of 2009, then, it was a place where almost the entire population had recently arrived—
and an ideal place in which to examine the processes by which people reconstructed their
communities by building “those things which really make social life viable.”
The end of the civil war in 2005 has led to the return of many displaced people to South
Sudan. For many returnees and their families, these “homecomings” have been marked by
“unsettling” experiences of unforeseen social distance (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004).
Indeed, people often used a metaphor drawn from the “prickly” receptions that homecomers
sometime received to described the hardships of everyday life in Bor—ciɛŋ acï lɔ nyathath ‘life is prickly’, dull and tasteless. (“When you go to someone’s home, and they do not tell you to leave but they don’t welcome you. You go to the house but no one greets you. No one says,
‘You sit here,’” one young man explained. “There is a relation but the relationship is dry. It is like bad posho [stale, buthuth ‘tasteless’]”.)
Research about return migration has only recently come to constitute a substantial field of scholarly inquiry. The reason is not only that return migration has tended to fall at the margins of larger narratives of assimilation, diaspora, and transnationalism (Stefansson 2004); it also stems from what Laura Hammond calls the “repatriation = homecoming” model (1999:229), a framework that has the effect of fostering the idea that “going back” is an “unproblematic and natural” return to familiar ground. The perils of this model were recognized by scholars in the
1980s, when the neoliberal restructuring of many refugee-sending and -receiving states,
“combined with inadequate international assistance, meant that refugees were often viewed as a drain on the local economy” and a security risk (Allen and Morsink 1994:5; Brown 1992).
Scholars charged governments with placing limitations on refugee status in order to place a thousand little impediments in the way of people becoming fully integrated into their
xix surroundings, thereby encouraging repatriation; and assessments from both within and outside humanitarian organizations suggested that the promotion of repatriation “as the durable solution”
(Chimni 1999:1) by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had risked complicity in non-voluntary repatriation schemes that jeopardized refugees’ safety (Chimni
1999; Crisp 1985, Harrell-Bond 1986). Because the volume of publishable research generated by a topic tends to follow the institutional agendas that fund it, the emphasis placed on ensuring the voluntary character of repatriation has meant that the scholarship on return migration is largely a literature about the repatriation of refugees (Allen and Morsink 1994; Allen 1996;
Black and Koser 1999; Long and Oxfeld 2004; Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Jansen and
Löfving 2009).
In 2008, I co-authored a paper with Mandela A.P. Mel, who was born not far from Bor
Town, about young people’s efforts to seek out, create and strengthen ties to their natal communities in Southern Sudan (Mel and Tuttle 2008). We wrote about the burden that student- debts placed on young refugees who did not have families to fall back on for support in the
United States. A few young men and women who gained refugee status in North America in the late 1990s went on to earn post-graduate degrees; some found work in offices, others found good paying jobs in the meat-packing and food-processing industry. All encountered barriers of racism and inequality, and many ended up struggling to make ends meet in low-paying service work. By 2008, many writers had begun to focus on the predatory ways that universities treated their students and how someone who wanted to enter into a career in a charitable organization or an NGO had to work for a year or two in an unpaid (or effectively unpaid) internship. We simply pointed out that there was a great deal of discussion in humanitarian circles about the promise embodied by “skills-transfer” projects designed to aid in the development of Southern
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Sudan with the help of US-educated returnees; but student loans, unpaid internships, and racism
effectively sealed young Sudanese migrants off from careers in charitable NGOs.4 Those young men and women that did manage to acquire the kinds of skills which could enable them to find jobs in Southern Sudan’s humanitarian sector, were generally so burdened by student loans that they were forced to seek employment elsewhere. In this respect, young arrivals from South
Sudan were not very different from the children of many working-class parents in the United
States.
By 2009-’10, when I arrived in Bor country, a number of the young men I knew in the
United States had resettled permanently in Southern Sudan. This topic was to have provided a kind of entrance into a study of return migration and feelings of belonging.5 I had planned to travel to Bor with a friend who had left there in 1984 and lived in a series of IDP and then refugee camps in Uganda until 2002, when he gained refugee status and traveled to the United
States. (After having lived in Bor for a few months I realized that the problems faced by returnees were not very different from those faced by everyone else.) As it turned out, we weren’t able to raise the money to get him there until several months after my arrival in Southern
Sudan. In the meantime his brother generously took time out of his studies at Makerere
University to meet me in Kampala and put me on a bus to Juba, where I was met by a friend of
4 Despite the aid and scholarships that many qualified for, and the shared apartments and budgets many relied on to make ends meet. This dissertation’s final chapter examines life in the United States. Mel and I (2008) focused on student debts in part because so much of the literature on young refugees has focused on the burden of remittances. While we acknowledged the importance of this literature, we argued that a focus on transnational ties often obscured the ways in which economic violence, racism, and other forms of inequality in the United States shaped the lives of recent arrivals. Indeed, paying one’s way through college often meant that a young person could not contribute to one’s family in Southern Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya, which added another painful burden to the stress of life in the US. By 2011, Mandela A.P. Mel had returned permanently to South Sudan, where he relied on the support of family and friends in Juba to get by until he was able to find a job. 5 Of course it isn’t surprising that many young men and women preferred not to chuck their families and loved ones to live in North America, where they had to struggle to make ends meet and a thousand reminders that being African they were unwelcome and not fully citizens. And while, admittedly, Southern Sudan is a difficult place to live, I began with this topic of return from North America because Americans tend to grow up with the belief that they live in the best country on earth. The idea that anybody would want to leave or prefer to live someplace else is practically incomprehensible.
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his named Majur Aguto who (delaying his own return to Makerere) introduced me to many
people and found me a place to stay in Bor. Majur was an in-law of my friend in the United
States; and while I was able to draw a sprawling kinship chart of several generations’ depth
which connected them, their friendship was based much more on relationships forged from
mutual aid and common experiences of movement. Majur greatly expanded the network of
people I had access to, without whom I would have learned much less about Bor country.
I think it is worth emphasizing the people in Bor defined their relatives by reference to
the commitments that they had made—their feelings of mutual responsibility and the desire to
create and maintain the kinds of ongoing relations upon which any community is ultimately
founded—if for no other reason than that Southern Sudanese societies are famous for having
patri-clans and lineages based on descent.
When people shared genealogical information with me they generally did not simply list
the names of their ancestors in strict lineal sequences—though most people could list eleven or
twelve male ancestors—but rather narrated stories about intergenerational movements,
successions, and loyalties and conflicts or divided relations as belonging to a father’s or a
mother’s “place.” These were accounts of the past in the mode of “storied knowledge,” in
Ingold’s phrase (2009): “To tell a story is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past,
bringing them to life in the vivid present of listeners as if they were going on here and now”
(2009:200). In Bor, people usually spoke of those whom they counted as their relatives most
generally by saying that they were “people of one dwelling-place” (kɔ c pan tok), and referred to themselves comprehensively as “Bor people” (kɔc Bor), describing different sorts of people geographically, as “those of such-and-such a place,” called “so-and-so.” Everyone also
market’)—and‘ ق) distinguished between Bor Town—popularly called “Jonglei State” or suk
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panjieng (lit., ‘people’s land’), a term referring to rural places where people could create a sense
of belonging that was more enduring and more secure than what “the state” or “the market”
offered.
Seasonality and place of kinship
This raises the issue of kinship. In CHAPTER ONE (page 60) I quote an excerpt from a matrimonial speech which contains the conventional order of talk about relatedness: a shared place, a way of speaking together (meaning how “we” come to agreements) and a name
(generally cast as a quotation from the speech of others), an image of commensality, an example of accompanying each other at a matrimonial discussion and a picture of exogamy—how “we shall all go together” as one group when one our daughters marry. (“We are the people of one place / this is how people should talk / and we are our people, which is called Jɔr / our food is one and we eat together / for instance, this small girl called Aja now’s going to Dɛ̈ r [to marry]…”). This order of talk ravels off from ordinary, unmarked, and day-to-day participation in other’s lives—working cooperatively, chatting, sharing meals, nurturing and caring for one another—and braids into “acts,” as Lambek (2011:3) terms those practices of kinship which “are not ongoing and continuous, not simply a matter of habit or having a feel for the game (Bourdieu
1977). Rather, acts stand out within the stream of practice as marked and often irreversible.”
Moving outward in genealogical space and time from the center of immediate and intimate relations where people and things circulate freely, to spheres of increasing distance calling for greater self-restraint; this scaling of relatedness, from the unmarked to the marked, evokes patterns of relating that resemble geographically mediated relational practices, which generally involve a similar slope of social and temporal distance and difference. Perhaps the
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simplest way to illustrate this would be to describe a few positions along an imaginary
continuum from the unmarked to the marked—after the way that people often spoke in the
abstract.
People in Bor distinguish different parts of the landscape by combining names with the
term pan, which implies inhabited land and bilingual speakers translate as “country,” “village,”
in the sense of “abode”), “community,” or “home.” In everyday speech, “pan” really just) ”دار“ means everybody who lives in a particular place. For instance, anglophone Dinka-speakers generally glossed pan-dԑ n Biong as “their-community of Biong.” It is almost impossible to invoke this notion of community without also implying that the people of such-and-such a place share some sort of common ancestry. In everyday speech, the term was most commonly used to refer to a group organized around a single named ancestor—pan Aguto is “the family of
Aguto”—and translated as either “section,” “family,” or “clan,” according to its genealogical depth and the speaker’s footing—that is, how the act of using the term oriented the speaker toward others, aligning them with some and separating them from others.
Practices of “participation in one another’s existence” (Sahlins 2013)—co-residence, a shared respect for principles of conduct toward each other, commensality, as much as
“prickliness,” loss, and betrayal—provide flexible metaphors for kinship beyond the relations of
“one place,” an image of kinship as concentric circles of mutuality, not long lines of descent.
“Common residence implies that individuals share a similar perception of their position in society within an expanding system of kinship relations,” Burton wrote (1987:109); and in rural communities, people generally acted as though everyone they related to on a day to day basis was a relative. Indeed, this was one of the ways that Evans-Pritchard defined “kinship” (in contrast to “descent”) in Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer, as a way of viewing
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relationships between people in terms of the various links established by close cooperation and
mutual interdependence, which people generally phrased in terms of a “kinship idiom” (Evans-
Pritchard 1951).
The smallest divisions were usually spoken of in terms of a recent grandparent: the
“people of so-and-so,” an expression equivalent to “people of one dwelling” that anglophone
Dinka usually translated as “family.” The smallest named division is called mac thok or
“cooking hearth,” the image being of children eating around a common cooking pot, and can refer both to small groups claiming common descent from a single ancestral grandmother and, more expansively, to groups of this kind, running five or six generations in depth. “Mac thok” often have female eponyms. Here is an example from a middle-aged man named Dau Deng, one of the sons of Deng Malual Aleer Goi, the first paramount chief of Bor country under early
Anglo-Egyptian rule (who died at Simsima on 1 August 1946). In June 2010 I was talking to
Dau about something his father, Deng Malual, had done some eighty years earlier. Deng Malual was so wealthy and his wives and children were so numerous, Dau was telling me, that he had delegated his responsibilities to three senior wives.
“He had thirty-six wives, so he divided them into three groups to organize the work and make dowries simple.” There was his first wife, tiɛŋ dït ‘big wife’, Ayɛn Kor Alith, who was from Anyakuei; then Nyakuɛny Biar, from Nyarweng; then Awak Bior Ahuɛr from Kongor. “Three big wives and thirty-three little wives.” The big wives each managed a group of eleven junior wives, he said; “those big wives were little husbands. [Each] big wife divided everything—food, properties, and what and what—among the little ones, and they divided everything between the children. [Each] was responsible for eleven wives. [Deng] was very clever; [and that was why he was made] a paramount chief.” “Thirty-six, exactly? you’re just keeping the math simple,” I said. Dau laughed, “Thirty-something. There were so many. So you see: we name our families by ladies” [4June 2010; 8 June 2010, WS500238].
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Dau described a populous descent group of three mac thok (“little husbands”) and several generations’ depth with a famous founding ancestor in a capsule, a genealogical narrative condensed into the family of one elderly government chief, Deng Malual. Dau’s story was a kind of parable about an archetypal wundït ‘great father’—a man who had achieved an astonishingly successful male career by transforming himself into an apical ancestor while he was still alive.
Being “people of one dwelling-place” (kɔ c pan tok) is not established by mere proximity or descent, however. In present-day Bor country, as much as any dwelling-place will be identified with a few “owners of the land” (kɔc piny), most of its members are likely to spend much of their time someplace else. This pattern of moving while maintaining links to one’s country of origin illustrates the region’s heterogeneity of livelihood strategies. These distribute risks through the year and among individuals and are much older than the region’s living memory. The many networks that converge upon cattle villages and shrines on the Upper Nile plains cross-cut the region’s “ethnic divides” and combine genealogical, matrimonial, political, economic, and religious relations, joining conceptions of dwelling-places, belonging, and ownership. These focal points are constituted by the density of these ties and—since people generally formalized their relations through bridewealth exchanges and other marked, periodic gatherings, such as the rebuilding of shrines, animal sacrifices, and life-cycle rituals—valued for their capacity to extend these ties outward in space and into the future (Mawson 1991; Johnson
1989, 1990).
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In the vicinity of Bor, where few shrines remain, the most important of these permanent focal points are the largest dry-season cattle villages (wut).6 Each of these villages is made up of a number of herding-groups, called dhiëën (sg. dhien), after the cattle-hearths and windscreens that they stake their cattle around. Dhiëën are also organized into a radial hierarchy, which forms the physical framework of the wut, and provides the terms of reference by which people can place themselves within it. Older dhiëën were seen as “generating” (dhieth) younger ones by fission or attracting settlers.
On the best-drained mound or mounds in the camp [wut], and usually in central position, are the shelters of members of those sub-clans [dhien] whose ancestors are thought first to have established the camp on that site [Lienhardt 1958:110].
The nuclear sub-clans of the tribes, and the nuclear lineages of sub-tribes, are often spoken of as 'the people of the centre of the camp' [wut], since they have first established the cattle camps and occupy central positions on the sites, or ‘the (classificatory) maternal uncles’ of the subtribe or tribe, since they are the descent-groups whose women are most widely distributed through the other descent groups of the tribe [Lienhardt 1961:9].
At any given time a cattle village was basically seen as an aggregation of dhiëën. I’ve already mentioned that many people spent a good deal of time away from their villages. The seasonal occupation of horticultural villages and cattle villages differ in terms of duration, activity, gender, and age. Nowadays, many people have moved closer to towns and government barracks for the safety afforded by those places; others reside in Bor or Juba, where they are students or shopkeepers or officials; others are soldiers, posted in almost every part of South
Sudan. Many men and women traveled widely to visit and to look for opportunities elsewhere; others made a trade in clothes or jewelry. If they had cattle they generally entrusted them to friends or relatives, who would care for them over the course of the yearly round. All this meant
6 I am following Burton (1987) here in translating the term wut as “cattle village” as opposed to “cattle camp” because the term “camp” implies impermanence. People move back and forth between villages. Although horticultural villages are occupied year-round, cattle-keeping is a year-round occupation; horticulture is seasonal.
xxvii that what really wove a wut together was not a human genealogy but rather the thickness of these ties—a sort of genealogy of dhiëën; and what really bound a dhien together were its members’ overlapping claims on cattle, which were in turn continually regenerated by debts and their obligations to various others—family, in-laws, and friends. The density of all these ties also meant that in practice many people had multiple ways of categorizing each other in the kinship idiom: two age-mates who would generally for this reason refer to each other as “brother” often also stood in a relationship of uncle-nephew, for instance. As a result the use of a particular term for a particular kinship relation did not precede an instance of speech—it was rather by speaking that they defined their relationship.
At least since the 1900s, governments have tried to turn focal points into institutions of the state. The trouble was that they were generally occupied seasonally (Burton 1981).
The Anglo-Egyptian policy of Native Administration has often been described as one that aimed to preserve “native culture and traditional authorities” by ceding colonial administration to
“traditional leaders.” This helps to explain the support that British officials gave to the teaching of indigenous languages (Sharkey 2012). It also accounts for District Commissioners’ (DCs) sometimes antagonistic relationships with missionaries—to whom colonial officials granted denominational “spheres of influences,” so that they would open schools and train low-level functionaries at their own expense, while at the same time worrying about the corrosive (“de- tribalizing”) influence that Christianity might have on the “customary” modes of authority upon which Native Administration was founded (DH Johnson 2011:14; Collins 2005:277).
Deeply embedded in the political theory of Native Administration is the idea of a natural identity between people and place, and “the conviction that mobile societies are incapable of generating distinct forms of social power” (Wengrow 2003:131). Having “traditional
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authorities,” in other words, was assumed to mean having a set of clearly bounded political-
territorial entities. (“The very word ‘displacement’ implies an assumption that all human
populations ‘belong’ in a certain place and that, in an ideal world, they would all be where they
belong,” David Turton (1996:97) notes in writing about fifteen years of Mursi movements and
what it has meant to the Mursi themselves.) Like the Mursi, and other mobile pastoral groups
elsewhere, cattle-keeping people of Southern Sudan contravened a basic norm of nineteenth-
century colonial political thought—namely, the inseparability of political structures from the
material framework of the settled village and the practice of agriculture. Wrote an official from
the Sudan colonial Ministry of Agriculture in 1955: “the Dinka, as cattle owners, would not be
tied to the land and take to the discipline of being settled as cultivators” (see page 44, CHAPTER
ONE, for the full quotation and citation).
This understanding of the relationship between authority, mobility, and labor underlays
the many “villagization” schemes undertaken by governments since the early 1900s, which
involved relocating populations and fixing “traditional leaders” in horticultural village centers
(see CHAPTER THREE). The assumption “that a village is the primordial fully social arrangement and that the physical existence of clustered habitations imbues social relationships with a measure of permanence”—in Burton’s (1980:273) phrase—also helps to explain why European visitors to Bor country always remarked on two things: the contrast between the riverside “cattle camps” with their “temporary huts” and the “permanent houses” of inland “villages,” and how people used the fine ash produced by cow-chip fires as salve. Here is an example from Father
Anton Kaufmann, writing in the 1860s.
When speaking about dwelling-places, a distinction must be drawn between the temporary huts erected during the dry season near the river bank, and the permanent huts in the woods, which the Africans regard as their proper homes. The former are only used
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for a few months and are then demolished. They are built of canes and reeds, plastered with cow dung … and are filled with ashes to keep out the cold. Many look more like towers than houses, with canes of different sizes jutting out of the ground. There are no closed walls and many apertures. The permanent houses in the woods present a completely different picture. They are solid round huts, about two poles in diameter, and are constructed by staking a circle of poles, each about a perch in length, and filling the space between each pole with bamboo-canes. … [T]he door … is just an oval-shaped opening through which the inhabitants enters or emerges on all fours [Kaufmann 1975[1881]:161].
Any traveler along the While Nile will see in the morning the Africans still covered in the white-greyish ash which is allowed to remain until the sun’s rays begin to make themselves felt. Then, if by chance, they come across a stream, they immediately wash themselves, but they are most reluctant to do so if any effort is involved; thus they smell horribly of cow-dung, and their skin becomes almost saturated with it [Kaufmann 1975[1881]:163].
corral’] is the cattle stand, or Murrah, whereupon the cattle are‘ زر ] Near the Seribah herded together every night after grazing on the plains [der Steppe]. Their manure, carefully laid out to dry in the sun, is gathered at sunset and set alight to cover the animals and their guardians in dense smoke to protect against the plague of the Baudah [ ‘mosquito’]. The cattle understand this blessing and seek out the densest smoke, getting a seat as close to the fire as possible. Even the natives [Eingeborene] lie down on the smoldering dung and ashes, so that they are dusted by ash and their originally black skin color appears streaky-grey; and this, though abhorrent to European eyes, in their view much improves their beauty and health. The whole floor of the Murrah is covered with cow dung and ashes like a threshing floor. While the whole area is daily cloaked in a fragrant, smoky gauze that hangs over these places, by night, the firelight and rising clouds of smoke betray the natives’ presence there [Marno 1873[1869]:340-41].7
Travelers described scenes without houses—distinct, functionally specific spaces with walls—lacking contrast, clear edges, and any sense of order. For these observers, ash-covered
7 “Nahe der Seribah ist der Viehstandplatz, Murrah, auf welchen allabendlich das tagsüber in der Steppe weidende Vieh zusammenge-trieben wird. Der Mist desselben, sorgfältig ausgebreitet, um an der Sonne zu trocknen, wird bei Sonnenuntergang zusammengehäuft und angezündet, dass die Thiere und deren Hüter im dichten Rauch Schutz gegen die Plage der Baudah finden. Das Vieh weiss diese Wohlthat zu würdigen und benützt sie soviel als möglich, indem es in den dichtesten Qualm und möglichst nahe am Feuer einen Platz zu bekommen trachtet. Auch der Eingeborene legt sich an den glimmenden Mist und Aschenhaufen, so dass er von der Asche eingepudert wird und dadurch die ur-sprünglich schwarze Hautfarbe mit einem ungleich ver-theilten Grau überdeckt erscheint, was zwar in europäischen Augen abscheulich ist, ihrer Meinung nach aber sehr zur Schönheit und Gesundheit dient. Der ganze Boden der Murrah ist mit Rindermist und Asche wie eine Tenne bedeckt. Die auch am Tage schwach glim-menden Haufen hüllen die ganze Gegend in eine, eben nicht wohl duftende Rauchatmosphäre, welche über diesen Plätzen lagert, während sie Abends und des Nachts durch den Feuerschein und die aufsteigenden Rauchwolken häufig an den Eingeborenen zum Verräther warden.”
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bodies signified savagery, an organic connection to the swamps—so close that its inhabitants
seemed to be so much a part of the landscape that they were lacking even bodies, like ghosts.
The cattle byers (lwak, pl. lwek) built in the villages away from the river are of imposing dimensions. … In the dry season—we are speaking specifically of the riverain [sic] tribes in the neighborhood of Bor and Shambe—the whole community, men, women, and cattle, migrates to the neighborhood of the river, living in small temporary huts (Shambe) or absolutely in the open (Bor). … Hearths are made, surrounded by dry wood and uprights to which the cattle are tied at night. On these hearths dung is kept smouldering at night, and men and cattle sleep as near to them as possible to gain protection from the mosquitoes. By rolling themselves in the fine ash men and boys acquire a grey covering, a moderately efficient protective and one that makes them look strangely ghostly as they move about in the morning twilight [Seligman and Seligman 1932:137].
The men sleep as a rule in the ashes of their fires, and we saw men herding cattle whose whole bodies were smeared with ash. We were told that this was to keep off cattle flies, and other stinging insects. The effect was startling; they looked like ghosts [Treatt 1927:194]
[T]here was a big Dinka camp, with many fine, long-horned cattle. A perfect swarm of boys and men lay in an immense mound of ashes, and these ghastly ghosts came and gave us their clammy paws, and then returned to tie up their favorite bulls to short posts, one close behind each sleeping place, for the night [Millais 1924:132].
That this attitude toward cattle villages and pastoralism almost exactly reverses the
attitudes toward them held by most of their inhabitants is a theme that will be reiterated
throughout this dissertation. The most immediate reason was bureaucratic; a mobile livelihood
enabled people to refuse to take any part in the colonial process. And the reason was that people
could simply entrust their cattle to distant friends and relatives and move elsewhere whenever
officials attempted to round up the male population for sudd-clearing or road-building projects,
or attempted a “punitive” raid.
It is worth noting here that “clothing” oneself (cieŋ) with ash is an act of more consequence than simply taking precautions against mosquitos. As a noun the term cieŋ refers to the domain of everyday life and practices, “habits and customs” (Nebel 1979), “surrounding
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land,” and, as a verb, means “way of doing things” or simply “to live.” Evans-Pritchard
famously translated the Nuer cognate as “home” (1940:135-6; but see Burton 1987:27-28); in
Dinka the term can mean “to wear.” This usage is not coincidental, one clothes oneself with
others. I mentioned that the main named focal points of social life are referred to with terms for
hearths, mac thok ‘cooking hearth’ and dhien ‘cattle hearth’. Hearths sites define networks of
people and their spatial relations index temporal sequences of growth and generation (Burton
1983). Francis Mading Deng (1973:226, 294) translates the term dhien as “clan” in a Ngok
Dinka song he recorded in 1962, which also illustrates the metonymic connection between ashes
and hearths. “Arom dhien e Dhaŋ ku ka kic alaam jak e yɛn,” a homesick woman laments, “the
ashes [arom] of the clan [dhien] of Dhang have not touched my skin.” Ashes are also an index of permanence and amenity; “layers and layers of ashes” and “deep ashes” are common expressions of long residence on a particular spot.
John Burton, author of the classic ethnography of Reel (called Atuot by Dinka speakers), who live in Dinkaphone country west of Bor—and who speak a language called Thok Reel
(“tongue of Reel people”) which is not mutually intelligible with Dinka—wrote about how
burnt dung ash … symbolizes [lineal] continuity, fictive though it may be. When a man acquires cattle through marriage and leads them to his camp to be teathered, one of the first things he will do is sift through the gol [it is the same word in many varieties of Dinka, dhien in Bor Dinka] to find clean ashes which he then spreads over the back, loins and head of each animal. Through this simple act they then ‘become’ part of the same ancestral heard. One of the first cosmetic chores each morning in the camp is to spread warm ashes over one’s own body, an act which accomplishes a similar end [Burton 1987:37-38].8
It is important to emphasize the density of experience around hearths alongside their more mundane functions. By sitting together, sharing a space, eating the same food, and
8 Burton (1983:114) quotes a Reel singer, “the ashes of the dung fire in my camp are so very deep,” an image suggesting “that the singer is a descendant of an ancient ancestor whose people have occupied the same space for uncountable years.”
xxxii covering themselves with ashes from a common fire, people come to share the same body by being people of one dwelling-place—sharing flesh and blood, each said to be produced by food, and sharing the same skin, clothed in ash.
Town and Country
“It is obvious [that] people will go back [to the village] because no one lives in town without a village.” [Major Aguto, 20 January 2010]
What I want to discuss here is how people imagined belonging in a place where the reordering of space—through border-making, settlement schemes, and displacement—has long been a principal mode of state power.
People whom I met in Bor country described a sense of localized identity in contrast to other places as well as in terms of being “local,” marginal to centralized powers, which were generally defined by a distinct style of bureaucratic speech associated with Government. In
Southern Sudan, where many on the countryside are largely self-sufficient, the centralized structure of government contributes to the perceived autonomy of rural areas. Concepts of citizenship in Southern Sudan have long been connected to locality, with the villages having chiefs’ courts being the locus of civic identity. Whenever people spoke about the specific locus of their most consequential actions, though, they spoke about cattle villages.
The strained relations between South Sudanese and the states which have sought to govern them have provided material for a story of international interventions that traces the problems to something inherent in the culture there. Related to the “culture of violence,” one of the most often cited is the supposed inability of people to distinguish between personal attachments and those which are supposed to be impersonal and bureaucratic, belonging to the market and the state. This is variously called “tribalism,” “corruption” or “nepotism.”
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Cherry Leonardi (2011:216-17) raised this issue recently in talking about debates over the
commodification of land and the
monetization of productive and reproductive resources, including human life itself. … [The resulting] debate and competition within families and communities [as some have sought out money and markets] has reproduced a binary distinction between the values of an idealised moral economy of kinship and reciprocity, and the immoral, individualistic cultures of money and town, … [a] moral dichotomy transcends ethnic divisions, and underlies perceptions of government corruption and of the broader changes wrought by the political economy of the 1983–2004 war and the subsequent interim period.
Clearly people in South Sudan understand the difference between the personal and
impersonal ties; few people elsewhere understand better or are more disturbed by their
understanding. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, one of the major divisions that people spoke of in
Bor country, which likewise summarized a more diffuse set of feelings about akuma