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Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of
photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary
practice. This collection of studies in African photography
examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and
ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are
produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social
contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive
characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures,
vis-a-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography'
worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn,
examining the history of academic engagement with these African
photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities
of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena.
The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography
and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the
variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in
Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and
projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African
photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the
studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios'
products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of
material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the relationship between photography and
ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in
Africa. Richard Vokes is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the
University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and author of Ghosts of
Kanungu
This is the first ethnography of the Uganda Martyrs Guild [UMG], a
lay movement of the Catholic Church, and its organized witch-hunts
in the kingdom of Tooro, Western Uganda. This book explores
cannibalism, food, eating and being eaten in its many variations.
It deals with people who feel threatened by cannibals, churches who
combat cannibals and anthropologists who find themselves suspected
of being cannibals. It describes how different African and European
images of the cannibal intersected and influenced each other in
Tooro, Western Uganda, where the figure of the resurrecting
cannibal draws on both pre-Christian ideas andchurch dogma of the
bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion. In Tooro
cannibals are witches: they bewitch people so that they die only to
be resurrected and eaten. This is how they were perceived in the
1990s when a lay movement of the Catholic Church, the Uganda
Martyrs Guild [UMG] organized witch-hunts to cleanse the country.
The UMG was responding to an extended crisis: growing poverty, the
retreat and corruption of the local government, a guerrilla war, a
high death rate through AIDS, accompanied by an upsurge of occult
forces in the form of cannibal witches. By trying to deal, explain
and "heal" the situation of "internal terror", the UMG reinforced
the perception of the reality of witches and cannibals while at the
same time containing violence and regaining power for the Catholic
Church in competition for "lost souls" with other Pentecostal
churches and movements. This volumeincludes the DVD of a video film
by Armin Linke and Heike Behrend showing a "crusade" to identify
and cleanse witches and cannibals organized by the UMG in the rural
area of Kyamiaga in 2002. With a heightened awareness and
reflective use of the medium, UMG members created a domesticated
version of their crusade for Western (and local) consumption as
part of a "shared ethnography". Heike Behrend is Professor of
Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Cologne,
Germany, the author of Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits [James
Currey, 1999], and co-editor of Spirit Possession, Modernity and
Power in Africa[James Currey, 1999]
Ongoing debates about the "return of religion" have paid little
attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of
religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of
techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise,
research on religion and media has neglected the fact that
historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was
closely linked to the development of new media of communication.
This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic
studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that
processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume
raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema,
video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and
healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media?
Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?
Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of
photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary
practice. This collection of studies in African photography
examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and
ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are
produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social
contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive
characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures,
vis-a-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography'
worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn,
examining the history of academic engagement with these African
photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities
of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena.
The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography
and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the
variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in
Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and
projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African
photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the
studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios'
products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of
material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our
understanding of the relationship between photography and
ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in
Africa. RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and
Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and
author of Ghosts of Kanungu
Ongoing debates about the "return of religion" have paid little
attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of
religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of
techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise,
research on religion and media has neglected the fact that
historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was
closely linked to the development of new media of communication.
This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic
studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that
processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume
raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema,
video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and
healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media?
Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?
In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern
Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit
named Lakwena, raised an army called the \u201cHoly Spirit Mobile
Forces.\u201d With it she waged a war against perceived evil, not
only an external enemy represented by the National Resistance Army
of the government, but internal enemies in the form of
\u201cimpure\u201d soldiers, witches, and sorcerers. She came very
close to her goal of overthrowing the government but was defeated
and fled to Kenya. This book provides a unique view of Alice's
movement, based on interviews with its members and including their
own writings, examining their perceptions of the threat of external
and internal evil. It concludes with an account of the successor
movements into which Alice's forces fragmented and which still are
active in the civil wars of the Sudan and Uganda.
Since the introduction of photography by commercial studio
photographers and the colonial state in Kenya, this global medium
has been intensely debated and contested among Muslims on the
cosmopolitan East African coast. This book does not only explore
the making, circulation, and consumption of popular photographs,
but also the other side, their rejection and obliteration, an
essential aspect of a medium's history that should not be
neglected. It deals with various social spaces of refusal in the
local Muslim milieu and in that of traditional spirit mediums in
which (gendered) visibility was (and is) contested in various and
creative ways. It focuses on the aesthetics of withdrawal the
various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as
well as the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the
image in new ways by veiling, masking, and concealing. In a
fragmented historical perspective, Heike Behrend seeks to
complement, decenter, and counter the history of photography as it
has been told by the West and to narrate another history beginning
with preceding local media such as textiles and spirit
possession.
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