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Based on eleven months of field work (2009-2011), this book analyzes the situation of youth in urban Gulu, Northern Uganda, in the aftermath of the war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government (1986-2006). Specifically, it focuses on the generation that was born and grew up during the 20-year war: How do members of this generation perceive and evaluate socio-cultural changes which occurred in Acholi society throughout the war years? How do they imagine their future society? And how do they react to the expectations directed at them by their elders? In order to answer these questions, the book draws on rich ethnographic material. It provides an in-depth analysis of how imaginations of the post-war society are contested and negotiated between different groups of social actors – youth and elders, men and women as well as local, national and international actors. While some try to re-establish former cultural practices and conventions and call for a 'retraditionalization' of Acholi society, others lobby for 'modernization' and attempt to establish 'new' social structures, values and norms which are strongly influenced by local understandings of 'the Western culture'. The book presents numerous examples of the multiple and complex ways young people strategically position themselves in these debates and make use of the various discourses on culture, tradition and modernity in their negotiations of generational, gender, family, and peer-to-peer relations.

This article explores the challenges of knowledge production in a sleep lab. Based on ethnographic research, and drawing on affect theory, I investigate the peculiar mix of cables and care, sensors and senses, "natural" sleep and technological tinkering, intimacy and strangeness that characterize nightly life at the lab. I discuss how the production of relevant knowledge and good therapeutic outcomes depends on the careful co-management of technologies, environments, bodies, personalities, and their various entanglements, which I capture by developing three analytical concepts: intimate space (to think about the sleep lab environment), technointimacy (to think about the haptic encounters between technology, bodies, and emotion), and side-affects (to think about the undesired effects of bodyminds on technology). Together, the three concepts bring out how patients' entanglements with sleep-related technologies and environments evoke intense affects and emotions which incessantly interfere with knowledge production and therapy. In order to bring about "good enough sleep" for "good enough knowledge," trade-offs between natural sleep and techno-medical interruptions abound. As every insomniac knows, sleep resists control. The sleep lab manifests this tension writ large.

This article reflects on the delicate issue of confidentiality and anonymity in contemporary anthropological research. It focuses on the challenges of assigning pseudonyms and disguising the identity of interlocutors and participants, especially in the contemporary context of the widespread use of social media and the internet. Drawing on the moral dilemmas, struggles, and failures that I experienced in relation to these issues in my own research, the article discusses the complexity of finding the right balance between respecting research participants' interests and well-being, on the one hand, and living up to both the high ethical standards of the discipline and the desire to provide a meaningful analysis of 'real' issues, people, and places, on the other.

In Africa, the emergence of a "modern" mental health regime centered on psychiatry is often portrayed as a unidirectional intervention by "the West." Analyses ranging from medical histories of colonial psychiatry to more recent studies of Global Mental Health focus mostly on the role of external actors and the ways their actions impact(ed) on local populations. Uncritical studies simply reduce the complexity of African therapeutic landscapes to a "treatment gap" and see the introduction of "science-based" mental health approaches as necessary "civilizing" missions. Critical studies emphasize the harms of psychiatric interventions and celebrate local healing practices instead. Both approaches are problematic: they ignore the many interconnections between highly dynamic treatment regimes that cannot be neatly designated as African or western, portray local populations as largely passive, and neglect the multiple ways in which psychiatry has been embraced, adapted, and disrupted by Africans themselves. This article challenges simplistic depictions of "western" psychiatry in Africa by providing a portrait of Rwashana Selina, the first Ugandan psychiatric nurse who—after being sent to the UK in the 1950s for training—became a central figure in Ugandan psychiatry. Based on interview material, I recount her life story and discuss her formative role in the development of psychiatric care in the colonial and postcolonial era. Rwashana's tale of Ugandan psychiatry emphasizes co-operation, mutual acknowledgments and pluralistic leadership and thus breaks with typical images of and dichotomies between white doctors and supposedly inferior African medical staff.

This working paper analyses how representations of the war between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government have evolved and changed over the past decades. I argue that one can discern and compare two more or less coherent discourses: a fairly uncritical and largely pro-government discourse which lays its primary focus on the LRA, its violence and seeming irrationality, and a counter discourse which tries to look beyond the LRA and which is highly critical of the Ugandan government's involvement in the war. The analysis shows how complex social realities (like wars), are ordered into coherent (but often competing) narratives over time. ; Dieses Working Paper analysiert wie Darstellungen des Krieges zwischen der Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) und der ugandischen Regierung sich über die vergangenen Jahrzehnte entwickelt und verändert haben. Ich argumentiere, dass sich dabei zwei mehr oder weniger kohärente Diskurse unterscheiden und vergleichen lassen: ein relativ unkritischer und tendenziell pro- Regierungs-Diskurs, der seinen Fokus auf die LRA, ihre Gewalt und scheinbare Irrationalität legt, und einen Gegendiskurs, der versucht den engen Fokus auf die LRA zu überwinden und eine kritische Perspektive auf die Rolle der ugandischen Regierung im Krieg propagiert. Die Analyse zeigt, wie komplexe soziale Realitäten (wie Kriege) mit der Zeit in kohärente, aber oftmals widersprüchliche Narrative geordnet werden. ; peerReviewed

Based on eleven months of field work (2009-2011), this book analyzes the situation of youth in urban Gulu, Northern Uganda, in the aftermath of the war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government (1986-2006). Specifically, it focuses on the generation that was born and grew up during the 20-year war: How do members of this generation perceive and evaluate socio-cultural changes which occurred in Acholi society throughout the war years? How do they imagine their future society? And how do they react to the expectations directed at them by their elders? In order to answer these questions, the book draws on rich ethnographic material. It provides an in-depth analysis of how imaginations of the post-war society are contested and negotiated between different groups of social actors – youth and elders, men and women as well as local, national and international actors. While some try to re-establish former cultural practices and conventions and call for a 'retraditionalization' of Acholi society, others lobby for 'modernization' and attempt to establish 'new' social structures, values and norms which are strongly influenced by local understandings of 'the Western culture'. The book presents numerous examples of the multiple and complex ways young people strategically position themselves in these debates and make use of the various discourses on culture, tradition and modernity in their negotiations of generational, gender, family, and peer-to-peer relations.

Based on eleven months of field work (2009-2011), this book analyzes the situation of youth in urban Gulu, Northern Uganda, in the aftermath of the war between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan Government (1986-2006). Specifically, it focuses on the generation that was born and grew up during the 20-year war: How do members of this generation perceive and evaluate socio-cultural changes which occurred in Acholi society throughout the war years? How do they imagine their future society? And how do they react to the expectations directed at them by their elders? In order to answer these questions, the book draws on rich ethnographic material. It provides an in-depth analysis of how imaginations of the post-war society are contested and negotiated between different groups of social actors – youth and elders, men and women as well as local, national and international actors. While some try to re-establish former cultural practices and conventions and call for a 'retraditionalization' of Acholi society, others lobby for 'modernization' and attempt to establish 'new' social structures, values and norms which are strongly influenced by local understandings of 'the Western culture'. The book presents numerous examples of the multiple and complex ways young people strategically position themselves in these debates and make use of the various discourses on culture, tradition and modernity in their negotiations of generational, gender, family, and peer-to-peer relations. ; peerReviewed

ABSTRACTA common claim, in public discourses and in post-colonial theory, is that colonialism, and more recently the aid industry and the media, have created global hegemonic norms, which have been enforced on non-Western societies. While this may be true in some respects, this article takes a different stance on the debate. It scrutinises perceptions of Western-influenced social change in Uganda, and differentiates between discourses on Westernisation and discourses on neo-colonialism. Both are analysed as forms of social critique – one internally and the other externally oriented. The largely elitist discourse on neo-colonialism is explicitly critical of the West and its interventions in Uganda. But it is not representative of the more ambiguous perceptions of Westernisation among 'ordinary' people, who use references to the West to comment on contemporary Ugandan society. The article is based on empirical research in Northern Uganda. It focuses on discourses on gender, kinship and sexuality, and the recent debate on homosexuality.

For the last three decades, Uganda has been one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Globally praised as an 'African success story' and heavily backed by international financial institutions, development agencies and bilateral donors, the country has become an exemplar of economic and political reform for those who espouse a neoliberal model of development. The neoliberal policies and the resulting restructuring of the country have been accompanied by narratives of progress, prosperity, and modernisation and justified in the name of development. But this self-celebratory narrative, which is critiqued by many in Uganda, masks the disruptive social impact of these reforms and silences the complex and persistent crises resulting from neoliberal transformations. Bringing together a range of leading scholars on the country, this collection represents a timely contribution to the debate around the 'New Uganda', one which confronts the often sanitized and largely depoliticized accounts of the Museveni government and its proponents. Harnessing a wealth of empirical materials, the contributors offer a critical, multi-disciplinary analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring since the 1980s. The result is the most comprehensive collective study to date of a neoliberal market society in contemporary Africa, offering crucial insights for other countries in the global South