In Acholiland, and elsewhere in the world, when a person becomes ill, he or she is inclined to find help for their ailments – regardless of whether they are of physical or psychological origin – in order to get better. And in order to get better, they need healing.46 Healing entails the subjective feeling of recovery, but the improvement is usually acknowledged and facilitated in social interaction with others. As already established in the previous chapter, in terms of war trauma, the symptoms can be universal, but the experience of illness and healing are always culturally constituted,
45 Interview with sister Rosemary Nyirumbe in Gulu, October 2017.
46 Healing [mass noun]: The process of making or becoming sound or healthy again (Oxford living
which means that also the treatment should be anchored in the sociocultural contexts in which they are administered (Okello & Musisi 2015, 257). This helps give a meaningful explanation to the illness experiences of those suffering from them in addition to simply curing the symptoms, which are both equally important for recovery, as receiving care that corresponds with the sufferer’s understanding of the illness’ cause and having faith in the selected approach are considered some of the key factors that constitute healing (Baines 2005, 49; Okello & Musisi 2015, 257; Schultz & Weisæth 2015, 832).
Thus, understanding how healing is achieved among my research participants requires examining the Acholi illness explanations (see chapter 2) as well as the underlying principles that guide the establishment of harmonious life since disease is always essentially a rupture of life’s harmony, as noted by Okello and Musisi (2015, 255). In case of the Acholi, the cure to illness and war-related psychological symptoms lie in the repairing of social harmony which among the Acholi is achieved intersubjectively by retethering the social bonds and restoring the cosmological balance that the appearance of psychological symptoms has shaken up, as already explained earlier in this thesis. For this reason, it is worth inspecting this guiding principle in the Acholi world view a bit closer as it is something that has been theorised in different ways by several anthropologists who are intimately familiar with the lived realities of the Acholi (Finnström 2008; p’Bitek 1971; p’Bitek 1986; Porter 2017).
Social harmony – or good surroundings47, as Finnström (2008, 10) and p’Bitek (1986, 27) call it – is a widely shared ideal in the Acholi society that is not possible to ever fully achieve or maintain. It is a normative concept that states what constitutes social, moral, and cosmological balance in society, and therefore it is strived for in all social relations (Porter 2017, 3). Living in social harmony consist of good existence – the proper way of coexisting with one another (kit mapore) and being in respect (bed ki woro) with the living and the dead – which emphasises the interpersonal aspects of life rather than the individual, subjective, side (ibid., 3, 38). Furthermore, the guardians of social harmony in Acholi society are often those in a position of power and, thus, individual concerns can easily get subjected under the aspiration for the common good (ibid., 4, 158). Social harmony is produced and reproduced consciously and subconsciously in everyday
47 Good surroundings (piny maber) is defined by Finnström (2008, 10) as “individual lives in balance with
the greater scheme of things, persons, relatives, ancestors, and God”, and it is opposed with ‘bad surroundings’ (piny marac) that prevailed during the northern Uganda conflict when pursuing life’s balance was made impossible. According to Porter (2017, 3), the concept of good surroundings is encompassed within the concept of social harmony.
interactions, which means that it is first and foremost a lived practice embedded in the ebbs and flows of the Acholi life (ibid., 4–5).
Failing to live up to social harmony’s high ideals, as obviously every erring human is bound to every now and then, can result in negative cosmological consequences which are often followed by some form of cosmological pollution – such as the cen, jogi, or ajwani. The pollution, in turn, demands cleansing and appeasing (Porter 2017, 64, 135– 136) which helps repair the spoiled relationships (Whyte et al. 2015, 45). These transgressions can cause illness, which demands healing, as has happened in the case of my formerly abducted research participants who have experienced, and still continue to experience, more severe symptoms than nightmares and attribute their symptoms to cosmological pollution. In each of the three healing practices examined in this thesis, healing begins by acknowledging the moral – spiritual or profane – transgression that has taken place. It can happen either by admitting or confessing the transgression (in counselling or church) or by confirming the information told by the spirits channelled by an ajwaka. Based on this knowledge the healing providers then determine what is the right way forward.
Pursuing social harmony by rebuilding relationships resembles what Rebecca Lester (2013, 760) calls the unmaking and remaking of the worlds of trauma victims. To Lester, the constant re-experiencing of trauma is a complex process where a person gradually retethers to the world through meaningful relationships with others which over time alters the traumatic memory in the symptom sufferer’s mind (ibid., 758, 760). In the process of the back and forth dynamics of unmaking and remaking of the world, the narrative of trauma receives new – hopefully more positive – meanings and interpretations which in turn can foster healing, as according to Lester “healing comes from redeveloping the [trauma victim’s] capacity to connect and relate to others in ways that extend beyond the specifics of the trauma or their ‘damaged’ identity” (ibid.). In this chapter, I argue that all three healing practices offer different kind of tools for remaking the world of those suffering from war trauma in a way that runs parallel to their aspiration for social harmony.
Next, I examine how the retethering of relationships is achieved within the three healing practices. However, due to the short fieldwork period, my infrequent participation in different healing sessions, and the limited space in this thesis, I will not offer a comprehensive analysis of what constitutes healing within each of the examined
practices’ context. Instead, I will focus on those aspects of treatment that I have observed to advance the strengthening of social bonds between the symptom sufferers and their close relationships and, thus, have the ability to remake their ruptured worlds. I hope to provide the reader with some new insights into how war-related symptoms are relieved and social harmony is fostered within the context of the three healing practices in Acholiland.