Auto Body: an excerpt from my documentary in progress

An Achamo Gangi

Since the fall of 2004, I have been putting together a documentary project on the civil war in Northern Uganda. It began as a film about the relation between the humanitarian aid industry and the internally displaced population of the region, but as I spent time in the conflict zone and had the opportunity to collaborate with local political leaders, human rights activists, artists, and musicians, the emphasis of the film changed. Instead, I became interested in exploring the question of how to represent the massive social upheaval that has taken place among the Acholi as a result of the civil war, and more importantly the question of how to represent the Acholi response to this upheaval. Thus, what began as an expository documentary project without a significant ethical consideration of process has now become a reflexive piece that meditates on a new set of intellectual and academic questions about: how to represent human suffering, the methodologies that one deploys to interrogate this process, as well as the tenuous relationship between filmmaker and the filmed, between the ethnographer and her informants, which is at the heart of these questions.

Over the many months I have spent in the conflict zone and in the internment camps these last four years, I have come to see how complex and critical the politics of representation are for people living in the midst of a civil war and the necessity for a filmmaker/anthropologist to consider these politics while paying close attention to the global North-South divide. Indeed, a whole host of complicating factors has been introduced for me in investigating cultural production and representation in this contested terrain, among them the unsettling fact that even though I am an Asian American, I am considered white—munnu—by the Acholi.

In addition to the politics of representation, I have decide to focus on three specific themes in my film and written work.

First, I am interested in the theoretical question of the relation between culture and violence. My point of entry into this theoretical field is the work of Swedish anthropologist Sverker Finnstrom whose powerful ethnography on Acholi and the civil war invokes the work of Carolyn Nordstrom and Michael Taussig to inquire into what he calls the “existential uncertainty” that interned Acholi have experienced for over a decade. I have also taken a great interest in the work of Liisa Malkki on the memory of violence among displaced refugee populations in Tanzania, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s exegesis on the camp as social-political form. Mariane Ferme’s work on militias in Sierra Leone has also provided me with insight into the intersection of culture and violence in the processes of paramilitarization in Acholiland. Finally, Allan Feldman's work on violence and vision has helped me think through the aesthetics of terror and suffering.

Second, I am interested in projects directed towards realizing justice and/or reconciliation for the Acholi, and the position of those projects at the interface of local cultural forms and global processes and discourses. The International Criminal Court has intervened in Acholiland in an effort to arrest and prosecute the leadership of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. In reaction, some Acholi have argued for the realization of justice not through punishment, but through “traditional” reconciliation rituals. Thus, the debate over justice for the Acholi has been polarized around the distinction between “universal” human rights and international law—championed by anthropologist Tim Allen, for example—versus culturally specific forms of justice—championed by a number of traditional Acholi leaders. I believe that the dilemma expressed in this debate might be overcome through the recognition of the existing interlacing of global and local.

This pressing issue of justice and reconciliation raises questions about the politics behind the traditional reconciliation agenda. Indeed, reconciliation rituals have come to play a key role in the reintegration of thousands of ex-LRA rebels, many of them youths, and so are helping to redefine the political parameters of Acholi society. The use of “traditional” reconciliation rituals presided over by male elders gives rise to questions about what political interests are being served through such rituals and what kind of society is being constructed under the guise of an authoritative, unquestionable Acholi culture. Certain images of Acholi society are put forth through the performance of these reconciliation rituals, images that ignore the fact that the very terrain of what custom means in Acholi society is currently being negotiated among a wide array of actors, including those previously excluded such as women and youth. Additionally, the intervention of outsiders (like the World Bank, and the structure of NGOs that have come to predominate the region), wishing to promote Acholi reconciliation rituals as a mode of conflict resolution, has introduced further complications. This invocation of local cultural authenticity to legitimate external intervention might be thought of as a continuation of the British colonial practice of indirect rule, as explicated in the work of Mahmood Mamdani and others.

Finally, I am interested in the question of specifically aesthetic production in the context of the Northern war. A number of documentary films about Northern Uganda have been released in the last two years, each with different interests behind them ranging from humanitarian aid agencies, to Christian evangelical organizations, to the Ugandan government, to the Acholi diaspora. These different interests have given rise to different modes of representation in the films, with divergent portrayals of the key actors including the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, the interned Acholi population, the government, and the “international community.” At the same time, there have been a number of initiatives by local Acholi church organizations, “traditional” chiefs, and human rights groups to promote the self-representation of the Acholi. Some of these projects have comprised attempts to promote the survival of Acholi culture and traditions in the midst of widespread violence, mass displacement, and the internment of the entire Acholi rural population. Other projects attempt to document the quotidian lives of the interned population, with an emphasis on recording human rights violations by government and rebels. Both of these types of projects raise questions about the specific image of Acholi culture that is being put forth, and the local and international political interests behind those images.

In the clip above, I wanted to experiment with the image of a woman walking through the gardens just outside the perimeter of a displacement camp in an attempt to show the similarities between how the filmmaker/anthropologist follows the subject/object of her work and the ways in which rebels and government soldiers trek through the bush seeking out and or preparing for ambush. Obviously, I have no previous experience of "trekking through the bush" as a rebel or government soldier. And so, I make no claim about the authenticity of the movement or the space that I move in and simulate. My intention is to call attention to the violence that is invested in both projects and to think about what it means to make a conscious and or unconscious claim about the authenticity of the experience of violence in film. On another level, I introduce the notion of reconciliation through the music in the clip and the overlay of the musician's performance-- something I haven't explored as extensively in my visual work.