16:00 - 17:30
Anxiety, Affectation and the ‘State’: Commentaries around poisoning evictions in West Nile, North-West Uganda
Elizabeth Storer
LSE, London

This paper explores the anxieties and affectations around poisoning evictions in West Nile, North-West Uganda. I contribute to a literature which explores the role of the state in judicial processing of witchcraft allegations, and in particular how the legitimacy of the state is challenged when confronted with ambiguous crimes which defy precise legal definition. Though discourses about state failure, neglect, or rumours that the state itself is complicit in witchcraft crimes featured during disputes, I expand my analysis to the anxious and fearful field surrounding the development and aftermath of evictions, to explore the meaning, and effect of multi-layered emotional responses, sentiments and ideas about order. Though the nature of community desires means that their settlements are inherently in conflict with the national law, and as such the state is unable to offer the required resolution demanded from below, I argue that even without evidence, the state remains a powerful spectre that could make people’s lives better, even when it does the opposite of fulfilling community desires. I begin with a description of what constitutes “poisoning”, and a consideration for how poisoning resolution in West Nile has been drawn into a pseudo-scientific space where state intervention is a possibility (unlike other forms of witchcraft). Drawing on three case studies, I elucidate the complexity of local constellations of state authority, and explore the anxieties of state officials and community commentaries on their actions. Ultimately, uncertainty about the actions of different parts of the state is productive of ideas about its form, role and potential that cannot be neatly collapsed into blunt concepts like legitimacy, transition or institutionalisation. The very absence of the state, and denial of local assistance, can serve as a means of affirming, rather that denying, its power.


Reference:
Tu-OS11 Affect, Emotion and the Political Imagination-P-003
Presenter/s:
Elizabeth Storer
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead – Room 112
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
16:30 - 16:45
Session times:
16:00 - 17:30