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| Title: | Death, memory and the politics of legitimation: Nuer experiences of the continuing second Sudanese civil war |
| Author: | Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine |
| Book title: | Memory and the postcolony: African anthropology and the critique of power / ed. by Richard Werbner. - London [etc.]: Zed Books |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Pages: | 58-70 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Sudan |
| Subjects: | Nuer civil wars death rites |
| Abstract: | Much of what currently passes for 'governmental authority' in war-torn Nuer regions of south Sudan rests on little more than the demonstrated power to kill with impunity. Beginning in the mid-1980s, leading Nuer members of what was then a still-united SPLA (Sudanese People's Liberation Army) sought to persuade ordinary Nuer villagers as well as active Nuer recruits into a novel disregard for the memory of the dead. They argued that violent deaths generated by the ongoing second Sudanese civil war were entirely devoid of the pollution risks associated with acts of intra-ethnic homicide due to local feuding. Much debate among contemporary Nuer stems from this clash between the mandatory 'forgetting' of civil war victims and the social and emotional sediments each such death leaves in the lives of surviving kin. This chapter explores this debate from the perspectives of both the perpetrators of 'government'-sponsored violence and the families of the victims. It shows how the fluctuating strength of politico-military power networks in the region has varied directly in relation to ordinary people's willingness to accept, however reluctantly, that some slain relatives will be consigned to a kind of social and spiritual 'oblivion'. It further shows that the fact that the Western Nuer were far less experienced with 'government' warfare and with guns than their well-armed Eastern cousins may account in large part for the different perspectives these two groups adopted with respect to 'the problems of violence' and 'the politics of memory'. Bibliogr., notes. |