I am currently not in Uganda (so maybe I should change my title?), but I am currently preparing for a long sting in Uganda. For a little update on my life right now, I'm a junior in Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. My past two trips have helped to shape my course work, and now I'm preparing to do official research for my senior thesis. I'll be living in Gulu from January to August, enrolled as a UT student and receiving course work for the ethnographic escapades I take on.
What I want to do with this blog right now is primarily selfish. I feel that I'm getting swamped in books and articles in preparation for my thesis, and I'm having a hard time keeping my head on straight when I combine that work with my regular 15 hours of course work, a part-time job, and various other activities. So I'm going to begin chronicling my pre-thesis journey. I'm hoping this will allow an outlet for me to flesh out some ideas, get some feedback, some suggestions. It will also help me to be accountable for keeping up with my readings leading up to my departure. I'll try to keep it as interesting as possible since I know that as interesting as I find my research, not everyone in the world thinks the same.
Okay so I'm tentatively titling my thesis project, "Acholi Culture and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: What is traditional culture and how is it being used to solve a contemporary issue?” I came around to this topic not only by personal interest and relevance but primarily by the influence of three things I have recently witnessed or been a part of in Uganda.
My first influence is the folk talk project I worked on with Bishop Ochola this summer and is still being worked on as a Jazz for Justice Project. For a crash course in what went down, I lived with Bishop Ochola and his family in Kitgum for a month (cool, right?) to work on recording the Acholi folk tales that he tells so well and turning them into a cartoon for younger children. The intention is to shed a new light on the folk tales in order to help children regain interest in this part of their culture. We have a team in Uganda working on it. Of course it starts with Bishop Ochola typing up the folk tales in Acholi. They are then sent to Moses Lajum to translate into English. While all of this has been going on, our two artists, Patrick Okello from Gulu and Vincent Ssebunya from Kampala, have been developing their characters based on a character map. As soon as they receive the stories, they are creating a comic strip to be distributed to schools.
Back to my point: I'll be using the progress and effects of this project as a case study for how an aspect of traditional Acholi culture can be used to reconstruct a certain facet of life that had been lost to the war.
My second influence comes from witnessing similar work by other NGOs in the northern region. There are several that go down the route of using traditional dance or music to rehabilitate former abductees or provide an outlet for expression for Acholi youth. I think it's important to measure the efficacy of these projects as well as observe which methods work best.
My third influence is what Jazz for Justice is hopefully morphing into: CreatEd. One of our members, Dustyn Winder, is currently designing the model for this new umbrella NGO that will do so much more than JfJ and still encompass JfJ's ideals and, of course, the concert. We hope to develop a curriculum of music and the arts that will work as a supplementary after-school program emphasizing the outlets for expression in dance, art, poetry, song-writing, etc. We're planning a pilot program this summer and once we all graduate, we can hit the ground running with what the organization should look like. Hopefully, my observations can aid us in developing our own programs by noting the pros and cons of the different approaches in art education.
Tied into these main research topics will be several aspects that can't go unnoticed. Obviously, culture is constantly changing and morphing. So what does it mean to say "traditional culture"? From what I have witnessed so far, it means different things to different people. I'll be interviewing people of different demographics - age, religious affiliation, educational background, socioeconomic background, etc. - to see how much of a gap there is in the general view of Acholi traditional culture.
Also tied into this research will be the question of, if a definition of traditional culture could be nailed down, why do people seem to be reaching back to their past to secure their future? There are a ton of ideas surrounding this, so I want to do a little more reading on the topic before I throw out speculation.
Okay, so, all 4 of you that might read this, I need feedback. Any books, articles, journals, videos, websites you come across that are relevant to my topic would be greatly appreciated. Also, what are your personal thoughts? Anything I should add to this? Anything I should take away?
Stay tuned for more specific topics coming soon. Thanks for reading :)
