Senior Research Seminar with Dr Holly Porter (University of Cambridge)

Senior Research Seminar with Dr Holly Porter (University of Cambridge)Moving toward ‘home’: love and relationships through war and displacement

The processual nature of affinal relationships is well established in Africanist anthropology.  This talk calls greater attention to spatial considerations and proposes the concept of movement as an integral dimension of understanding affinal relationships. This observation springs from reflections on how the experiences of displacement and return in northern Uganda have reshaped constructions of ‘home’ in relation to love and intimate relationships. Reflecting on ethnographic research over ten years in northern Uganda where a two-decade-long war (1986–2006) occurred, in this talk we examine movements in relationships against the backdrop of wider societal movements from the spatial moral geography of camp to home. I argue that movement as a concept has much to offer the conceptualization of ‘marriage’ both within the Acholi post-war context and beyond.