Ghostly Vengeance: Spiritual Pollution, Time, and Other Uncertainties in Acholi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnography that describes problems of spiritual upset in northern Uganda, where the repercussions of recent war (1986—2008) intermingle with older legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence. Based on 14 months of fieldwork in the Gulu and Amuru Districts of the Acholi sub-region, it describes spiritual effects and affects in ordinary life, encompassed by what many Acholi people understand in the concept of “dirty things,” or ajwani. The pollution of ajwani manifests in phenomena such as cen (sometimes interpreted as ghostly vengeance), malevolent spirit possession, misfortune, premature death, and other uncanny problems with unclear or uncertain causes. The ethnography shows that while ajwani can be broadly understood as the manifestations of spiritual pollution caused by transgressions of a moral order, this order—or orders—is the site of myriad epistemic and ethical collisions. The thesis thus considers how transgression is variously understood in Acholi, and how ghostly vengeance and other dirty things act as contextual, contingent, and subjunctive phenomena through time. The work features interlocutors of varied religious orientations and social positions, and shows how they consider spirit forces to be subjunctive —be they living or dead, human or extra-human. It further suggests that the contingency of ghostly vengeance and other dirty things points to the ways in which the distress such phenomena cause, and the timely responses they demand, provoke and reflect immanent and imminent ethical challenges in Acholi. In so doing, the thesis contributes ethnographic exposition to the anthropological literatures on violence, ritual, social repair, and authority in post-war Acholi; haunting, religiosity and Christianity(ies); contemporary witchcraft and conspiracy; and ordinary ethics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".