Letha Victor

Letha Victor

Letha Victor is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation is provisionally titled “Dirty things: violence, spirit forces, and social change in Acholi, northern Uganda.” Her thesis concerns the problem of cosmological disruption resultant from twenty years of war and population displacement in Acholi (1986-2006) and the spiritual affect of a threatening and uncertain past, present, and future. Ajwani or “dirty things” are instances of spiritual pollution, manifest in certain types of suffering and misfortune, caused by transgressions of the moral order. The ghosts of those persons in Acholi who died violent and impure deaths haunt the living, non-human spirit forces possess and speak through the bodies of humans, and the shadows of ancestors — neglected at abandoned family homesteads for many years — make their presence known to their living kin. Still others interpret such happenings as the result of devil worship and global conspiracy, or in the biopolitical vein of trauma: pointing to the severe lived experiences of the war (mass population displacement, large-scale abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army, massacres and other atrocities). What binds these diverse explications is the concern with addressing distress in an ethical way, prompting debates over morality and ritual expertise, the legibility of suffering, and authenticity in Acholi society. Letha’s dissertation argues that shared anxieties over who is most qualified to act upon the pollution caused by violence (broadly defined) speak to wider issues of subjectivity, temporality, and social change in Acholi.