Hedging in a god-like hakuma

A key way in which divine authorities contested government power is the remaking of moral and ritual regimes.2 In South Sudan, divine authorities have been central to the remaking of moral communities. Douglas Johnson, Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1994). Graeber and Sahlins argue that a way to limit the powers of the divine is to make them sacred. ‘To be “sacred”, in contrast [to being divine], is to be set apart, hedged about by customs and taboos’.3 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 8. It is through subjecting governments to customs and taboos that the government becomes ‘sacred’ and restrained. South Sudanese have used cultural archives to assert the applicability of customs to governments.4 James, The Listening Ebony. Cultural archives include norms that are habitual and unremembered, alongside histories that are retold, that can be a basis for validation and ‘constitutes the foundations of a moral world’.5 Ibid., page 6. In South Sudan, a major point of contestation over the last century and a half is whether governments are vulnerable to moral and spiritual pollution, or whether they can step outside these confines of custom. As Douglas has taught us, pollution can be a ‘semi-judicial punishment’,6 Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2004), page 163; Perri 6 and Paul Richards, Mary Douglas: Understanding Social Thought and Conflict (Berghahn Books, 2017). and therefore a way to impose norm-governed regimes. By making hakuma subject to pollution and requiring of purity, the government can potentially be restrained.

In discussing how moral and symbolic regimes can contest power, this book draws on Graeber’s ideas that cultures can be ‘political projects’ and a form of ‘creative refusal’,7 Graeber, ‘Culture as Creative Refusal’. shaped to reject other cultures and to contest economic systems which have informed them.8 Ibid. Since the 1990s, anthropologists have often described cosmologies as critiques of modernity and capitalism.9 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26:2 (1990): 279–303; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (University Press of Virginia, 1997); Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (University of California Press, 2000). Paying attention to cosmologies, symbols and rituals not only allows us to notice their immense physical, social, political and economic force, but also the space they can create for ‘creative refusal’ of predatory regimes.10 Graeber, ‘Culture as Creative Refusal’. For at least a century and a half, the political economy in South Sudan has involved the violent extraction of labour, resources and land by national and international governments and businesses.11 Kindersley and Majok, Breaking Out of the Borderland; Uchalla, Trading Grains in South Sudan; Thomas, South Sudan; Craze, ‘Displaced and Immiserated’; Craze, The Politics of Numbers. While some cultures and beliefs have previously been understood as primordial, they are better understood as self-conscious political rejections of forms of cultural ‘progress’ that are tied to these violent economies.12 Graeber, ‘Culture as Creative Refusal’, page 1. This book documents various ways in which South Sudanese have used cultural symbols, rituals, moral norms and theology to contest predatory power and to make peace.

This book’s demand to take seriously the cosmic politics of peace builds on but departs from existing work on the political economy of peace. The book recognises how cosmic polities are entangled with political economies; the divine nature of the hakuma is partly a creation of colonial and subsequent political economies and their violence, and key ways to refuse these political economies was through divine power. At the same time, the book pushes against ideas that meaning is determined by the material.13 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1976), see the final chapter. The book argues that, in South Sudan, the creative process of refusal that slowly remakes rituals, moral restraints and cosmic hierarchies is driven by empirical experiences of the divine, as well as a slow remaking of the cultural archive. Many South Sudanese who were consulted have an epistemic confidence in divine authorities based on critical analysis of empirical experiences.

Another way in which divine authorities have contested the impunity of the hakuma is to attempt to make the hakuma subject to legal norms. The legal history of South Sudan means that the cosmic politics of peace and purity have become entangled with the law. Across its empire, British colonial authorities used law to manage religions and divine claims.14 Massoud, ‘Theology of the Rule of Law’. New legal institutions allowed the government to try to make existing divine authorities sacred, and no longer divine, and through legal norms and appointments, constrain these authorities within the law. Legal institutions included chiefs’ courts and regular peace meetings.15 Leonardi, Dealing with Government. At the same time, as law showed its power to limit the divine, the law also became a potential opportunity to limit government. In this context, making the government sacred included making the government subject to the law.

So, this book catalogues attempts by non-government divine authorities to limit the ability of the hakuma. Yet, crucially, these non-government divine authorities are not necessarily or consistently benign and non-violent. South Sudanese moral, legal and cosmological regimes, and the purity and peace they promote, can themselves be exclusive and violent.16 Mary Douglas and Gerald Mars, ‘Terrorism: A Positive Feedback Game’, Human Relations 56:7 (2003): 763–786. Sometimes rituals that restrain government have also made exclusive moral communities including along ethnic lines.17 Hutchinson and Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy’. Notions of purity can also be exclusionary and create a moral and spiritual context where conflict flourishes.18 Tim Allen, ‘Witchcraft, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS among the Azande of Sudan’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 1:3 (2007): 359–396; Tim Allen and Kyla Reid, ‘Justice at the Margins: Witches, Poisoners, and Social Accountability in Northern Uganda’. Medical Anthropology 34:2 (2015): 106–123; Douglas, Jacob’s Tears, pages 85–87; Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford University Press, 2000); Douglas and Mars, ‘Terrorism’. Such exclusive moral communities make seemingly unending war more likely. They can act as a form of violent moral populism, as Allen’s work on witchcraft in South Sudan and Uganda has made abundantly clear.19 Allen, ‘Vigilantes, Witches and Vampires’.