Losing Place: Experiencing a Sense of Home in the Face of Internal Displacement

• In Event: 563 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Residential Mobility, Immobility, and Displacement

Abstract

My paper will point to my nascent explorations of a new sociology of “home,” based on preliminary dissertation fieldwork studying social displacement and reorganization among northern Ugandans. Gulu, Uganda, a city of agrarian refugees in a region devastated by twenty years of civil war, is an ideal case study of rural reconstruction. The cessation of violence in 2006 allowed the gradual return home of nearly 1.1 million internally displaced persons, mostly of Acholi ethnicity, from government enforced “protected villages.” Given the centrality of land to livelihoods and political organization among the Acholi, the vast majority of former refugees aim to regain traditional rights to family land. However, considering most land boundaries are based on oral land tenure traditions which should be enforced by (now-defunct) village hierarchies, there has been a recent explosion of land dispute conflict among the Acholi.

Agricultural land rights are not just about rural livelihood. Rather, I argue, meaning-making practices are intensely localized in specific, memory-laden places among agrarian communities. Home is, according to one middle-aged Acholi man, “where ancestors live, where your god dwells, where you were born, and where your kids live.” Thus, the dissolution of social landmarks and community structures call into question the perpetuity of vital identity narratives of home and belonging. Drawing on literatures of rural sociology and narrative theory, my presentation will explore the intersections of customary land tenure and ideologies of “home” among returning Acholi in Uganda.

Author

• Amanda McMillan Lequieu, University of Wisconsin-Madison