Michael D’Arcy
Haverford College
To read Against Humanity—to grapple with its layered critique of the concept of the human—is to return, again and again, to a question Sam refused to answer. A striking and innovative contribution to the discipline of medical anthropology, this text is also a wilderness of sorts. Rigorously and carefully reasoned, it is also defined by passion, provocation, and the dynamics of internal tension and debate that bring a piece of academic labor to life.
When I teach Sam’s work to my students, they are so taken with his radical reappraisal of the analytic of structural violence and its entanglement with the colonial legacies of humanitarianism that I find it impossible not to remember him as he was when I first met him—young and only halfway through his medical training but already committed to the task of reimagining the practice of medicine as a “locus of revolution” in Uganda and beyond (Scheper-Hughes 1990). The ferocity of his dual commitments as a physician and a social scientist are palpable each time I return to this text, and they may well inspire another generation of militant anthropologists and clinicians to come.
I first forged an intellectual bond with Sam via our shared reading of Franz Fanon, and it is through the forms of revolution Fanon makes legible that Against Humanity invites us into the lum. Cast as the “bush” against which the gang or Acholi space of “home” is normatively defined, the lum occupies a space in the Ugandan cultural imaginary populated by dangerous animals and spirits of vengeance. It is, in short, a space that putatively exists outside of human community. It is also the place where Sam’s primary interlocutors—former insurgents from the Lord’s Resistance Army—staged their rebellion, made their home, and refashioned their very understandings of kinship and shared morality. In his extended dialogue with former LRA rebels, Sam joins a long tradition within political and medical anthropology that refuses state claims to monopolies on violence, as well as the kinds of neocolonial governance that are so frequently imbricated with the project of humanitarian aid (Ferguson 1994). This imbrication includes, he argues, the tendency of physician anthropologists to focus on clinical work to the exclusion of political and economic transformation (Dubal 2012). His challenge to the forms of structural violence that such aid has fomented in Uganda therefore extends beyond historical analyses of the bureaucratic mismanagement of refugee camps for internally displaced persons in the aftermath of the Ugandan civil war. Sam also demands that his readers confront the forms of symbolic and psychic violence that these projects both depend upon and reproduce via concepts as fundamental as the “human” itself. In this sense, Sam’s lessons from the LRA burn with the twin flames of the Fanonian liberatory project: they require the dismantling of ostensibly “external” sociopolitical and economic structures of domination, as well as a confrontation with the psychological colonization that can characterize the collective afterlife of colonial violence (Fanon 1967).
While imagining a de-colonial praxis of political, cultural, and psychological self-determination alongside the LRA, Sam again follows his rebel interlocutors into the lum, exploring the symbolic limits of the human capacity to apprehend forms of communal injury, as well as offering an implicit critique of the structure of the very “person” who apprehends. This is both a theoretical and a meta-methodological intervention, in that Sam interrogates the normative anthropological interpretation of structural violence, as well as the ethical horizons of the “ethnographically visible,” looking beyond the individuated, Euro-American positions of doctor, victim, and anthropologist and toward a shared future. In this, Against Humanity is reminiscent of Fanon’s interventions into the theory and practice of revolution; it also recalls the work of early anthropologist Marcel Mauss who sought to demonstrate the historical contingency of the category of the person. In Sam’s hands, and in conversation with current work in anthropology’s ontological turn, this category of the person necessarily exceeds the category of the strictly human, to say nothing of its potential to transgress the boundary between the living and the dead (Mauss 1985). Who, then, is the ethnographer, if their vision must extend beyond the perspective of the human to include the terrifying rebels of the lum, and what are the ethical implications of such a work?
It is here that I find Sam’s treatment of the cen most instructive. Historically described as “a vengeance ghost,” or the spirit of one who returns to bedevil their murderer, the Acholi figure of the cen haunts the lum of post-conflict Uganda (Dubal 2018). Rather than pursuing a “unitary cultural definition” of such a haunting, however, Sam draws upon the forms of dreadful accountability that the cen demands to explore “the ways in which people construct moral orders of violence through the concept” (Dubal 2018, 49). Intriguingly, cen fear guns and other newer technologies that allow for combat at a distance, and they seem incapable of recognizing the structural violence against which Sam organizes the majority of his anthropological and medical call to arms. Colloquially associated with the forms of violent warfare that are consistently attributed to the LRA, the figure of cen is often invoked by the organization’s enemies to summon the intimate horrors associated with rumors of machete strikes and bodily mutilations. These stories are intended to delegitimize the political project of the LRA and similar organizations, and they also conveniently obscure and naturalize the collective forms of injury that result from the very neocolonial policies that the LRA has historically opposed. It would seem that there is no spirit that haunts those who perpetuate the structures of inequality and exclusion that characterize the camps for internally displaced people—no spirit, perhaps, save the memories of the people who suffer this violence and the forms of anthropological witness that can amplify their outrage.
In this moment, I recall a question that I asked Sam many times over many years and in many different permutations, working towards a theory of speculative ethnographic practice: are you, then, a kind of cen, but the kind of spirit who can demand redress for structural violence—the forms of harm that extend beyond the reach of a gunshot, that implicate the citizens of empire, that implicate the anthropologist and the discipline of anthropology itself?
Grinning, Sam always refused to answer me, but this is the question that hovers over my many returns to this work. The ethics of the cen, its capacity to decenter the individual within the space of ethnographic encounter, are truly among the lessons that he learned from the LRA. If the spirit of injury can only seek justice when the heart of the victim can see the killer’s body—or rarely, from a distance, when the perpetrator of violence showed mercy or sympathy for the one he or she had killed—then I think that Sam’s work is inviting us to haunt and to be haunted, to doggedly pursue and critique injustice, to interrogate our own culpability in larger structures of violence and inequality. Sam wants us to ask, ethnographically, clinically, and politically: who deserves care, recognition, and perhaps even retribution? Following Fanon, such a project might, and perhaps should, require the radical reconstruction of the world.
Thank you, Sam.
Works Cited
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Oakland: University of California Press.
Dubal, Sam. 2012. “Being Ethical in an Unethical World: A Desperate Plea for Radical Political Medicine,” https://samdubal.blogspot.com/. Accessed 7 June 2024.
Ferguson, James. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Mauss, Marcel. 1985 [1938]. “A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of the Person; the Notion of the Self.” In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, edited by Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, Steven Lukes, 1-25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1990. “Three Propositions for a Critically Applied Medical Anthropology.” Social Science and Medicine 30(2): 62-77.