Richard Vokes

Introduction: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive

Since the publication of Anthropology and Photography (Edwards 1992) almost two decades ago, there has been an explosion of anthropological interest in historical ethnographic photography and other photographic practices associated with the discipline. Of course there were contributions prior to 1992, significantly Scherer (1975; see also Scherer 1990 for a comprehensive overview) and Edwards and Williamson (1981), and of course the relationship between anthropology and photography is as old as the discipline. However, through their consideration of the anthropological photographic archive (in this case, the collections of the UK’s Royal Anthropological Institute) the various contributors brought photographs from the discipline’s past into the present in a series of new, and challenging, ways. What the contributors to that volume spurred was a reconsideration of what to many were now devalued photographs: devalued by their artificiality (for example, the posed studio shots of J. W. Lindt—see Poignant 1992: 54), by their overtones of scientific racism (see Maxwell 2008) or simply by their presumed lack of relevance to the post-war anthropological project, anxious as it was to avoid being seen as the discipline that studied primitive peoples. From the 1990s onwards, there was a growing sense that such images could be read in a way that went beyond or behind the photographers’ (presumed) intentions and instead provided access to historical traces of the peoples depicted. No matter how staged or seemingly artificial, these images recorded points in individual and collective lives in which the subjects were sutured into the anthropological project. One task since then has been to unpick those stitches and

Reflections on a Complex (and Cosmopolitan) Archive: Postcards and Photography in Early Colonial Uganda, c.1904–1928

This article examines a collection of picture postcards that were published in Uganda between c. 1904 and 1928. Drawing upon recent developments in the anthropology of photography, the article attempts to reconstruct the extended “social archive” of this collection, by exploring the range of relationships through which these image‐objects were produced, and through which they have been subsequently circulated and consumed. The approach reveals something of a “concealed” archive of meaning within this collection, one which is indicative both of wider cosmopolitan imaginaries that were at play in the British Empire during this period, and of the official view of the new Uganda colony as an inclusive, even collaborative, social project. A focus on the social agency of the postcards themselves then reveals how these meanings became later “overwritten”, to produce a more recognizable semiotics of colonial representation and power.

Before the Call: Mobile Phones, Exchange Relations, and Social Change in South-western Uganda

ABSTRACT This article contributes to recent attempts to provide ethnographically and historically nuanced accounts of Africas mobile phone ‘revolution’. It does so by examining the coming of mobile phones in one particular place and time: Bugamba Sub-County, in rural Mbarara District, South-western Uganda, between the years 2000 and 2012. In so doing, it extends recent anthropological scepticism regarding the transformative potential of mobile communication per se, by showing how in this case, the most notable effects generated by mobile telephony were in fact those produced by a series of exchanges of phone-related objects, which took place in a sense ‘prior’ to communication. These circulations effected a kind of ‘time–space expansion’, which allowed for new imaginaries of physical and social mobility. The article illustrates these arguments through a detailed examination of the mobile spaces of taxis, and through a discussion of changing burial practices.

Primaries, patronage, and political personalities in South-western Uganda

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic study of the National Resistance Movement Party primaries that took place in the constituency of Rwampara County, Mbarara District, between mid and late 2015. Based on fieldwork carried out during the primary campaigns, it offers a detailed examination of the five candidates’ campaign strategies in the run-up to the polls. It focuses in particular upon the ways in which they all sought to secure votes through making frequent public donations to potential voters. Building upon recent insights from a nascent anthropology of corruption, the paper argues that it is crucial to understand how these gifts were conceptualized, both by their givers and their recipients. It finds that although these donations generally made sense to everyone involved in terms of long-standing cultural logics regarding the ‘proper’ operations of power (amaani), this is not to say that they simply reflected cultural continuities. On the contrary, over the course of the campaigns, both the practices of gifting, and the meanings that attached to these, changed significantly. This helps to explain how and why, in the context of all of this gifting, the donations of one candidate – and one candidate only – came to be seen as illegitimate (i.e. as ‘corrupt’).

‘Time for School’? School fees, savings clubs and social reciprocity in Uganda

The past 25 years have witnessed sweeping educational reforms in Uganda. The introduction of ‘free’ Universal Primary Education (UPE, in 1998) and Universal Secondary Education (USE, in 2007) has raised social expectations about access to quality education. Over the same period the population of young people in Uganda has also grown dramatically. As a result hundreds of new primary and secondary schools have been established across the country. This article examines the social and economic consequences for a rural part of Southwest Uganda. Bringing together secondary data from national household surveys with detailed ethnographic research, the article highlights families’ material and social investments in schooling. It explores the costs faced by even the poorest households whose children attend ‘free’ government schools. Despite public investment, the poor quality of state provision has led to public frustration and demands for reforms. Survey data demonstrate that, as a result, wealthier households are investing in education, sending their children to private schools to benefit from smaller class sizes and better learning outcomes. The article describes how people use a range of social arrangements, including rotating savings and credit associations to manage school fees and access credit in this part of Uganda. Drawing on recent work by Graeber and others, we argue that people are creating new social relationships within these savings clubs. Whilst managing their financial commitments, people invoke and rework existing idioms of reciprocity, interdependence and patronage. The use of human capital theory to explain schooling choices in relation to individual economic or social ‘returns’ downplays the sociality of these arrangements. We argue that educational commitments are now an integral part of the Ugandan social landscape, generating aspiration, nurturing networks and creating new inequalities.

Party, patronage and coercion in the NRM’S 2016 re-election in Uganda: imposed or embedded?

ABSTRACT In the wake of President Museveni’s latest election victory in Uganda, this article provides a critical review of the current literature on his National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and seeks to affect a paradigm shift. We find that much of this scholarship has tended to track the regime’s increasing authoritarianism over the years with an implicit assumption of social detachment, as if the NRM’s successful electoral machine is one imposed on the voting public in ways that counterbalance Museveni’s declining legitimacy and lack of genuine political support. While agreeing with the substance of many of the points made to this end, we draw on the events of the 2016 election, our own ethnographic evidence from four traditionally pro-NRM districts and the research in the rest of this special issue to outline the ways that the regime’s election strategies rely on a more embedded presence in Ugandan political culture. The article focuses specifically on how three often-cited components of the NRM electoral machine – its dominant party network, its use of patronage as election finance, and its deployment of physical coercion through the security services – can only be understood when viewed with this more grounded approach.

The house unbuilt: actor‐networks, social agency and the ethnography of a residence in south‐western Uganda

Anthropological theory has always shown a particular fascination for the subject of the house. However, Latours work offers a significant challenge for previous theorising in this area. Latour challenges the very idea of what a house is, and encourages us to see ‘the house’ as not a coherent form at all, so much as a multitude of (more or less stable) assemblages. He also forces us to re-examine the relationship between constructed dwellings and the social, encouraging us to see the former as having particular forms of agency within the latter. This article examines these ideas in relation to the ethnography of one particular house in rural south-western Uganda.

Photography and African Futures

This special issue examines the history of photographic ‘futurism’ in Africa. It begins with the observation that from the time photography was first introduced on the continent, European explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators, in particular, developed a peculiar fascination with photographing African pasts or, more accurately, rendering African pastness visible in the act of making photographs. In other words, and as a by now large body of historical scholarship has repeatedly shown, the camera quickly became a key technology for the establishment of colonial concepts of African history, European constructs of African ‘traditions’ and even widespread ideas about how certain African peoples represented previous ‘evolutionary stages’. Thus, it is no coincidence that one of the first photographs ever taken in Africa – a daguerreotype produced by the Ottoman Viceroy to Egypt, Viceroy Ali, in late 1839 (just a few months after the official ‘invention’ of the medium) – took as its subject a scene of African antiquity: the ancient port at Alexandria (Haney 2010, 13; see also Perez 1988). It is indicative that newly arrived Europeans were by the 1870s, at least, habitually using cameras as tools for their ethnographic surveys – producing images that played a key role in constructing ‘stereotypical illustrations’ of African ‘tribes’, through their focus on indigenous people’s most ‘exotic’ of traditions (Ranger 2001, 203; see also Apter 2002; Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes 1998; Faris 1992). And it is illustrative that anthropologists and their agents, from the late-nineteenth century onwards, produced significant numbers of physiognomic photographic portraits, in an attempt to establish an objective visual record of the ‘average’ physical characteristics of African ‘races’ (Shortland, cited in Pinney 1992, 76). These images were in turn used to support various theories of human physical and social evolution (Maxwell 2008; Morris-Reich 2016).

Photography, exhibitions and embodied futures in colonial Uganda, 1908–1960

This article seeks to complicate our understanding of the relationship between the camera and colonial rule in Africa. Based on a case study of the Uganda Protectorate between the years 1908 and 1960, it argues that photography was in fact more deeply embedded within processes of imperial governance than we may have previously appreciated. It substantiates this claim by focusing not upon the more coercive practices of photography, or the more derogatory elements of certain kinds of photographic representation, but instead upon the political ‘work’ that photography did within this colonial society. It argues that photography here operated within a wider ecology of state-controlled media, which not only represented various ideal or model futures but actively encouraged African subjects to physically engage with them. As such, photography was a key technology of governmentality. The article will substantiate this argument with a particular focus on the Uganda Protectorate’s official Photographic Section, between the years 1947 and 1960.

Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa

Like globalisation in general, electronic globalisation is not a unified, or homogeneous, process. Rather, in different spaces, people engage with the possibilities and limitations of electronic goods and with the images, sounds and values that circulate with them, in different ways. Anthropologists are in a unique position to study the vernaculars of electronic globalisation because of their focus on the ways in which electronic goods are embedded in people’s everyday lives. The subfield of anthropology of media has recently begun to move away from ‘reception studies’ – that is, from the study of the ways in which people interpret, or ‘decode’, media ‘messages’ – to focus instead upon the ways in which people interact with the physical and sensory objects of media as part of their everyday lived experience. In anthropology, many of the key ethnographic contributions to this burgeoning field have been from Africa (e.g. Hirschkind 2006; Larkin 2008; Meyer and Moors 2006; Schulz 2012; Spitulnik 2002; De Bruijn et al. 2012), although these studies have resonated with work done elsewhere as well (e.g. Ginsburg et al. 2002; Hobart 2010; Moores 2012; Morris 2009; Pink 2013; Pinney 2008). Across all of these ethnographies, a key concern has been to trace how people’s engagement with media technologies invariably changes over time: either as people move through their daily routines, or as they traverse between social contexts (from public to private, from formal to informal, etc.), or as the media objects themselves also travel through time and space (something which is ever more common, of course, in our current age of increasinglymobilemedia). As a result, human biographies may be defined by interactions with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in different ways at different times, yet so too ICT objects can be said to develop ‘social biographies’ of their own. In other words – and as Kopytoff and Spitulnik, in particular, have highlighted (1986 and 2002, respectively) – over the course of their ‘lifetime’, all media objects may pass through distinct ‘phases’, in which they may be alternatively positioned as, for example: ‘objects of desire’, purchased goods, donated gifts, stolen items, ‘status symbols’, mundane objects, obsolete artifacts, ‘e-waste’ or other things besides. Moreover, as ICTs pass between these different phases they invariably reorganise social worlds as they go. In these ways, this new ethnographic literature has offered new perspectives on some of the most fundamental questions for the study of media, including: What part do