Theories of mind and trauma after war in Uganda.

Abstract

After years of armed conflict in northern Uganda, many local people have turned to Evangelical churches for help with healing and recovery. We observe that the healing practices in these churches encourage particular notions of what the mind is, how the mind works and whether it is bounded or porous to the outside world. In the traditional cultural setting in which these people grew to adulthood, many accept that vengeance can attack supernaturally from without. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the region between 2015 and 2025, this article argues that these new ideas about mind (broadly conceived) may help some community members recover (to some extent) from traumatic experiences arising from the armed conflict by modeling trauma as not supernatural, and modeling the mind as protected by God from attack. Learning a new way of understanding the mind and its boundaries with the outside world-e.g., as more closed and bounded-and learning to practice a certain amount of control over this boundary, may have a significant effect on the experiences of mental distress This argument contributes to debates on anthropology of mind, and on the way local theories of mind may shape mental experience.