Imitating Christ in Magwi

An Anthropological Theology

Todd D. Whitmore

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567684196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology achieves two things. First, focusing on indigenous Roman Catholics in northern Uganda and South Sudan, it is a detailed ethnography of how a community sustains hope in the midst of one of the most brutal wars in recent memory, that between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. Whitmore finds that the belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ can enter into a person through such devotions as the Adoration of the Eucharist gave people the wherewithal to carry out striking works of mercy during the conflict, and, like Jesus of Nazareth, to risk their lives in the process. Traditional devotion leveraged radical witness. Second, Gospel Mimesis is a call for theology itself to be a practice of imitating Christ. Such practice requires both living among people on the far margins of society – Whitmore carried out his fieldwork in Internally Displaced Persons camps – and articulating a theology that foregrounds the daily, if extraordinary, lives of people. Here, ethnography is not an add-on to theological concepts; rather, ethnography is a way of doing theology, and includes what anthropologists call "thick description" of lives of faith. Unlike theology that draws only upon abstract concepts, what Whitmore calls "anthropological theology" is consonant with the fact that God did indeed become human. It may well involve risk to one's own life – Whitmore had to leave Uganda for three years after writing an article critical of the President – but that is what imitatio Christi sometimes requires.

Chapter 1

Imitating Christ in Magwi: Theology in Media Res

I have never seen a night sky like this. There are no cities near Magwi, South Sudan, and so no light pollution. I see now that there are stars between the main, brightest stars, and stars between the ones in between; many more and much brighter than I could have imagined. We are sitting outside in plastic chairs in something of a circle in the compound of the eucharistic center where I have been living the past two weeks. There is no electricity, and conversation has yet to be displaced by television. Father Joseph Otto and the health unit workers, Dominick, Odoch, and Kidega, bounce from topic to topic, fed by the day’s events, and my attention shifts from sky to conversation to sky again.

Seemingly without topical prompt, a debate breaks out among them regarding the best direction to run during a rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) attack. Though the rebels are ostensibly at war with the Ugandan government, in the complex logic of the conflict, the government of Sudan uses the LRA to fight its own rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA, while the government of Uganda trains SPLA soldiers for combat against the LRA. The people of northern Uganda and South Sudan are simply caught in the middle. Though the Sudanese government and the SPLA signed a peace agreement two years ago, change is only incremental on the ground.

Dominick, a slender, lighter-skinned Madi from Adjumani, argues that it is best to run across the line of fire, to what appears to be off to the side of the attack. Father Joseph Otto disagrees. He is dark-skinned, and I can only make him out because he is very animated when he speaks. He holds up his hand in the shape of a C and presses it forward like he is holding an invisible cup.

“They attack you like this. The two sides first. They try to catch you at the back, but if you run to the side, they will catch you also. This is how they attacked in January. Ay, yi, yi,” he laughs, shaking his head. “January was the worst month.”

“The LRA attacked. People from all around came to our compound. They were saying, ‘Father Joseph, the LRA are coming! Help us!’ I did not know what to do. We could not protect them. Father Maurice was here. So I asked him what we should do. He said, ‘Let’s get a motorcycle and ride towards the LRA. Let’s try to talk to them. Maybe they’ll talk. And if they kill us, at least the others will have more time to get away.’”

The next day, Father Joseph and I drive to Torit to see the bishop. Though the Magwi County Commissioner says that they have all gone to Western Equatoria, the LRA are still around. Father Maurice saw one running from the SPLA earlier in the week, and the next week, four will be spotted on the edges of Agoro, Uganda, just south of the South Sudan border, while I am there. Father Joseph crosses himself and says a prayer before he starts the vehicle. I ask him what went through his mind when Father Maurice suggested riding a motorcycle toward the center of an LRA attack.

“We were the only ones. The SPLA was not there to protect. They did not come until after Easter. And the people, they are just people of the village. They did not know what to do. There are no activists, no community leaders. There is no one who can be in the middle and try to talk with the LRA. Someone maybe they can trust. It is hard. These LRA are not very dependable. But I am a man of peace, and so I seek to make peace wherever I am. I am a priest, and I am supposed to be an image of Christ. So we just got on the motorcycle and went.”

* * *

I have done eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in conflict and post-conflict northern Uganda and Eastern Equatoria state, South Sudan, between 2005 and 2013, and the Acholi people and their ethnic neighbors there have taught me three main things, and these lessons, if you will, thread through this book.¹ The first is that the vocation of the Christian is to reenact and, in this way, revivify Jesus of Nazareth, in whom God and human meet as Christ. And we are to do this in a way that instigates further such reenactment and revivification in ourselves and others. When Father Joseph says, “I am a man of peace, and so I seek to make peace wherever I am. . . . I am supposed to be an image of Christ. So we just got on the motorcycle and went,” he is referring to just this kind of reenactment and revivification. Among technical academic terms, that of “mimesis” best conveys the various aspects of such activity.

This is a specific lesson for the practice of theology, namely, that theology, if it seeks to signify itself as Christian theology, must also be mimetic—that is, it must, as theology, itself seek to reenact and instigate others to reenact Jesus the Nazarene the Christ. I am here categorically rejecting the idea of theology as a “second-order” form of discourse that reflects on the practice of the Christian community as if standing outside of, or at least at a remove from, the activity of that community. If theology is simply a second-order discourse, then, to quote Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the suggestion that the Eucharist is only a symbol, “to hell with it.”² It must be the real body and blood, our own as well as Jesus Christ’s, if what we are engaged in is to be deemed Christian theology.

Theology in a mimetic mode creates all sorts of difficulties for theology as it is largely practiced in the church and the academy today. This is first of all because mimetic theology is done and can only be done in medias res—in the middle of things—rather than at any absolute beginning or as if at a remove high above time and the contingencies of life. Mimetic theology, therefore, is decidedly unsystematic theology. This is not to say that a Christian community cannot develop a relatively coherent and ordered fund of wisdom that it identifies as the received tradition. To be in the middle of things is to be part of a tradition and to carry it forward. It is to say, however, that that tradition is c onstantly being interrupted by life lived, and that theology serves life and God best when it is practiced with alertness for and openness to interruption. Interruption invites, prompts, and sometimes forces re-presentation of the tradition. This is the case even when the tradition at the formulaic level appears to be merely reasserted. We can assume that Father Joseph of Magwi, South Sudan, was taught in seminary that as a Christian and particularly as a priest he is called to imitate Christ. What he did not anticipate was the way in which the interruption of a decades-long war and a specific attack by the LRA would bring him—much like the original disciples—to a far different understanding of what such imitation requires. After Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus responds, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34). So Father Joseph “just got on the motorcycle and went.” Interruption and re-presentation, again and again. Mimesis is, in the words of one commentator, always “on the move.”³

Mimetic modes of re-presentation also create difficulties for theology because, traditionally, such modes are most fully performed orally, through the use and display of the whole range of physical senses—sight, smell, hearing, touch, and even taste—in a communal setting that invites immediate interpretation and response from active listeners. In their work, Mimesis: Culture, Art and Society, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf put it this way:

In oral speech, the role of context is comparably more significant and extensive and is mediated more physically than in literate speech. . . . The speaker—in particular, the performing poet—puts himself physically into his performance. His presentation is not so much the recitation of an “inner text”; it demands, on the contrary, a high level of psychological and physical involvement. When the audience takes up the rhythm of speech and representation responsively, it becomes involved in the recitation emotionally and physically. The poet’s representation amounts to a kind of physical pointing that grips and involves those present. . . . Spoken and heard sounds, rhythm, schema, melody, bodily movements, and shared participation together form a kind of dance.⁴

While mimesis at its fullest is oral, physical, and immediately communal, what we call theology is—with the exception of the few conferences we attend each year—for the far greater part written in a manner that suppresses the physical senses in articles and books that we expect to be read in isolation in library carrels and studies. It is not incidental that two of the major intellectual forces militating against mimetic modes of knowledge—the work of Plato and the development of Enlightenment understandings of reason—arose in conjunction with the ascendance and spread of written forms of expression, particularly where the texts were increasingly meant to be read rather than heard. Although most accounts of the suppression of mimesis focus on the ancient Platonic and modern Enlightenment moments, it is also important to highlight the role of developing Christianity and the Church, not least because of their reputation as having fostered the imitatio Christi. The alternative history I will provide stresses that ongoing contestation over religious authority in the Christian community has served to limit and even suppress members’ reenactment and revivification of Jesus the Nazarene the Christ.

Such suppression of mimesis has terrible costs. Theology as it is practiced today is largely—one could say almost entirely—a discipline of texts.⁵ Yet, in sub-Saharan Africa alone there are 200 million people who do not read or write. In the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Uganda, where I did most of my work, the nonliteracy rate was 73 percent. Among women in South Sudan, where I also lived, it is 88 percent.⁶ How do these and other similarly socially located people figure in what and to whom we write? Not to undertake methodologies that gather the perspectives, judgments, and patterns of life of such people risks—I would even say virtually assures—reinforcing the patterns of political and economic dominance that coincide with the rise of literate culture.

What are the prospects of doing theology in a way that does not suppress mimesis either in ourselves or in others? To argue that the suppression of mimesis has coincided with the rise of writing intended for solitary reading is not to say that writing in itself is necessarily anti-mimetic.⁷ Rather, what I want to suggest is that the inco rporation of the methods of ethnography into theology can help offset the liabilities of the practice of writing. When theologians talk about theological anthropology, they almost always mean not the use of ethnographic methods to raise theological questions, but rather a theologically inflected philosophical understanding of the human person. In using ethnographic methods, I want to turn theological anthropology on its head to read “anthropological theology”—any account of “the person” must be richly informed by how persons in fact live.⁸

What is first of all helpful about ethnographic research and writing is that it can have, when done well, a certain kind of evocative and provocative vividness because it engages the physical senses. With regard to the research aspect, two ethnographic methods in particular call for our attention: participant observation and the semi-structured or open-ended interview. Participant observation is the practice of living with a community in an intensive way for an extended period of time—typically a year at minimum—with the researcher involving herself in as full a range of the community’s activity as possible—work, leisure, worship, food preparation, and meals—and is considered to be “the hallmark of traditional anthropological research.”⁹ Participant observation—or what Loïc Wacquant aptly calls “observant participation”¹⁰ —forces us to use our physical senses—our eyes and ears, and our senses of smell, taste, and touch—instead of shutting them out as if they are a distraction. The “semi-structured interview”—a formal term for a careful and reflective conversation—allows the members of the community to provide their own accounts of who they are in the world. It requires the theologian to be a listener and, because the interview is open-ended, a participating responder. Participant observation and the open-ended interview are particularly important because they are among the only ways to take into account the lives and narratives of largely oral—that is to say, marginalized—cultures in our theologies. Ethnographic methods—with the detailed and sense-engaged attention to the lives of other people in their own terms as much as possible—provide a way to displace ourselves and our pretentions to authority.

The sociological, epistemological, and political forms of displacement that can take place during ethnographic research—the processes are far from automatic—are concrete conditions that facilitate theological mimesis. We cannot reenact and revivify Jesus the Nazarene the Christ without being in some manner displaced ourselves. The practice of ethnography, with the multiple forms of displacement that it involves—displacement made possible and vivid because we have engaged the physical senses—sets the concrete conditions in which the displacement of the self and openness to Jesus Christ becomes more possible. In Walter Benjamin’s words, “sentience takes us out of ourselves.”¹¹

The wager is that that use of the physical senses and their capacity to displace the investigator in the research phase will carry over to the writing, and to the reader of that writing. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz refers to this kind of account as offering a “thick description” of what is going on.¹² Anthropological theology turns thick description to eva...