Babies, buildings, and bones: the (im)materiality of love and homemaking

This article examines the (im)materiality of love and homemaking after war. It draws on long-term ethnographic work on gender, sexualities and violence in northern Uganda, including over 200 'love-life' history interviews with formerly displaced people and ex-combatants. It posits notions of 'home' as central to understanding affinal relations. During the two-decades-long war the well-trodden paths of beginning a sexual relationship and establishing a home were nearly impossible to follow. Consequently, many thousands of relationships began which do not conform to imagined Acholi 'ideals'. In particular, there is an evident absence and reduction of customary exchanges between kinship groups to formalize 'marriages'. This research shows how, in these circumstances, aspects of materiality have taken on different prominence in the project of 'home-making' and negotiating belonging. It focuses on three sites where 'materials' are central in that project and examines the changing relationships, meanings, and potentials that people have with those materials in the aftermath of war and displacement. As the title suggests: babies, buildings, and bones (or ancestral shrines). With each, the interpretation offered of evolving relations between people and these substances in relation to the project of homemaking highlight both the power and limits of a historical materialist analysis.