Brokers and Breakers of War Stories in Acholiland, Northern Uganda

Abstract

This article describes the tension that built up between two European journalists who had teamed up to shoot a documentary on the entanglement of war and humanitarian interventions in Acholiland, northern Uganda, with the fieldworking anthropologist as the local broker of the documentary project. The article also examines a parallel disconnect developing between the journalists and the Ugandans they encountered. From the perspective of the broker/anthropologist, it is argued that research ethics and the methods of data collection interact in ways that have real consequences and that a scrutiny of this interface exposes a paradoxical vulnerability of research as such.