Our aim in this article is to contribute to understanding the effects of firearms on the relationship between the state and pastoral communities in contemporary northeast Uganda. The Karamoja region has from early colonial times been a peripheral zone. Although successive post-colonial regimes have made episodic efforts to incorporate this zone more fully into Ugandan national space, relations between Karamoja and the centre remain distant and distrustful. The transformation of local modes of conflict by large-scale infusion of the AK-47 has had far-reaching effects both on relationships with the Ugandan state and its local representatives, and within Karamoja societies. The younger men who possess these weapons elude the authority of the elders, and entertain ambiguous relations with the state authorities, whom they may serve as auxiliaries or resist.

This article examines the implicit meaning of the well-known Jie and Turkana oral tradition of origin known as Nayeche, as a remembered memory and a repeated event. The images of the remembered messages of the past event contained in the Nayeche oral tradition are reproduced through storytellers'representations of them. These representations are not simple fixed historical messages that are expressed explicitly, but they are active and interconnected with present situations and thus are a part of the society's habitual actions. The memory of the journey of Nayeche and the gray bull Engiro from the Karamoja Plateau to the plains of Turkana is well remembered both among the Jie and among the Turkana people. The memory of this journey is symbolically embodied in the Jie and in the Turkana landscape, in the phases of the Jie marriage ceremonies as well as in the phases of the Jie harvest rituals. This article focuses on the relationship between the Jie people who live mainly along the banks of Longiro River and in the Nakapelimoru and Kotido area and the Turkana people who live on the upper Tarash River region.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interpretation of sorghum as the dominant metaphor of self among the Jie people, and the offering of sorghum to the Turkana women by the Jie women as a gift. The literature on food as self is extensive, emerging from various key theorists who have defined the field of food and the semiotics of food (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Parry 1985; Raheja 1988). These scholars are keenly aware of the symbolic utility of food as constitutive features of self identity, and they have examined the interplay between self and food and tropes. For Ohnuki-Tierney, for instance, food and food production, and their associations with metaphors, define and produce meaning. Her interpretation of rice grain as one of the foundational categories of the Japanese traditional polity explicates the role commensality of rice plays in defining boundaries between people who share the commensal food and those who do not. As each member of the commensal consume the food, the food becomes a part of his or her body. The food embodied in each individual “…operates as a metonym by being part of the self” (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993:130). In this paper I extend Ohnuki-Tierney's theoretical model in understanding the role sorghum symbolism and metaphors play in producing identities and social relations of power in the Jie society and in the Jie people's interethnic relationship with their Turkana neighbors.

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This article explores the incorporation of the memories of Sir Vivian Fuchs's voyage to the South Island and the deaths of two of his expedition members in 1934 into the Elmolo's oral traditions. The incorporation of the memory of the voyage brought out a new meaning in the Elmolo oral traditions, transformed their identity, and epitomized their traditional memory. What made the memory of Fuchs's voyage flourish and enter into Elmolo oral tradition is the story of their great tragic heroine Sepenya. The myth of Sepenya has made it possible for Fuchs's voyage and the deaths of two of its expedition members to flourish and to become a part of the Elmolo's oral traditions, as an objectification of the phenomenon of Sepenya.