Lecture | Research Seminar
Quietly Otherwise: Atmospheres of Sharing in Unusual Ik Families
- Date
- Monday 27 October 2025
- Time
- Serie
- CADS Research Seminars
- Address
-
FSW building
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 1B01
In the Ik mountains of Uganda, where economic and cultural marginality meet strict national middleclass norms of gender and family, some families quietly practice forms of kinship that fall outside normative expectations. Drawing on a collaborative research project on Imaging Gender Futures in Uganda, this paper explores atmospheres of keeping quiet, sharing resources and difficulties in two families whose ways of living otherwise are not articulated through rights-based discourses, but expressed through everyday acts of care, sharing, conflict and quiet.
In one family, a widow is inherited into her late husband’s brother’s household, where she and the brother’s wife form a polygynous marriage with shared responsibilities for children, labor, and love. In another, two brothers share a wife and raise their children together—a polyandrouse arrangement born of imprisonment, absence, return, and slow attunement to an unusual situation. These family constellations resist legibility within dominant scripts of nuclear kinship and moral modernity, and their quiet ways call for an ethics of being-with-otherwise that embraces ambivalence and respects opacity.
Through filmic collaboration and attunement to their atmospheres of sharing and withholding food, affection, tension, and care—the paper explores the imagistic and affective dimensions of kinship that unfold in these in-between spaces. It reflects on how such families not only traverse thresholds of normativity and recognition, but also offer glimpses into kinship otherwise.
About Lotte Meinert
Lotte Meinert, is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and has carried out research in Uganda since 1993 and has led research capacity building projects in Uganda for 15 years.
Her main fields of research are medical anthropology with a focus on life worlds and the pursuit of well-being across gender and generations; as well as changing human security situations: responses to transformative historical events such as epidemics and armed conflict in Africa.
Her book publications and edited volumes with colleagues include Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health, and Everyday Life in Uganda (2008), Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (2014), In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments. (2014), Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency Biosocial Worlds (2020), Configuring Contagion: Ethnographies of Biosocial Epidemics (2021). This Land is Not for Sale: Trust and Transition in Northern Uganda (2023). Marriage Matters: Love and Belonging in Uganda (2025) Ageing Time Beings: Temporality and Ethics in Old Age (2025).
Lotte is currently working on a book project called: Sharing Mountains: Being-with and Ethical change in Ik Land.
This seminar is made possible by the European Research Council-funded project Globalizing Palliative Care: A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life (grant No 851437) www.globalizingpalliativecare.com