This paper examines the materiality of love and homemaking in the wake of war. The paper draws on longterm ethnographic work on gender, sexualities and violence in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, including over 200 ‘love-life’ history interviews with formerly displaced people and ex-combatants. Crucially, it highlights the centrality of notions of ‘home’ in 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 the evident absence and reduction of customary exchanges between kinship groups to formalize ‘marriages’, this research shows how different aspects of materiality take on greater prominence in the project of ‘home-making’ and negotiating belonging. It focuses on three sites where materiality takes center stage in contestations around belonging and homemaking: burial, ancestral shrines, and children. The persistence of gendered norms despite the erosion of their supposed material basis suggests the limits of historical materialist analysis. The paper argues for the value of a shift in emphasis from ‘marriage’ as a process and an institution tied to customary exchanges, to ‘home’ as a material and normative project.

The keynote lecture is part of the annual IMAGENU workshop. Please write to korsbaek@cas.au.dk to get the zoom link.