ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the creation of temporal beginnings and continuities through reburials in Northern Uganda. The reburial of the bones in the ancestral land creates material continuity between land and people, as well as between the living and the dead, which makes new life possible, and at the same time confirms a family's claim on the land. The specific historical context of Northern Uganda, where hundreds of thousands of people died from violence and disease and were buried 'out of place' in Internally Displaced People's camps, adds a new facet to the classic anthropological research on burials and death. The war between the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the national Uganda Peoples' Defence Force (UPDF) was fought most bitterly in Acholiland. The re-placement of bones and graves in the geographical and social landscape, the ordering of hierarchies and sequences by placing bones in patterns of proximity, distance and orientation.
