SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper studies power through data focusing on gender–age relations gathered ethnographically among the Acholi of northern Uganda. It analyses these data through a framework combining Haugaard’s notions of dispositional, episodic and discursive/tacit power, with Arendt’s ideas on authority, and Bourdieu’s on disposition and habitus. I suggest using ethnographically collected data makes an important contribution to studying power and propose replacing the idea of gender and power as a simple binary relationship with the concept that gender–power relations are always crossed with multiple modalities, among which, for gerontocratic settings like most in Africa, age holds particular significance. I conclude that gender analysis based on the local habitus is critical for empirical explorations of social interactions.