SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article offers a novel perspective into how Murle agro-pastoralist youth in South Sudan draw on permanent body marks (also known as scarifications or body inscriptions) to communicate their individual and collective stories and future aspirations; negotiate identities and generational relations; and reimagine social norms and political subjectivities. Based on long-term ethnographic research and through a visual analysis of body marks, the article explores the meanings behind young people’s body mark iconography, including assault rifles and army ranks, to mobile phones, syringes and United Nations acronyms. Body marks are a powerful embodied knowledge practice and unique lens to understand people as well as how social institutions like the age-sets are transforming. In particular, this article explores the insights that body mark iconography reveal about how Murle rural youth interpret and imagine “modernity”, as read through young people’s bodies, as a culturally situated phenomenon. It reveals how young people’s interpretations of modernity are tied to an urban and military culture that, in their eyes, is synonymous with power. While youth may be aware of the global connotations of their body marks, these are localised practices and claims for validation and pathways to social personhood within their own social world.