Early anthropological research on Karamoja categorized the people as alien to social life. Terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘warrior’, ‘backward’, ‘criminal’, and ‘heathen’ circulated within the colonial vocabulary. Alongside the bifurcation of the state (Mamdani, 1996), the customary native authority that governed the natives also transformed socio-economic relations in ways previously unknown to Karamoja society. The challenges faced by the British in establishing customary law as the foundation of life and order highlighted their intentions to sedentarize the Karamojong. However, the policies of the colonial era did not emerge from a vacuum; disciplines of knowledge, especially early social anthropology, contributed to embedding social definitions of native life within a regime of compulsions that governed native society. While it is true that colonizing epistemologies received critical scrutiny towards and after independence, the categories did not vanish but persisted under the new impetus of the post-colonial state. Why have descriptions such as ‘warriors’, ‘backward’, ‘criminals’, and ‘heathen’ remained in the public discourse about particular social groups like the Karamojong? My objective is to question the relevance of specific epistemological frameworks in the social sciences by examining the validity of abstract categories. Assessing the real conditions of social life in Karamoja and how the people understand and organize their lives is the most effective way to scrutinize the categories that represent that life. This approach enables a deeper understanding of the processes by which epistemologies can either refine, replace, or deconstruct colonial perspectives. I aim to evaluate how discourses related to knowledge production in cultural and political economy disciplines, especially in key texts about Karamoja, either reproduce or challenge colonial categories. By undertaking empirical research through ethnography, life histories, biographies, the interpretation of material culture, and ideologies of social life in Karamoja, we can gain a clearer understanding of how real social life is constructed, and thus begin to consider Karamoja as grounded in concrete science rather than abstract principles divorced from social realities.

Keywords: Violence; Social Life; Law; Order; Decolonization; Karamoja