Daily Life as Poetry: The Meaning of the Pastoral Songs of the Karimojong in Northeastern Uganda

The Karimojong have two genres of songs: eete and emong. Emong is a kind of song that individuals other than the composer refrain from singing in public; these songs mention specific castrated animals owned and herded by the composer/singer. A consciousness grounded in the ideology ofidentification with a castrated animal has had a profound effect on the structural features of this creative endeavor. Nevertheless, references to oxen constitute only a small portion of the lyrics of these songs, which describe the life-worlds of singers as they engage in the daily subsistence activities of pastoralism. This paper describes gender divisions of the singing situation characterizing emong and eete songs as well as the 'empirical' features of emong and examines: (1) how singing emong enables the singer to satisfy personal needs; (2) how visual images of animal coats function as a metaphoric source; and (3) how visual experiences, the sources of the poetic imagination, are transformed into auditory illusions through the manipulation of color and visual perception