Blood and relational selfhood: crisis and sacrifice among the Nuer of South Sudan

Dominant global discourses on climate change often define vulnerability and risk through a modern sedentarist framework, rooted in a human/nature dichotomy and a unified model of selfhood shaped by European modernist thought. These premises do not hold for Nuer pastoralists and refugees in South Sudan, whose relational selfhood remains rooted in sacrificial practice, and in their dense ties with cattle, divinities, climate, ancestors, descendants, and the shared substance that binds them, “blood.” As they confront intensifying climate shocks and armed conflict, Nuer communities work to steer their destiny by drawing on alternative cattle resources and sustaining relationships that extend beyond their home rangelands, thereby protecting what they understand as their vulnerable blood. This article focuses on those who have lost or left their cattle in the village; it examines how their cattle-based rituals and moral practices help them navigate crises of self. Drawing on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (2009–2018, South Sudan and Uganda), this study posits these practices as a form of “climate narrative” that offers alternative methods by which to understand vulnerability and crisis as socially and spiritually entangled experiences. Through case studies of newly emergent sacrificial practices—such as remote sacrifices and lime substitutions—the study demonstrates the centrality of “blood” as a connective force linking humans with divinities, the rain, cattle, and fruits. The Nuer understanding of human vulnerability, based on the fluidity and pervasive nature of “blood,” enables a resilient and sustainable collective self. This relational selfhood and perception of crisis offer a critical perspective on the global “climatisation” of crisis, which is grounded in Eurocentric notions of selfhood and vulnerability. The international communities also should place greater value on the capacities required to live with uncertainty in the Anthropocene.