The first phase of anthropology's turn toward ethics called our attention to freedom, evaluative reflection, and projects of intentional self‐cultivation. While the inclusion of such moments of intentionality and freedom provided a helpful corrective to overly determinist frameworks for the study of morality and social life, we lost sight of other aspects of ethical life and personhood that are less easily controlled. Drawing on an ethnographic case that might otherwise be considered exemplary of a Foucauldian “care of the self,” this article draws on texts from Africanist anthropology and Franciscan theology to explore how members of a community of Ugandan, Kenyan, and Tanzanian Franciscan nuns living and working at a residential home for orphans and children with disabilities in central Uganda understand and engage with the uncertain potential of moral transformation. [ethics, personhood, ontology, Christianity, Africa]

Faith in divine intervention affects the ethical and temporal orientations of a community of East African nuns managing a charity home in Central Uganda and leads them to make programmatic decisions that put them at odds with mainstream approaches in development and humanitarianism. By demonstrating that their resistance to long-term planning and audit practices is not the product of material privation or ignorance but, rather, a consciously developed orientation toward time and agency, I bring together concerns from the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of development. Further, by seeking to explain how the sisters come to hold their particular beliefs, I move beyond the elucidation of doctrine to show how mundane forms of practice are central to the formation of ethical subjectivity. [Africa, agency, Christianity, charity, ethics, temporality] Teresa and a ducat can do nothing: God, Teresa and a ducat can do everything. Let us do everything we can, but let us make God our banker.-Saint Teresa of Avila, 16th-century Spanish mystic

The United States Child Protective Services system is shaped by the unresolved tension between the aims of child protection and family preservation. Since the 1980s, child welfare experts have recommended the use of risk assessment tools in the hopes of standardizing the decisions made by social workers and judges. In this article, I show that despite their bureaucratic appearance, the tools implemented lacked a clear directive, allowing unresolved value conflicts to be papered over by the appearance of technocratic regularity. I argue that this case not only exemplifies Max Weber's classic distinction between problems of social science and moral value in the creation of social policy, but also raises questions about the effects and uses of audit technologies in situations of ongoing moral conflict.

While vernacular therapeutics had long been a topic of interest to many writing about medicine and healing in Africa, with a few exceptions most recent anthropological writings on medicine in Africa are focused on biomedicine. In this article, I trace this shift back to the turn of the millennium and the convergence of three events: the emergence of global health, the accession of the occult economies paradigm, and critiques of culturalism in medical anthropology. I argue that these three shifts led to research projects and priorities that looked different from those defined and undertaken as late as the late 1990s. While seeking to avoid the errors that could come with writing about vernacular therapeutic traditions in Africa as bounded comprehensive systems, I argue that there are empirical, political, and practical reasons why medical anthropologists may want to reconsider our collective research priorities.

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