Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Ontology and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent

Scherz, China

doi:10.1111/aman.12968

Cited by 23 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Cooper () foregrounded the language of “unruly affects” in her examination of homeless individuals in San Francisco who elude US criminal court control, despite legal efforts to contain and render them fixed. As O'Neill and Dua (, 8) argue, “people want out, and they want it now.” Sometimes the unruly or bumptious (Haraway ) is a matter of improvisation and bricolage in relation to divine agency (Bjork‐James ; Elisha ; Friedner ; O'Neill ; Scherz ) or in the face of global capitalism or neoliberalism (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ), while other times the unruly is a matter of life and death, terror and madness (Burraway ; Luna ). Some of this work used the language of the unruly to point to the contagious spilling over of affect in an attempt to take seriously a range of ways of being in the world.…”

Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A body of work on religion considered the unruliness of the supernatural as it shapes human lives and actions. Scherz (, 102, 108) used “unruly” in talking about the “workings of divine grace” that are “less easily controlled,” among Franciscan nuns working in a home for orphans and disabled children in Uganda. Through examination of moments of “moral failure” when certain nuns were unable to fully engage in care of disabled or elderly orphans or residents, Scherz argued that the nuns understand the “ethical subjectivity and transformation as partially dependent upon forces outside a person's control” (104), a mixture of inborn qualities and active yet mysterious and unpredictable involvement from God.…”

Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a necessary dialectic, much work considered seepage or failures of containment through analytics of freedom (Furani ), the unruly (Cooper ; J. Fisher ; Scherz , 108; Stoetzer , 302), zaniness (Degani ), play (Rea ), transgression (Muir and Gupta ), porousness (Bjork‐James ), madness (Nuhrat ), rupture or breaking open (Kunreuther ; Kyriakides ; Ofstehage ; Saleh ), queering (Heywood ; Shirinian ), invasion (Sherouse ), excess (Gershon ), or contagion (Kivland ; Luna ; Rubin ; Rubinstein et al. ).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…In the literature on ethics in anthropology, the role that divinities or other spiritual beings might play as agents involved in collectivities capable of shaping the self has received only occasional attention (Mittermaier 2012; 2011; Laidlaw 2013; Lambek 2010; Bialecki 2017; Scherz 2018), yet as Kato's story and the rich anthropological literature on spirit mediumship vividly demonstrate (Boddy 1989; Lambek 2010; Langwick 2011; Masquelier 2001; Peek 1991), many people conceptualize such forces as being crucial to processes of self-transformation. Likewise, while conflicts between the groups of practitioners involved in our larger study often stem from ontological disagreements about the beings that exist, their natures, and the relationships between them, there is a common sense of agreement among these practitioners that the forces and beings involved in a process of ethical transformation exceed secular categories and understandings of bounded or buffered selves (Taylor 2007).…”

Section: Transforming the Self In The Company Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

His mother became medicine: drinking problems, ethical transformation and maternal care in central Uganda

Scherz¹,

Mpanga²

2019

Africa

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Excessive alcohol consumption often appears as an issue of great concern for the friends and family members of drinkers in Uganda, where per capita consumption rates among drinkers are among the highest in the world. In many cases, these families seek care for their loved ones in small shops run by herbalists, in the shrines of spirit mediums, in the pews of churches, or in one of several newly established inpatient rehabilitation centres. Yet, acts of intervention come not only from living family members or friends, but also from an array of spiritual beings who may arrive uninvited and outside intentional therapeutic contexts. In this article, we consider a case in which a mother's spirit intervenes in the life of her son, first by possessing his body and then by continuing to dwell there in ways that make it impossible for him to drink. This case highlights the importance of forces experienced as non-self in life-transforming processes, and demands that we give attention to a moment in a person's life when the work of care is achieved through an act of physical force.

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“…Sisters participating in the difficult and never‐ending work of formation experience powerful forms of embodied intensity, attempt to interpret it in relation to their understandings of medieval accounts of Saint Francis, and pray that God will directly intervene in their lives to alter their experiences of their work through grace. While some might want to focus solely on the visceral experience and others on describing the sisters’ understandings of conversion and God's immanence in their lives, choosing either at the expense of the other would mean missing the ways in which the sisters understand and experience these forms of affect in relation to both texts and transcendence (Scherz ).…”

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confidence: 99%

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

Robbins

2016

Royal Anthropological Inst

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A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.

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Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Ontology and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent

Cited by 23 publications

References 39 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

His mother became medicine: drinking problems, ethical transformation and maternal care in central Uganda

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

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