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

Abstract

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.

Divine trauma: Schizophrenia and unresolved realities in South India

“…A symbolic construction of the divine does not account for how, once these gods appear and make their presences known, individuals may react—or how this coincides with designations of pathology. This article specifically draws upon three conceptions of the divine: one, it follows scholars who move away from a symbolic construction of the divine and explore the ways in which the divine cannot be fully known (Mittermaier, 2011; Suhr, 2015) and is an unpredictable agent, which can result in ambivalent encounters (Beliso‐De Jesús, 2014; Lambek, 2003; Orsi, 2018; Scherz, 2018; Scherz & Mpanga, 2019; Smith, 2006; Suhr, 2015; Pandolfo, 2018; Whitmarsh [forthcoming]). For example, Scherz (2018), working in a Ugandan convent, explores how the uncertainty of the will of a divine entity that both harms and heals impacts human agency, constituting an ambivalent encounter.…”

Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City

“…Among these less controllable aspects are various forms of spiritual experience and the divinities or other spiritual beings who often appear as agents in people's narratives of ethical transformation. The possibility that such beings are involved in collectivities capable of shaping the self has received only occasional attention (Mittermaier 2012;Lambek 2010;Stonington 2020;Laidlaw 2013;Scherz and Mpanga 2019;Scherz 2018a;Qu 2022). This lack of focus is surprising given both people's explicit articulations of divine action as an explanation for personal moral transformations (Daswani 2015) as well as the current disciplinary interest in questions of ontology and phenomenology.…”

“…George, who also works as a professional master of ceremonies for other major functions, handled the job of leading the discussion with great care. Kato, who had stopped drinking after being violently possessed by his mother's ghost (Scherz and Mpanga 2019), encouraged those who were worried to calm down, saying that although he was a Catholic, our book would be a "book of wonders" and that it should include everything, even the stories of the basamize. At the end of the afternoon, one of the waiters who had been serving the lunch requested a chance to speak and came up to the microphone to appreciate those who had spoken and to share his own story of recovery.…”

Motorcycle taxis, personhood, and the moral landscape of mobility

“…Most visibly, the governance of care in fields like education, health, and healing continue to be shaped by heterogeneous forms of indigenous Ganda ethical practice (Scherz and Mpanga, 2019;Cheney, 2007;Zoanni, 2018). Baganda are the dominant ethno-linguistic group in Kampala and central Uganda, home to the Buganda Kingdom, the ethno-linguistic and political entity reconstituted by Uganda's 1996 constitution as, in theory, a purely cultural traditional institution (Karlström, 1996).…”