Clintonville Books welcomes China Scherz

Join us Thursday, March 12 as we welcome China Scherz, author of Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City, in conversation with Thomas McDow.

China Scherz, anthropologist and professor at the University of Notre Dame, discusses her new book, Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City, with OSU historian Thomas McDow.

Co-authored by George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe, Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave behind problematic alcohol use. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While these methods are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and towards the possibility of release. Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.

China Scherz is the Kristin Yudt Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda and is currently at work on a project exploring how people struggling with substance use in the rural United States navigate hope, abandonment, and trauma as they learn to care for one another, and for themselves, over the long haul.

Thomas F. McDow is a historian of Africa and the Indian Ocean world at Ohio State with a strong interest in the history of global health. He is the author of Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean and is currently working on a history of HIV in Tanzania. He has written about the long history of HIV and given public lectures on the global aspects of this history.

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