Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-15T16:07:46.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2019

China Scherz  and
George Mpanga
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Résumé

Une consommation excessive d'alcool est souvent un sujet de préoccupation important pour l'entourage familial et amical des buveurs en Ouganda, où le taux de consommation d'alcool par habitant est l'un des plus élevés au monde. Dans de nombreux cas, ces familles cherchent des remèdes pour leurs proches dans des petites boutiques tenues par des herboristes, auprès des spirites, dans les églises ou dans l'un des centres de cure nouvellement créés. Cependant, les actes d'intervention ne viennent pas uniquement des parents ou amis vivants, mais aussi d'esprits divers susceptibles de se manifester sans y être invités et en dehors de contextes thérapeutiques intentionnels. Dans cet article, les auteurs étudient un cas dans lequel l'esprit d'une mère intervient dans la vie de son fils, d'abord en possédant son corps puis en continuant à l'habiter de manière à le rendre incapable de boire. Ce cas souligne l'importance des forces vécues comme non-soi dans les processus de transformation de la vie et exige qu'on prête attention à un moment, dans la vie d'une personne, où le travail de soin se fait par un acte de force physique.

Type
Medicine, care and mediation
Information
Africa , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 125 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akyeampong, E. (1997) Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: a social history of alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to recent times. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Ambler, C. (1990) ‘Alcohol, racial segregation and popular politics in northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History 31: 295–313.Google Scholar
Ambler, C. (1991) ‘Drunks, brewers, and chiefs: alcohol regulation in colonial Kenya, 1900–1939’ in Room, R. and Barrows, S. (eds), Drinking: behavior and belief in modern history. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Archambault, C. (2009) ‘Pain with punishment and the negotiation of childhood: an ethnographic analysis of children's rights processes in Maasailand’, Africa 79 (2): 282–302.Google Scholar
Bajunirwe, F., Bangsberg, D. and Sethi, A. (2013) ‘Alcohol use and HIV serostatus of partner predict high-risk sexual behavior among patients receiving antiretroviral therapy in south western Uganda’, BMC Public Health 13 (1): 1–7.Google Scholar
Beaglehole, R. and Bonita, R. (2009) ‘Alcohol: a global priority’, Lancet 373 (9682): 2173–4.Google Scholar
Berger, I. (1973) ‘The “Kubandwa” religious complex of interlacustrine East Africa: an historical study, c.1500–1900’. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin at Madison.Google Scholar
Bialecki, J. (2017) A Diagram for Fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement. Oakland CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bledsoe, C. (1990) ‘No success without struggle: social mobility and hardship for foster children in Sierra Leone’, Man 25: 70–88.Google Scholar
Boddy, J. (1989) Wombs and Alien Spirits: women, men, and the Zar cult in northern Sudan. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Borneman, J. (1999) ‘Caring and being cared for: displacing marriage, kinship, gender, and sexuality’ in Faubion, J. (ed.), The Ethics of Kinship. New York NY: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Boyd, L. (2015) Preaching Prevention: born-again Christianity and the moral politics of AIDS in Uganda. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Bryceson, D. (ed.) (2002) Alcohol in Africa: mixing business, pleasure, and politics. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Bubandt, N. (2014) Empty Seashell: witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, P. and Wiggins, T. (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Carlson, R. (1992) ‘Symbolic mediation and commoditization: a critical examination of alcohol use among the Haya of Bukoba, Tanzania’, Medical Anthropology 15 (1): 41–62.Google Scholar
Cassaniti, J. and Luhrmann, T. (2014) ‘The cultural kindling of spiritual experiences’, Current Anthropology 55 (10): 333–43.Google Scholar
Colson, E. and Scudder, T. (1988) For Prayer and Profit: the ritual, economic, and social importance of beer in Gwembe District, Zambia, 1950–1982. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Crush, J. and Ambler, C. (eds) (1992) Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa. Columbus OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Csordas, T. (1997) The Sacred Self: a cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Csordas, T. (2002) Body, Meaning, Healing. New York NY: Springer.Google Scholar
Das, V. (1987) ‘The anthropology of violence and the speech of victims’, Anthropology Today 3 (4): 11–13.Google Scholar
Demause, L. (1995) The History of Childhood. Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson.Google Scholar
Desjarlais, R. (2016) Subject to Death: life and loss in a Buddhist world. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Diduk, S. (1993) ‘European alcohol, history, and the state in Cameroon’, African Studies Review 36 (1): 1–42.Google Scholar
Dipio, D. and Sillars, S. (2014) Performing Wisdom: proverbial lore in modern Ugandan society. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Douglas, M. (ed.) (1987) Constructive Drinking: perspectives on drink from anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Doyle, S. (2007) ‘The Cwezi-Kubandwa debate: gender, hegemony and precolonial religion in Bunyoro, Western Uganda’, Africa 77 (4): 559–81.Google Scholar
Earle, J. (2017) ‘Dreams and political imagination in colonial Buganda’, Journal of African History 58 (1): 85–105.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, S. and Janzen, J. (1992) The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Garcia, A. (2010) The Pastoral Clinic: addiction and dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Garcia, A. (2015) ‘Serenity: violence, inequality, and recovery on the edge of Mexico City’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 29 (4): 455–72.Google Scholar
Garriott, W. and Raikhel, E. (2015) ‘Addiction in the making’, Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 477–91.Google Scholar
Garro, L. and Mattingly, C. (eds) (2000) Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Geissler, W. and Prince, R. (2010) The Land Is Dying: contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya. New York NY: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Geschiere, P. (2013) Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldstone, B. (2017) ‘A prayer's chance: the scandal of mental health in West Africa’, Harper's Magazine, May.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, A. (2014) ‘First acts of violence: reflections on breastfeeding and enemas in West Africa’ in Wells, K., Burman, E. and Montgomery, H. (eds), Childhood, Youth and Violence in Global Contexts: researchers and practitioners in dialogue. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Graeber, D. (2015) ‘Radical alterity is just another way of saying “reality”: a reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41.Google Scholar
Green, M. (1999) ‘Trading on inequality: gender and the drinks trade in southern Tanzania’, Africa 69 (3): 404–25.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1986) ‘Making up people’ in Heller, T., Sosna, M. and Wellbery, D. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Heath, D. (1987) ‘Anthropology and alcohol studies: current issues’, Annual Review of Anthropology 16: 99–120.Google Scholar
Hoesing, P. (2011) ‘Kusamira ritual music and the social reproduction of wellness in Uganda’. PhD thesis, Florida State University.Google Scholar
Hoesing, P. (2017) ‘Sound and the social aesthetics of religious pluralism in southern Uganda’, Nova Religio 1 (21): 31–59.Google Scholar
Huby, G. (1994) ‘Drinking and the management of problem drinking among the Bari, Southern Sudan’ in MacDonald, M. (ed.), Gender, Drink and Drugs. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Imoh, A. (2013) ‘Children's perceptions of physical punishment in Ghana and the implications for children's rights’, Childhood 20 (4): 472–86.Google Scholar
Janzen, J. (1982) The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Karamagi, C. A., Tumwine, J. K., Tylleskar, T. and Heggenhougen, K. (2006) ‘Intimate partner violence against women in eastern Uganda: implications for HIV prevention’, BMC Public Health 6: 284.Google Scholar
Kawere, E. (1991) Omuzimu Gwa Kasooba. Kampla: Crane.Google Scholar
Kizza, I. (2010) The Oral Tradition of the Baganda of Uganda: a study and anthology of legends, myths, epigrams and folktales. Jefferson NC: McFarland.Google Scholar
Klaits, F. (2010) Death in a Church of Life: moral passion during Botswana's time of AIDS. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A. (2009) ‘Caregiving: the odyssey of becoming more human’, Lancet 373 (9660): 292–4.Google Scholar
Kodesh, N. (2010) Beyond the Royal Gaze: clanship and public healing in Buganda. Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Korbin, J. (1981) Child Abuse and Neglect: cross-cultural perspectives. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Korbin, J. (2003) ‘Children, childhoods and violence’, Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 431–46.Google Scholar
La Hausse, P. (1988) Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts: a history of liquor in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, J. (2013) The Subject of Virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lambek, M. (2010) ‘How to make up one's mind: reason, passion, and ethics in spirit possession’, University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (2): 720–41.Google Scholar
Lambek, M. (2015) The Ethical Condition: essays on action, person, and value. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Langford, J. (2013) Consoling Ghosts: stories of medicine and mourning from Southeast Asians in exile. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Langwick, S. (2011) Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: the matter of maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Last, M. (2000) ‘Children and the experience of violence: contrasting cultures of punishment in northern Nigeria’, Africa 70 (3): 359–93.Google Scholar
Lienhardt, G. (1961) Divinity and Experience: the religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Livingston, J. (2012) Improvising Medicine: an African oncology ward in an emerging cancer epidemic. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Luhrmann, T. (2012) When God Talks Back: understanding the American evangelical relationship with God. New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Macintyre, K. (2011) ‘Alcohol brewing and the African tuberculosis epidemic’, Medical Anthropology 30 (2): 126–35.Google Scholar
Makumbi, J. (2017) Kintu. Oakland CA: Transit Books.Google Scholar
Marshall, M. (1990) ‘“Problem deflation” and the ethnographic record: interpretation and introspection in anthropological studies of alcohol’, Journal of Substance Abuse 2 (3): 353–67.Google Scholar
Masquelier, A. (2001) Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: possession, power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mattingly, C. (2014) Moral Laboratories: family peril and the struggle for a good life. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mbulaiteye, S., Ruberantwari, A., Nakiyingi, J., Carpenter, L., Kamali, A. and Whitworth, J. (2000) ‘Alcohol and HIV: a study among sexually active adults in rural southwest Uganda’, International Journal of Epidemiology 29 (5): 911–15.Google Scholar
McAllister, P. (1993) ‘Indigenous beer in Southern Africa: functions and fluctuations’, African Studies 52 (1): 71–88.Google Scholar
McAllister, P. (2001) Building the Homestead: agriculture, labour and beer in South Africa's Transkei. Leiden and Farnham: African Studies Centre and Ashgate.Google Scholar
McAllister, P. (2004) ‘Labor and beer in the Transkei, South Africa: Xhosa work parties in historical and contemporary perspective’, Human Organization 63 (1): 100–11.Google Scholar
Meinert, L. and Whyte, S. (2017) ‘“These things continue”: violence as contamination in everyday life after the war in northern Uganda’, Ethos 45 (2): 271–86.Google Scholar
Mittermaier, A. (2011) Dreams that Matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mittermaier, A. (2012) ‘Dreams from elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope of self-cultivation’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2): 247–65.Google Scholar
Mol, A. (2008) The Logic of Care: health and the problem of patient choice. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mushengyezi, A. (2013) Oral Literature for Children: rethinking orality, literacy, performance, and documentation practices. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Obot, I. and Room, R. (2005) Alcohol, Gender, and Drinking Problems: perspectives from low and middle-income countries. Geneva: World Health Organization.Google Scholar
Ocobock, P. (2012) ‘Spare the rod, spoil the colony: corporal punishment, colonial violence and generational authority in Kenya, 1897–1952’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 45 (1): 29–56.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (1988) ‘The production of possession: spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia’, American Ethnologist 15 (1): 28–42.Google Scholar
Peek, P. (1991) African Divination Systems: ways of knowing. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Povinelli, E. (2015) ‘Transgender creeks and the three figures of power in late liberalism’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26 (1): 168–87.Google Scholar
Raikhel, E. (2016) Governing Habits: treating alcoholism in the post-Soviet clinic. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Riches, D. (1986) ‘The phenomenon of violence’ in Riches, D. (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Room, R. (1984) ‘Alcohol and ethnography: a case of problem deflation?’, Current Anthropology 25 (2): 169–91.Google Scholar
Rose, N. (2003) ‘Neurochemical selves’, Society 41 (1): 46–59.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992) Death Without Weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. and Sargent, C. (eds) (1998) Small Wars: the cultural politics of childhood. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Scherz, C. (2014) Having People, Having Heart: charity, sustainable development, and problems of dependence in central Uganda. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Scherz, C. (2018) ‘Enduring the awkward embrace: personhood and ethical work in a Ugandan convent’, American Anthropologist 120 (1): 102–12.Google Scholar
Schoenbrun, D. (1998) A Green Place, a Good Place: agrarian change, gender, and social identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th century. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Ssewankambo, S. (1998) Njabala: the lazy one. Kampala: Fountain Publishers.Google Scholar
Stevenson, L. (2014) Life Beside Itself: imagining care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Suggs, D. N. (1997) ‘Mosadi Tshwene: the construction of gender and consumption of alcohol in Botswana’, American Ethnologist 23 (3): 597–610.Google Scholar
Tallbear, K. (2017) ‘Beyond the life/not life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking and the new materialisms’ in Radin, J. and Kowal, E. (eds), Cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tamale, S. (2005) ‘Eroticism, sensuality and “women's secrets” among the Baganda: a critical analysis’, Feminist Africa 5: 9–36.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. (1990) Magic, Science, and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tantala, R. (1989) ‘The early history of Kitara in western Uganda: process models of religious and political change’. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin at Madison.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, J. (2008) ‘On recognition, caring, and dementia’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22 (4): 313–35.Google Scholar
Todd, Z. (2016) ‘An indigenous feminist's take on the ontological turn: “ontology” is just another word for colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22.Google Scholar
Tumwesigye, N., Atuyambe, L., Wanyenze, R., Kibira, S., Li, Q., Wabwire-Mangen, F. and Wagner, G. (2012) ‘Alcohol consumption and risky sexual behaviour in the fishing communities: evidence from two fish landing sites on Lake Victoria in Uganda’, BMC Public Health 12 (1): 1069–79.Google Scholar
UBOS (2014) National Population and Housing Census 2014. Kampala: Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS).Google Scholar
van Wolputte, S. and Fumanti, M. (eds) (2010) Beer in Africa: drinking spaces, states and selves. Berlin: Lit.Google Scholar
Vorholter, J. (2017) ‘Class-based chronicities of suffering and seeking help: comparing addiction treatment programs in Uganda’, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 41 (4): 564–89.Google Scholar
Vrecko, S. (2010) ‘Civilizing technologies and the control of deviance’, BioSocieties 5 (1): 36–51.Google Scholar
WHO (2004) Global Status Report on Alcohol 2004. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO).Google Scholar
WHO (2014) Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health 2014. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO).Google Scholar
Whyte, S. (1997) Questioning Misfortune. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Willis, J. (2002) Potent Brews: a social history of alcohol in East Africa, 1850–1999. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, M. (1977) For Men and Elders: change in the relations of generations and of men and women among the Nyakusa-Ngonde people, 1875–1971. New York NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wolff, B., Busza, J., Bufumbo, L. and Whitworth, J. (2006) ‘Women who fall by the roadside: gender, sexual risk and alcohol in rural Uganda’, Addiction 101 (9): 1277–84.Google Scholar
Zablotska, I., Gray, R., Serwadda, D., Nalugoda, F., Kigozi, G., Sewankambo, N., Lutalo, T., Mangen, F. W. and Wawer, M. (2006) ‘Alcohol use before sex and HIV acquisition: a longitudinal study in Rakai, Uganda’, AIDS 20 (8): 1191–6.Google Scholar