Search results for ""Author China Scherz""
The University of Chicago Press Having People, Having Heart – Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda
Believing that charity inadvertently legitimates social inequality and fosters dependence, many international development organizations have increasingly sought to replace material aid with efforts to build self-reliance and local institutions. But in some cultures - like those in rural Uganda, where Having People, Having Heart takes place - people see this shift not as an effort toward empowerment but as a suspect refusal to redistribute wealth. Exploring this conflict, China Scherz balances the negative assessments of charity that have led to this shift with the viewpoints of those who actually receive aid. Through detailed studies of two different orphan support organizations in Uganda, Scherz shows how many Ugandans view material forms of Catholic charity as deeply intertwined with their own ethics of care and exchange. With a detailed examination of this overlooked relationship in hand, she reassesses the generally assumed paradox of material aid as both promising independence and preventing it. The result is a sophisticated demonstration of the powerful role that anthropological concepts of exchange, value, personhood, and religion play in the politics of international aid and development.
£25.16
University of California Press Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.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.
£27.00
