School of Social and Political Science

Description

This talk draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct lives after alcohol. 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. In So doing, this talk offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.