Part of review forum on “Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City”

We want to begin by thanking our three reviewers for their thoughtful engagements with our work. They each bring unique perspectives and expertise to thinking about health, healing, and embodiment in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa and we are honored to have this opportunity to respond to their comments.

Erin Moore draws the book into a productive dialogue with the larger medical anthropological literature on chronic illnesses such as diabetes, noting how the different therapeutic pathways we discuss in the book attend to continuity of a person’s life through a more defragmented approach to addiction. This observation highlights the nuanced tension that these practitioners hold as they help people to chart a path forward that both attends to continuity with their past, particularly to the time before they began drinking, and the possibility of a radical break. This tension is perhaps seen most clearly in the chapter on the Pentecostal Churches where we draw on Joel Robbin’s writings on Christian interruption to describe moments which are simultaneously break and restoration to enhanced continuity (Robbins, Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life [Oxford, 2020]).

Julie Archambault asks whether in our efforts to think about alcohol from Africa, we have perhaps neglected to think about alcohol in Africa, and what it might look like to do just that. Although we agree with Archambault’s claim that this book is, in part, an effort to see what students and scholars outside of Africa might learn from the wide range of vernacular healing modalities presently practiced in Uganda, we are equally concerned with the ways in which this book might be able to intervene in policy debates about the best ways to approach problem drinking in Uganda and in other African countries with similar therapeutic landscapes. With this in mind, we have endeavored to share this work with policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and students in Uganda through book launch events and engagements with English and Luganda language newspapers, television, and radio. Writing the book for a wider audience and producing the book as an open access title have also gone a long way to making it more accessible in Uganda. Our discussions with policymakers and practitioners are still in their early stages, but there are promising indications that this book will play a role in thinking about alcohol in Uganda as well.

Finally, Stacey Langwick asks us to reflect more on the interweaving of care and violence in each of our sites. This question is one we turned to most explicitly in an earlier work (Scherz and Mpanga, “His Mother Became Medicine” [Africa, 2019]). This question has also proven useful in several recent works both on the anthropology of addiction treatment outside of Africa and in medical anthropology within Africa. As Langwick suggests, the reworking of destructive relations to substances, people, and other more-than-human beings can involve actions that are both physically and spiritually dangerous and which may not be entirely voluntary. As we have written elsewhere, these forms of violence are sometimes conceptualized as acts of love which demand more nuanced forms of ethical discernment than a binary split between violence and nonviolent forms of discipline seems to allow.

We want to close by thanking all three of these reviewers for their thoughtful engagement with our book. We look forward to continuing the conversation with them and with our readers within and outside of Uganda.