Not You: Addiction, Relapse, and Release in Uganda.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry March 1, 2022 China Scherz, George Mpanga, Sarah Namirembe 4 citations
In Uganda, alcohol addiction is often understood not as a chronic brain disease but as control by an external spirit. Pentecostals and spirit mediums both see addiction as possession by an outside being, but they disagree on whether that spirit is evil or morally neutral and on how to address it. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that these local concepts of bondage and possession, though severe, offer pathways to recovery that differ from the biomedical model of addiction as a relapsing disease.