The major goals of the "Alternative Pathways to Well-Being" (NSF Award #1758472) project were to better understand (1) how spiritual experiences affect processes of ethical transformation and (2) how spiritual experiences and participation in communities oriented towards these experiences affect people?s networks of social support.  

From March 2018 to August 2019 anthropologist China Scherz and her team investigated this question by studying the effects of spiritual experience in the lives of a cohort of Ugandans living in Kampala who were seeking to leave histories of alcohol abuse behind. Scherz and her team gathered data about their experiences through qualitative ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and mapping exercises, focusing on the effects of spiritual experiences in their lives and shifts in their networks of social support.  The team-based approach also contributed to the training of two Ugandan researchers and a US undergraduate.

Given the relatively recent introduction of ideas of alcoholism and addiction, most Ugandans use other therapeutic resources to define and address problems related to alcohol.  These treatments can include herbal therapies, engagements with spirits and their mediums, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal and Charismatic Catholic churches.  Though these therapeutic forms differ from one another in substantial ways, Scherz and her team found that they all present challenges to the prevailing biomedical model of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease.  

The affordances of these other approaches can be seen most clearly in the Pentecostal churches and the shrines of spirt mediums.  Despite their differences, in both of these types of sites problem drinking is thought to be caused by spiritual forces that come from outside the self. For Pentecostal Christians in Uganda, the external forces are conceptualized as demons, and moving beyond problems with alcohol requires Pentecostals to exorcise the spirit which is causing the problem through prayers for deliverance. For sprit mediums, the external force is also conceptualized as a spirit, but here the task is to better accommodate the troubling spirit by recognizing the spirit and moving into a more productive relationship of reciprocity with them. For both Pentecostal Christians and spirit mediums, alcohol-related problems can be explained as resulting from the actions of an external force. Where they differ, and here they differ strongly, is about what the moral valence of these external spirits is and what ought to be done about them. 

Centrally related to Scherz's interest in exploring the relationships between spiritual experience and social support is an effort to understand how beliefs and experiences like these shape people?s relationships with others. When Scherz and her team began the study, they were conceptualizing the link between these two things, the spiritual experiences and the social relationships, as being somewhat coincidental. In short, they hypothesized that spiritual experiences might people to participate more intensively in spiritual communities and thus they find more opportunities for social support. Over the course of the study, they have come to see the connection between these two factors differently. Through their research they have come to understand that specific beliefs about spiritual forces can change the way that a person is perceived by those around them and that this can greatly alter the sources of social support that they have available to them.  To take the examples given above, when those around the former drinker see the former drinker as separate from the spiritual forces that caused the person to drink, important opportunities for building trusting interpersonal relationships in the future are created since the former drinker is conceptualized as radically separate from their prior actions. 

This dynamic can be contrasted with the dynamic found in in-patient recovery centers which generally subscribe to the chronic relapsing brain disease model of addiction. In these centers and in the relationships that continue in Alcoholics Anonymous groups, suspicion and mutual support co-exist in ways that make trusting relationships difficult to achieve. While there are certainly tensions in the churches and shrines as well, the possibility that a person?s past actions were authored by another allows people to form different kinds of relationships in the present. Such relationships of trust are further fostered through the creation of a series of opportunities for demonstrating one's reliability and trustworthiness in progressively more public ways. 

This study not only contributes to the anthropological literature on ethics by greatly expanding the range of experiences that may be considered relevant to processes of personal transformation, it also contributes to the anthropological study of addiction by showing how addiction and recovery look in a place where the idea of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease has not fully taken hold.  By offering a new perspective on what might be possible outside of this model, this study will contribute to the care and healing of people living with addictions.

Last Modified: 10/07/2019
Modified by: China R Scherz