China Scherz

Biography

Scherz’s work examines how health and well-being are fostered through care, connection, and community. Across a series of projects, she has also explored how people decide who they should care for and how they ought to care for them and the ways in which spiritual experiences intersect with processes of ethical transformation.

Her work on the importance of interdependent relationships began in her first book, Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (University of Chicago Press 2014). In this book, she explored how aid-workers and recipients involved in orphan support projects in Uganda negotiate, embrace, and also avoid relations of hierarchical interdependence as they pursue moral and material ends.

Since 2015, she has continued to explore questions of the role of social connection to wellbeing through her collaborative work with two Ugandan researchers, George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe. Together they conducted a long-term collaborative ethnographic study of alcohol use disorders, social connection, and recovery in Kampala, Uganda funded by the NSF (Award #1758472). This study resulted in an open access co-authored book Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City, published by the University of California in 2024.

Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave problematic forms of alcohol use behind. 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 spirit mediumship, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While their engagements with possession, aversion, and deliverance 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, Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.

More recently Scherz has extended her work on addiction, recovery, spiritual experience, and social connection into the rural United States (NSF Award #1920871) in collaboration with Abigail Mack and Joshua Burraway. Scherz and Mack are currently beginning work on a co-authored book manuscript that will explore how people struggling with substance use navigate hope, abandonment, and trauma as they learn to care for one another, and for themselves, over the long haul.