Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave behind problematic alcohol use. 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. Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.
Those interested in the development of scientific theory and in the nature of academic life will appreciate this intellectual autobiography written with great beauty and frankness by one of America's leading sociologists. Homans describes how his ideas about the proper nature of theory in social science, both in form and content, have developed over time. The chief interest of the book lies in the description of the process.
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