Ph.D. University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley 2010

https://uva.theopenscholar.com/china-scherz/

Specialties

Cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, alcohol, addiction, development, Christianity, ethics, Uganda, Africa, United States

About

I am a medical anthropologist.  In my research and teaching I seek to understand how health and wellbeing are fostered through care, connection, and community.  Across a series of projects I have 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. 

My work on the importance of interdependent relationships began in my first book, Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (University of Chicago Press 2014). In this book, I 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, I have continued to explore questions of the role of social connection to wellbeing through my collaborative work with two Ugandan researchers, George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe.  Together we have conducted an ethnographic study of alcohol use disorders, social connection, and recovery in Kampala, Uganda funded by the NSF (Award #1758472).  The co-authored book we wrote based on this work, Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City, is currently in production at the University of California Press and will be published in February 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.  The book also continues my earlier engagements with questions of ethical transformation, particularly in communities where spiritual experiences are engaged as major sources of ethical guidance and where these questions of transformation rely on relational and porous understandings of the self.

The collaborative methods we used in creating this work were inspired by Ugandan ethics of interdependence and furthered through my work with the University of Virginia’s African Urbanism Humanities Lab.  In an effort to improve and facilitate a broad range of collaborations across sub-Saharan Africa, I worked with the lab to convene the Collaborative Engagements conference in 2018.  I went on to lead the process of writing a collectively authored article for Inside Higher Ed which sought to bring insights from that conference concerning the ways in which small shifts in institutional practices and policies might help to facilitate more collaborative forms of scholarship.

Finally, I have extended my work on addiction, recovery, spiritual experience, and social connection into the rural United States (NSF Award #1920871) in collaboration with two postdoctoral fellows, Abigail Mack and Joshua Burraway.  Through this work Joshua Burraway and I explored the moral economy of Suboxone and the complex temporalities of Hepatitis C diagnosis and treatment.  Abigail Mack and I 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.

Publications

Books

In Press           Scherz, China, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe. Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

2014                Scherz, China. Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Link

Articles and Other Works

2023                Scherz, China. “Philanthropy.” In Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Ethics and Morality, edited by James Laidlaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Link

2023                Shoshana V. Aronowitz, Jennifer J. Carroll, Helena Hansen, Marie Jauffret-Roustide, Caroline Mary Parker, Selena Suhail-Sindhu, Carmen Albizu-Garcia, Margarita Alegria, Jaimie Arrendondo, Alexander Baldacchino, Ricky Bluthenthal, Philippe Bourgois, Joshua Burraway, Jia-shin Chen, Hamed Ekhtiari, Hussien Elkhoy, Ali Farhoudian, Joseph Friedman, Ayana Jordan, Lindsey Kato, Kelly Knight, Carlos Martinez, Ryan McNeil, Hayley Murray, Sarah Namirembe, Ramin Radfar, Laura Roe, Anya Sarang, China Scherz, Joe Tay Wee Teck, Lauren Textor & Khuat Thi Hai Oanh “Substance Use Policy and Practice in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Early Pandemic Responses Through Internationally Comparative Field Data.” Global Public Health. 17:12, 3654-3669. Link

2022                Burraway, Joshua and China Scherz. “Keeping it in the Family: The Moral Economy of Suboxone in Rural Appalachia.” American Ethnologist. 49(4):508-520. Link

2022                Burraway, Joshua, Bailey Helbert, Julie Schexnayder, Terry Knick, Rebecca Dillingham, and China Scherz. “Reliving it All Over Again: Injection Drug Use and Hepatitis C Diagnosis in Far Southwest Virginia.” Medical Anthropology. 42(1):21-34. Link

2022                Scherz, China, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe. Dipo Nazzigala (I Closed the Depot). Dipo Nazzigala is a twelve-part Luganda and English language podcast about addiction and recovery created by China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe and produced in collaboration with WTJU Charlottesville  Link

2022                Scherz, China, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe. “Not Me: Addiction, Relapse, and Release in Uganda.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. 46:101-114. Link

2021                Members of the African Urbanism Humanities Lab. “Collaborative Research Across Continents.” Inside Higher Ed. December 10, 2021. (China Scherz - Corresponding Author) Link

2020                Scherz, China, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe. Dipo Nazzigala (I Closed the Depot). Dipo Nazzigala is a twelve-part Luganda language radio program about addiction and recovery created by China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe and produced in collaboration with CBS Radio Buganda 89.2FM in Kampala, Uganda.

2019                Scherz, China and George Mpanga. “His Mother Became Medicine: Drinking Problems, Ethics, and Maternal Care in Central Uganda” Africa. 89(1): 125-46. Link

2018                Scherz, China. “Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Personhood and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent” American Anthropologist. 120(1): 102-112. Link

2018                Scherz, China. “Stuck in the Clinic: Vernacular Healing and Medical Anthropology in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 32(4): 539-555. Link

2017                Scherz, China. “Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage.” In The Request and the Gift: Asking and Giving in Religious and Humanitarian Discourses, edited by Fredrick Klaits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Link

2017                Scherz, China. “Persistent Forms: Catholic Charity Homes on the Boundary Line of the Moral Neoliberal.” In Religion and the Morality of the Market, edited by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Link

2013                Scherz, China. “Let Us Make God Our Banker: Ethics, Temporality, and Agency in a Ugandan Charity Home.” American Ethnologist 40(4): 624-636. Link

2011                Scherz, China. “Protecting Children, Preserving Families: Moral Conflict and Actuarial Science in a Problem of Contemporary Governance.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(1): 33-50. Link

2010                Scherz, China. “‘You Aren’t the First And You Won’t Be The Last’: Reflections on Moral Change in Contemporary Rural Ireland.” Anthropological Theory 10(3): 1-16. Link

2004                Behforouz HL, Kalmus A, Scherz CS, Kahn JS, Kadakia MB, Farmer PE. “Directly observed therapy for HIV antiretroviral therapy in an urban US setting.”  Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 36(1):642-5. Link