reasons of confidentiality.54 I will describe UHC more fully in chapter 3.
For nineteen months between October 2005 and May 2007, I spent time in these communities, interviewing pastors and youth and attending services, workshops community events, prayer meetings, and women’s meetings. I also lived for nine months in the home of a Ugandan family who were members of a born-again church I visited regularly, and I attended home Bible study groups and family meetings with them. (I later rented for a year a small house adjacent to the home of another member of the same church.) I returned in July 2010 and June 2011 to conduct follow-up interviews with pastors and youth. I also spent time during those visits attending parenthood workshops at UHC, where I learned more about the church’s expectations for family life. I conducted group interviews with both church members and Ugandans outside the born-again community that focused on the issue of homosexuality and Uganda’s 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill, a topic I take up in chapter 6.
I interviewed four dozen young adults and reinterviewed ten of them at least twice over the six years of primary field research, tracking how their attitudes about marriage, sexuality, and their desire for and struggles with parenthood and family life changed over time. I also interviewed eight pastors and church leaders about their hopes for their church, their involvement with AIDS prevention and activism, and their problems with church financing. I knew many more young adults, older adults, and clergy less formally, and spoke with them at church meetings and social events about their concerns in life. In addition to ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I also interviewed individuals involved in AIDS prevention outside these churches, including people involved in advocacy and research from various other sectors including academia, the secular NGO world, and the mainline Catholic and Anglican churches.
I was positioned as a researcher within the church community I studied, though—especially by those I lived with and knew well—I was also considered a friend. The intimacy of the ethnographic encounter can be both tremendously rewarding and challenging, as frustrating as it is illuminating: it is a mode of research that generates close personal ties between researchers and research participants. Ethnographers depend on the intimacy of the fieldwork experience to help reveal deeper cultural understandings: How do people in this community think? What matters to them? As Clifford Geertz has famously described, ethnography is akin to “thick description”; it is the way we come to understand the difference between the proverbial wink and a twitch of the eye.55
In recent years, especially as the work of religious activists in Uganda has generated more controversy (see especially chapter 6), many people have asked me what it was like to conduct fieldwork within this community. Studying Ugandans who have embraced a version of the religiosity—born-again Christianity—that many (Ugandans and Americans alike) view as native to my own country certainly presented its own unique challenges. The church where I conducted fieldwork had relationships with Christians in the West, and so the presence of an American in church was not all that unusual. As a researcher rather than a missionary-volunteer I was, of course, positioned differently from most of these other visitors. (I am not a born-again Christian, for one thing.) Yet as many other anthropologists who have studied Christianity around the world have also noted, my position outside the “frame of belief” was not a point of particular concern or contention for the Ugandans I knew.56 As a participant-observer I was taken seriously as someone who sought to better hear and understand the Ugandan Christian way of life. Church members took time to explain their mode of worship, their attitudes and beliefs, in part because this was the work of being a Christian—of both proselytizing and experiencing their own faith.
I was not only viewed as a potential convert (as all nonbelievers are), however; I was taken seriously as an anthropologist. This was somewhat surprising to me, as anthropology is not a discipline that is widely studied in Uganda (though, like foreign missionaries, the peripatetic academic researcher is a known commodity in Kampala). Thomas Walusimbi, the head pastor at UHC, once told a room full of church members that he wanted to start a college radio station and feature on it a show about “anthropology and our culture.” Though surprising, his idea was not all that far-fetched. The study of culture—especially as it was understood in Uganda to mean “traditional culture”—was a project of some significance to a community that sought to both embrace and reform aspects of so-called traditional life. Pastor Walusimbi even once spoke to me, unprompted, about the “anthropology of the Baganda,” forwarding his own analysis of the ways precolonial Ganda political relationships influence contemporary mind-sets. As a discipline concerned with understanding both the similarities and the differences between Ugandan and American Christians, anthropology presented a certain utility to the pastor. As I discuss in chapter 1, he was concerned with highlighting the agency of Africans in a world that seemed defined by the politicoeconomic relationships of development aid that positioned Africans as passive recipients; thus, a project focused on a deeper understanding of African actors was one he could get behind.
That being said, it was not always easy to observe and seek to understand views that were not only different from my own but at times objectionable and unsettling to me. The most challenging portions of my fieldwork were those toward the end of my study, when an antihomosexuality agenda came to dominate church activities. Both within and outside the church, discussion of homosexuality in Uganda revolved around often disturbing and violent imagery. Attacks on people accused of being gay or lesbian were becoming more common in Kampala in the wake of 2009’s antihomosexuality legislation. But it was during this period that I was also struck by the way Ugandans (and especially Ugandan Christians) were being portrayed by the Western media. They have become, to use a phrase coined by the anthropologist Susan Harding, a “repugnant cultural other” in the eyes of a supposedly enlightened West.57 Their views on homosexuality have been dismissed as either grossly misguided, a symptom of their lingering “traditionalism,” or—worse yet—a reflection of their position as pawns of a sinister contingent of rogue Western conservative religious activists. Throughout my fieldwork I was struck by this persistent assumption: that Ugandan Christian social activism is pursued under the guidance of American Christians and conservative politicians and that the beliefs and interests of these two groups—American and Ugandan—were interchangeable. One of the main purposes of this book is to elucidate the ways this was often not the case. My intent is to reveal and explain something about the motivations and moral orientations of Ugandan Christians, highlighting their own agency and agenda in the social protests (for abstinence as an AIDS prevention method, and against homosexual rights) that have come to define them in recent years.
The Book’s Structure, and an Outline of the Chapters
This book is structured as an ethnographic study of a policy in that it considers, to quote Catrin Evans and Helen Lambert, “how interventions enter into existing life worlds and both shape and are shaped by them.”58 It is divided into three sections that lead the reader from the historical and political context that gave rise to PEPFAR’s origins, to an analysis of its impact within one Ugandan community, to the long-term effects or “wakes” that have remained in the years following its initial implementation. Part 1 draws on archival research, analysis of U.S. congressional records, and interviews with key figures in Uganda’s health and religious sectors involved in early AIDS prevention efforts. Part 2 is the ethnographic heart of the book, where Ugandan responses to and interpretations of PEPFAR’s policy are analyzed. Part 3 is also primarily ethnographic, focusing on the broader social and political effects of the policy in Uganda, especially in terms of attitudes surrounding gender and sexuality, including homosexuality.
Part 1, which outlines the context for the PEPFAR program, begins with a focus on the history of the PEPFAR policy itself and its initial implementation in Uganda.