Senior Research Seminar with Julia Modern and Giulia Sciolli (University of Cambridge)

‘Obulema’ [disability] and ‘abaceke’ [weak people]: legal and relational obligations to disabled people in UgandaJulia Modern (University of Cambridge)

In 1995, Uganda adopted a new Constitution mandating the election of disabled representatives in parliament and local councils. There are now over 45,000 disabled councillors, and Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) notionally exist in every village to elect them. Consequently, Uganda has an unusually institutionalised ‘disability rights movement,’ promoting a politico-legal form of obligation to disabled people. Tangible resources delivered to DPOs and their members through this system overwhelmingly focus on grants or loans for individual small businesses, adding a ‘developmental’ approach to disability provision. Using a case study of a women’s DPO, this seminar traces the implications for members with learning difficulties, who became marginalised in the group because they were deemed incapable of the steadfast ‘active’ comportment considered essential to sustaining a business. The DPO’s officers nevertheless experienced relational obligations to these members, based predominantly on personal histories of long-term association rather than their status as disabled. I analyse two discourses used about marked bodily-mental difference: ‘obulema’ [disability], and ‘abaceke’ [weak people], arguing they are based on divergent forms of obligation.

 

Tinkering with Food and Family in an Eating Disorder Treatment Centre in ItalyGiulia Sciolli (University of Cambridge)

Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork in a centre for eating disorders in Italy, this paper examines treatment at the intersection of professional and family care practices, and how these shape one another for the sake of what in clinical settings is called ‘therapeutic efficacy’. The treatment team tinkers with kinship care by purposefully functioning as a ‘relational laboratory’. In reflecting on this, the paper both draws on and goes beyond anthropological works that have usefully highlighted the potentially harmful side of kinship. Here, kinship also becomes a therapeutic tool – albeit a difficult one to use – as professionals work to reshape kinship care in patients’ families, and simultaneously borrow from kinship practices in their own therapeutic work with patients. The paper brings together some of the issues dealt with in the anthropological literature on kinship, and some of the issues dealt with in medical anthropology, to suggest that kinship and feeding are interestingly aligned in both the production and treatment of disease: in the world of this treatment centre, we might say that eating disorders are the result of the bodies that patients acquired through kinship, and which can be treated through kinship.