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Let us make God our banker: Ethics, temporality, and agency in a Ugandan charity home
Author(s) -
SCHERZ CHINA
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12043
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , temporality , subjectivity , ignorance , mainstream , sociology , doctrine , faith , odds , situational ethics , environmental ethics , law , political science , epistemology , social science , philosophy , medicine , logistic regression
Faith in divine intervention affects the ethical and temporal orientations of a community of East African nuns managing a charity home in Central Uganda and leads them to make programmatic decisions that put them at odds with mainstream approaches in development and humanitarianism. By demonstrating that their resistance to long‐term planning and audit practices is not the product of material privation or ignorance but, rather, a consciously developed orientation toward time and agency, I bring together concerns from the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of development. Further, by seeking to explain how the sisters come to hold their particular beliefs, I move beyond the elucidation of doctrine to show how mundane forms of practice are central to the formation of ethical subjectivity.