作者Shanti Parikh通过十年的人种学研究、250次采访和300多封青年情书，利用生动的小插曲，为了解乌干达年轻人的异性恋欲望和行为提供了难得的窗口。在题为《不碎我的心》、《我想你就像沙漠里的雨一样》和《你只是在玩弄我的头》的章节中，她邀请读者进入乌干达年轻人的秘密渴望、失望和焦虑的世界，他们在创造性地想象浪漫的未来和可能性的同时，与日常困难作斗争。
Parikh还研究了乌干达激进的艾滋病宣传活动的意外后果，这些活动将性行为和对性行为的焦虑推向了公共领域。在经济不稳定和代际紧张的背景下，年轻人对基于消费的浪漫的观念不断复杂化，社区面临着保护和监管年轻人免受性活动的名誉和健康危害的困境。“他们因为爱一个女学生而逮捕了我”是一章的标题，该章讲述了如何控制犯罪的女儿，以及如何惩罚那些试图通过维护青春期的浪漫关系来破坏父权权威的叛逆男友。性教育项目在国际捐赠者和社区老年人的道德辩论中，在风险和快乐之间挣扎，将年轻的女性身体转变为公众批评和关注的平台。这项研究的许多方面构成了一个富有说服力的干预批判人类学。
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Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda’s Time of AIDS
Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people’s heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled “Unbreak my heart,” “I miss you like a desert missing rain,” and “You’re just playing with my head,” she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities.
Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda’s aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people’s notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. “They arrested me for loving a school girl” is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.
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