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Shanti Parikh, Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda’s Time of AIDS. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. 336 pp.
Shanti Parikh's Regulating Romance offers a compassionate, cleareyed, and scrupulously researched examination of youth romance in Uganda. With great ethnographic richness, Parikh analyzes the fraught dynamics of morality, desire, and aspiration in "a time of AIDS," a moment when HIV/AIDS has become a profoundly intimate and social fact for most Ugandans. With considerable care, Parikh historically contextualizes her ethnographic investigations; her book situates contemporary anxieties about youth romance within longer-term transformations that have reshaped the ways that Ugandans experience kinship, love, bodies, and well-being.
Regulating Romance is notable for being grounded in research that is both extensive, relying on nearly a decade of fieldwork (1996-2015), and intensive, drawing on a formidable range of data on life in rural and urban east-central Uganda in the kingdom of Busoga. Aided by a team of four research assistants, Parikh is able to robustly substantiate her claims on the basis of household surveys; gossip and oral traditions; hundreds of interviews with youth and adults; 25 case studies following young people over several years; numerous coming-of-age and sexual histories; focus-group discussions; and many interviews with community leaders, activists, and "sexperts" positioned to speak about youth romance.
But the most distinctive kind of data in Parikh's book consists of over 300 love letters written by Ugandan youth. Parikh's use of this material arose serendipitously in the course of her research, when she happened upon a young man's letter. This chance revelation led Parikh to discover that a lively practice of letter-writing was central to young Ugandans' romantic exploits. Moreover, she found youth quite willing to share and discuss these letters, which she collected in exchange for a small fee. This collection of love letters allows Parikh to circumvent a major obstacle that confronted her research-garrulous elders and reserved, evasive youth. Yet if Ugandan youth proved reluctant to answer direct inquiries about their romantic lives, they were by no means restrained in their often charmingly florid letters (e.g., "Your shining face attracts and affects my feelings and make [sic] me mix up my chemical wrongly") or in discussing them. Parikh offers a thorough reading of the form and content...