Full Description
Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience. Based on ethnographic research conducted in sites from alcohol treatment clinics in Russia to Pentecostal addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are linked by the contributors' attention to the dynamics-including the cultural, scientific, legal, religious, personal, and social-that shape the meaning of "addiction" in particular settings. They examine how it is understood and experienced among professionals working in the criminal justice system of a rural West Virginia community; Hispano residents of New Mexico's Espanola Valley, where the rate of heroin overdose is among the highest in the United States; homeless women participating in an outpatient addiction therapy program in the Midwest; machine-gaming addicts in Las Vegas, and many others. The collection's editors suggest "addiction trajectories" as a useful rubric for analyzing the changing meanings of addiction across time, place, institutions, and individual lives. Pursuing three primary trajectories, the contributors show how addiction comes into being as an object of knowledge, a site of therapeutic intervention, and a source of subjective experience.
Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow SchÜll
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Tracing New Paths in the Anthropology of Addiction / Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott 1
1. The Elegiac Addict / Angela Garcia 36
2. Balancing Acts: Gambling-Machine Addiction and the Double Bind of Therapeutics / Natasha Dow Schüll 61
3. A Few Ways to Become Unreasonable: Pharmacotherapy Inside and Outside the Clinic / Todd Meyers 88
4. Pharmaceutical Evangelism and Spiritual Capital: An American Tale of Two Communities of Addicted Selves / Helena Hansen 108
5. Elusive Travelers: Russian Narcology, Transnational Toxicomanias, and the Great French Ecological Experiment / Anne M. Lovell 126
6. Signs of Sobriety: Rescripting American Addiction Counseling / E. Summerson Carr 160
7. Placebos or Prostheses for the Will: Trajectories of Alcoholism Treatment in Russia / Eugene Raikhel 188
8. "You Can Always Tell Who's Using Meth": Methamphetamine Addiction and the Semiotics of Criminal Difference / William Garriott 213
9. "Why Can't They Stop?" A Highly Public Misunderstanding of Science / Nancy D. Campbell 238
10. Committed to Will: What's at Stake for Anthropology in Addiction / A. Jamie Saris 263
Afterword. Following "Addiction Trajectories" / Emily Martin 284
References 293
Contributors 327
Index 329
