Addiction Trajectories

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

"From an accomplished group of scholars come deeply instructive and timely accounts of the unseen of addiction's moral grip. Addiction Trajectories will be a standard-bearer in the new anthropology of addiction."—Adriana Petryna, coeditor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices, "The experience of addiction has given rise to a huge literature, divided between biomedical accounts on the one hand, and, on the other, personal narratives, often inspired by the Alcoholics Anonymous paradigm. Qualitative social research by anthropologists and sociologists has been scarce thus far, but this wonderful collection shows that larger social and cultural processes do much to shape experiences usually seen in terms of individual failings and heroisms. Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott have brought together analyses that respect the feelings and ideas of ordinary 'addicts' but that allow us to go beyond the Oprah Winfrey 'just do it' approach."—Mariana Valverde, author of Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom, “I would highly recommend the book especially to readers within anthropology and other related disciplines, who are interested in addiction, diseases, illnesses, and also in organizing ideas of what it means to be human: these ideas assume specificity in different historical and spatial settings, as they are related to political and commercial histories of pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs and their translations and transformations.”, “Addiction Trajectories provides a creative blend of anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, and it does so through the engaging stories of individuals suffering from various addictions. . . . I found this book to be a refreshing perspective on the psychology, biology, and ethnography of addiction.  This blending of disciplines serves as a powerful reminder to the medical community that addiction should not be overly biologized.”, “I found this a fascinating book… The chapters deconstructed all the usual notions one holds about addiction trajectories and opened up a myriad of trajectories of temporal, cultural and spatial dimensions.”

Eugene Raikhel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.William Garriott is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at James Madison University. He is the author of Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America.