Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform‐Era China. NicholasBartlett. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2020. ix‐204 pp.

Abstract

In Recovering Histories, Nicholas Bartlett shares his intimate, decade-long relationships with a group of recovering heroin users in Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as the "Tin Capital." When the marketization of the mining industry in Gejiu stimulated a booming private sector, the use of heroin gained popularity in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s. During this period, heroin even "became a symbol of wealth, bravery, and belonging for a group actively questioning inherited economic and social traditions" (42). By the early 2010s, however, the once sizable heroin-using community had shrunk to approximately 2,500 local residents because of the heavy death toll of overdoses and infectious diseases, intense police crackdowns on drug dealing, as well as the stigmatization of heroin use. This book, thus, is an ethnography of recovery rather than of drug use. Rather than conducting fieldwork in spaces dedicated to drug treatment, Bartlett's ethnographic research took place in a variety of everyday spaces, including a drop-in center for heroin users, private homes, outdoor restaurants, hot springs retreats, wedding ceremonies, and family-related events from 2008-2018. Informed by the phenomenological approaches of David Carr, Paul Ricoeur, and Sara Ahmed, Bartlett captures drug users' lived experience of disorientation and their attempts at forging new lives, while at the same time attending carefully to the ways in which the shifting collective experiences associated with China's reform and development impact recovery.