THE ELEGIAC ADDICT: History, Chronicity, and the Melancholic Subject

Abstract

In biomedical and public health discourses, “chronicity” has emerged as the prevailing model to understanding drug addiction and addictive experience. This approach is predicated on constructing and responding to addictive experience in ways that underscore its presumed lifelong nature. In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of heroin addiction and heroin overdose in northern New Mexico's Española Valley, which suffers the highest rate of heroin‐induced death in the United States, and explore how the logic of chronicity is dangerously reworked through the Hispano ethos of endless suffering. Focusing on the narrative of Alma, a Hispana heroin addict who died of an overdose after many previous overdoses, I evoke a sense of the physical, historical, and institutional refrains in which she felt herself caught. By tracing Alma's death back to these refrains, I describe the complex of entanglements in which her addiction took form and show how the discourse of chronicity provided a structure for her suffering and, ultimately, her death.

Anthropological Perspectives on Money Management: Considerations for the Design and Implementation of Interventions for Substance Abuse

“…In closing, I wish to broaden the scope of my critique with a call for increased awareness among researchers and practitioners of the broader social context in which addiction and recovery are produced and experienced. Anthropologists who study addiction call attention to the complex social and historical conditions that shape substance use (26)(27)(28). In contrast, clinical interventions for substance abuse, including money management, target individuals.…”

Everyday translation: health practitioners’ perspectives on obesity and metabolic disorders in Samoa

“…Well-being in Samoa is focused on 'living well' more than on 'bodily vigilance' (Smith-Morris, 2006, p. 6;cf. Agee, McIntosh, Culbertson, & Makasiale, 2013;Capstick, Norris, Sopoaga, & Tobata, 2009;Carlisle & Hanlon, 2007, 2008, including placing social priorities over individual health. Health practitioners grapple with these differences by asking: 'How can you reduce sugar intake when tea is made in one pot for the household?'…”

An uncritical encounter between anthropology and psychiatry

“…We might say that Affliction points towards an answer, one in which each of our responding psychiatrists recognize themselves, namely, treatmentseeking among the urban poor as taking place in a certain kind of urban ecology, composed of multiple points of entry and exit or persistence, where quasi-events can turn into critical events, and within which psychiatrists are one among other stopping points. The particular circuits that compose these fragile ecosystems of life and labor, health and illness may differ quite strongly, for instance, as compared to the circuits that stitch together the 'culture of chronicity' that anthropologists such as Tanya Luhrmann (2007) and Angela Garcia (2008), among others describe, the 'institutional circuit' of mental illness in 'developed country' contexts, between homelessness, supported housing, hospital, jail, and in some cases addiction rehab.…”