The Promise: On the Morality of the Marginal and the Illicit

Abstract

Moral engagement in the setting of drug addiction is often at odds with prevailing moral discourse and is treated in punitive terms. In this article, I explore how one moral gesture-a promise between a heroin-using mother and daughter-embodies the difficulty and ambiguity of moral experience in the context of addiction and offers insight into how it is profoundly shaped by social processes. By offering a close description of the promise over time, I show how morality is lived through sentiments and practices of care and commitment, which are vulnerable to isolation, punishment, and wounding. The story of the promise thus offers a way to reflect upon morality as the blurring of these different intensities. [morality, ethics, care, incarceration, addiction] In my work on addiction and family life, I have encountered experiences that blur the boundaries of vice and virtue, alienation and connection, injury and care (Garcia 2010(Garcia , 2008. In describing these tensions, I have tried to dismantle the symbolic order that excludes ethical engagement in discourses of the illicit and have emphasized the "ordinary virtues" of sentiments and practices that are typically at odds with normative claims of morality (Todorov 1996; see also Lambek 2010). 1 Conceiving the moral and the illicit not as opposites but as processes coexisting in the life of drug users, I have emphasized the concrete moral concerns and commitments of subjects living in dense, local worlds. This requires a focus not only on "the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation," but also on the historical context in which it unfolds (Nussbaum 1986:13). This context is absolutely critical to understanding what constitutes life lived virtuously and well and how processes at once political and intersubjective shape moral experience (Desjarlais 1997;Kleinman 1998; Walker 1998).Approaching the moral as a mode of inhabiting the world, I have been interested in the ethical dimensions of addictive experience and how these gain or lose shape in relation to intimate and institutional pressures. What is at stake for me is ethnographically attending to the ways that addicted kin absorb, share, lessen and ignore each others' pain and how these responses fluctuate in relation to life conditions. My hope is that such work has the potential to recuperate the marginalized subject (the drug addicted) within and beyond Western moral discourse, while also "contributing to collective memory that sustains political community" through the process of remembering, documenting, and reimagining moral experience (Shari Stone-Mediatore cited in Code 2002:165; see also Cixous 1981).

The material, moral, and affective worlds of dealing and crime among young men entrenched in an inner city drug scene

“…Moreover, while moral logics of the gang were used by young men to make sense of practices that are typically at odds with normative claims of morality (such as acts of extreme violence; Garcia, 2014), youth also used these logics to convey highly conventional understandings of the good – such as the imperative to protect women and children. Subjectivities like the heroic gangster engaged in explicit ways with state infrastructures and technologies of administration (e.g., the broken child welfare system in British Columbia; Turpel-Lafond, 2006, 2007).…”

“I'm Stuck”: Women's Navigations of Social Networks and Prescription Drug Misuse in Central Appalachia

“…These strategies include self‐medicating with prescription drugs, using with close family members and friends to decrease risks associated with drug use, and sharing material resources with those in their network. Yet material, social, and political factors limit women's options in navigating caregiving responsibilities, self‐care, drug use, and economic inequalities (Buch ; Campbell ; Garcia ; Han ; Kleinman ; Van Vleet ).…”

Troubling Love: Gender, Class, and Sideshadowing the “Happy Family” in Vietnam

“…Morality here is revealed to be contested and contradictory, and it is through the narrative pondering of events that An and Bà Bảy confront incommensurable goods, similar to their neighbor cô Thu and her mother‐in‐law in years past. Moral value is not to be reduced to the logic of accounting applied when assessing economic value (Lambek ): as in other recent accounts (e.g., Garcia ; Han ), where drug addiction intersects with loving acts between spouses or parents and children, the provisioning of care can also effect moral harm, depending on the temporal scale and perspective from which events are viewed.…”