Table of 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 Schull 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

Promotional Information

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.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"The experience of addiction has given rise to a huge literature, divided between biomedical accounts on the one hand, and personal narratives, often inspired by the Alcoholics Anonymous paradigm, on the other. 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