Department of Anthropology

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 Espanola 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.

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]

This article explores the changing nature of inheritance among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. Specifically, it examines how Hispano families have reworked the traditional application of inheritance, referring to property passed down the generations, to conceive of heroin addiction as ‘inherited’. It shows how this emerging formation of inheritance is shaped by, and refracts back upon, past configurations of property and belonging. This article reflects on intergenerational addiction as a modality of connection and continuity, but one that is entangled with experiences of loss. It highlights the implications of this tension for anthropological understandings of inheritance, addiction and the embodiment of history.

Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially among the urban poor. During the same period, unregulated residential treatment centers for addiction, known as anexos, have proliferated throughout
the country. These centers are utilized and run by marginalized populations and are widely known to engage in physical violence. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article describes why anexos emerged, how they work, and what their prevalence and practices reveal about the nature of recovery in a context where poverty, drugs, and violence are existential realities. Drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between violence and recovery, pain, and healing,
it complicates categories of violence and care that are presumed to have exclusive meaning, illuminating the divergent meanings of, and opportunities for, recovery, and how these are socially configured and sustained. [addiction, violence, Mexico,
drug war, informality]

This article considers an archive of letters written by three generations of female kin as offering a form for thinking about the nature of kin relations. It tells the story of how the archive came into being, and examines the ways writing and archiving makes visible the shifting relations that constitute kinship. Highlighting the narrative acts of selected letters, it grapples with the failure of things being properly ‘passed on’ within the web of kinship, as well as the potential that this failure generates.

In the past two decades, drug-treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and attended by the working poor, anexos' therapeutic practices blend criminal violence and religious ritual, and they are widely condemned as abusive and unethical. Based on several years of ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article situates anexos within a larger historical frame and examines how they conjure and rework contemporary forms of affliction through a novel form of confessional practice. It shows how confession simultaneously reproduces pervasive images of violence while also disclosing projects of communitarian survival that are ethically affirmative. In doing so, this article demonstrates that anexos' confessional practices constitute an aesthetics and politics of recovery that calls for a rethinking of criminal, religious, and therapeutic domains.

The excavations of Argos Orestikon (www.argosorestikonproject.org) co-organized by the Universities of Ioannina and Western Greece explore not just the ancient past, but the directors also make a special effort to include the local community.  With the sponsorship of Stanford University, the archaeologists held two outreach events, an informational open day and an educational program for children in July 2012.  These two programs focused on presenting the work undertaken in the trenches and encouraging the involvement of the community.  By embracing a creed of participation and inclusion, the archaeologists, collaborators, students, and others involved demonstrate that such endeavors are worthwhile and help build the social relevance of archaeology.

"The economic crisis in Europe has reverberated through all facets of society, even archaeology and heritage. The following forum takes into account some of the economic effects on the archaeological industry along with its impact on people, places, and material culture. Considering the contribution of archaeology to the economy of Greece, as well as its influence on culture and society, there is an argument that a greater investment should be made in the protection and preservation of heritage. Proponents also suggest that archaeology should work to garner wider public support and seek alternative financial opportunities for funding. While heritage may not be the solution for this crisis, it could play a part in unifying people during this period."