The Pastoral Clinic

Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-520-26208-9
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 437 g

The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispanic addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its experience of the opioid epidemic as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. With lyrical prose, evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of immigration and addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call to political activists, politicians, and medical professionals for a new ethics of substance abuse treatment and care.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Garcia, Angela

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: American Pastoral

1. Graveyard

2. The Elegiac Addict

3. Blood Relative

4. Suicide as a Form of Life

5. Experiments with Care

Conclusion: A New Season

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Angela Garcia is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.