Addiction

Bibliographic Data

ID4525657
AuthorsJ Burraway (0000-0003-4470-6577, corresponding author)
EditorsF Stein (0000-0002-0123-9895), Hildegard Diemberger (0009-0004-7655-6520), Rupert Stasch, Joel Robbins, Andrew Sanchez (0000-0001-8660-7505), Sian Lazar (0000-0002-0056-6333), M Candea (0000-0001-7260-4194)
Year2020
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOpen Encyclopedia of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2398-516X • E-ISSN: 2398-516X
PublisherThe Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.29164/20addiction
OpenAlexW4230261775
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited41

What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive behavioural patterns, including not just drug-taking and drinking, but gambling, eating, sex, video gaming, and even shopping. Whilst all these activities have generated rich fields of inquiry across the social science disciplines, this entry focuses primarily on the changing nature of substance addiction. Anthropology has played an important role in unpacking the multiple meanings contained within this phenomenon, tracking its expansion and enmeshment across a diverse range of human domains. The study of addiction encompasses anxieties regarding the changing nature of selfhood, control, and agency, as well as moral and political concerns relating to what counts as ‘proper’ versus ‘deviant’ behaviour. Since the turn of the twentieth century, addiction has increasingly become an object of both biomedical and criminal intervention. This shift has accelerated the birth of a therapeutic-carceral industry, where substance-users occupy the dual role of patient and criminal. This entry traces the development of anthropological thoughts on addiction, demonstrating how cultural approaches to non-Western alcohol use in the 1950s were adopted and expanded as Western social scientists sought more nuanced sociocultural models for understanding substance-use within their own societies. These developments fed into the tradition known as critical medical anthropology, which sought to join experiential accounts of suffering and illness to politico-economic approaches that examined the systemic conditions of inequality. The core contribution of anthropology in the study of addiction has been the generation of rich ethnographic data on the lived experiences and everyday realities of substance-users. This body of work has been instrumental in depathologising the lived world of addiction, demonstrating in vivid colour the complex sociality, cultural values, status dynamics, forms of intimate belonging, embodied experiences, and sociostructural inequities that lie at its heart

Addiction · Criminology · Epistemology · Phenomenon · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Social science · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk · Psychedelics and Drug Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes

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