Bringing anthropological views to undergo on dependancy, the participants to this crucial assortment spotlight the contingency of dependancy as a class of human wisdom and adventure. in response to ethnographic study carried out in websites from alcohol therapy clinics in Russia to Pentecostal habit ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are associated via the participants' consciousness to the dynamics—including the cultural, medical, criminal, non secular, own, and social—that form the which means of "addiction" particularly settings. They learn the way it is known and skilled between execs operating within the legal justice approach of a rural West Virginia group; Hispano citizens of recent Mexico's Espanola Valley, the place the speed of heroin overdose is without doubt one of the maximum within the usa; homeless girls engaging in an outpatient dependancy treatment software within the Midwest; machine-gaming addicts in Las Vegas, and so forth. The collection's editors recommend "addiction trajectories" as an invaluable rubric for reading the altering meanings of habit throughout time, position, associations, and person lives. Pursuing 3 fundamental trajectories, the members convey how dependancy comes into being as an item of information, a website of healing intervention, and a resource of subjective experience.

Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll