Announcements

Call for papers: Border constructions and crossings in the anthropology of psychoactive substances

**CALL FOR PAPERS**

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

San Francisco, CA, November 14-18, 2012

Drug (Ab)use:

Border constructions and crossings in the anthropology of psychoactive substances

 

Co-organizers: Tazin Karim, Roland Moore, Gilbert Quintero, Lee Hoffer, and Daniel Lende on behalf of the Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Study Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology

This panel invites papers …

Features

Toward a Neuroanthropology of Immersive Online Gaming and Cyberdependence

Since Spring 2008, I’ve been studying videogaming, conducting participant-observation research in and around the World of Warcraft (WoW), interviewing and surveying the citizens of this online community. I have been particularly fascinated by players’ relationships to their WoWavatars,” the in-game graphical representations of their characters. Via avatars, gamers can temporarily separate or even “dissociate” from …

Features

The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation

Got Absorption? Towards a Neuroanthropology of Play and Ritual

Cross-posted with Neuroanthropology.

On Thursday, Nov. 17th at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, Canada, I attended a double panel of neuroanthropologists hosted by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Organized by Christopher Dana Lynn (University of Alabama) and Jeffrey G. Snodgrass (Colorado State University), the panel was entitled …

FeaturesIn the Journals

Health and medicine 20 years after the Soviet Union

This article is part of the series:

Nearly two decades have now passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Over the next several months we will be running a series of articles which consider a specific issues related to health and medicine in the former Soviet Union.  The articles comprising “20 Years After the Soviet Union” will highlight research by anthropologists and other social …

BooksWeb Roundups

William Garriott on narcopolitics

My colleague William Garriott of James Madison University’s Department of Justice Studies was recently interviewed by the website Left Eye on Books about his recently published monograph Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America (NYU Press: 2011).  In the interview Garriott discusses the concept of narcopolitics, the particular role ethnography has to play in understanding an emergent phenomenon like methamphetamine, …

Books

Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

by Angela Garcia

University of California Press, 2010. 264 pp., US$24.95 (paperback).

 

Angela Garcia’s magisterial, unsettling account of heroin addiction among a Hispanic community in Espanola Valley opens with a description of Nuevo Dias, a rural detoxification facility for drug users.  Accepting the executive director’s challenge to “work” …