Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.
In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.
Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgement associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.
Elizabeth F. S. Roberts is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes. Since 2013, she has participated in collaborative environmental health research in Mexico City.
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“A powerful, honest, and thought-provoking reimagining of addiction and its cultural and historical complexities that only an anthropologist could produce. With great care and sensitivity, Roberts gives us the best of ethnography and memoir while making the strong case that the two are always inextricably linked.”—Jason De León, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
“Bold, witty, and incisive, In Praise of Addiction is a much-needed antidote to the usual framing of addiction as disease. Roberts’s genre-bending book defies disciplinary boundaries and opens new ways of thinking and being. A must-read for anthropologists, addiction specialists, and anyone else who has ever been judged for their dependencies.”—Angela Garcia, author of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos
“In Praise of Addiction challenges our country’s hatred of dependency, which Roberts rightly connects to the cult of individualism. She explains why addicts have been unfairly demonized for generations and offers a fresher, less punishing framework for thinking about the pleasures and people we lean on most. The book succeeds as both the work of a scholar and a personal account, an invigorating and honest examination.”—Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
“A compelling argument and a significant original contribution. Roberts takes aim at the culture and assumptions underlying moralizing approaches to addiction and health.”—Eugene Raikhel, author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic
“Roberts offers an engaging ethnography of addiction and vice in Mexico City, demonstrating how addiction can serve as both an act of devotion and a rebuke against middle- and upper-class judgments about pleasure, connection, debt, and value.”—Kelly Ray Knight, author of addicted.pregnant.poor
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