ANTH 203: The Anthropology of Drugs - Midterm Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering core anthropological and policy concepts for ANTH 203: The Anthropology of Drugs (Weeks 1 to 5).

Drug

Any chemical compound that changes the body’s functional condition, especially mental and emotional states; legality is not part of the definition (Page and Singer).

Ethnography

The study of the cultural contexts of behaviour through immersion, participant observation, and open-ended interviewing (Page and Singer).

Emic perspective

The insider’s point of view; central to ethnography, though analysis is not limited to it (Page and Singer).

Hidden populations

Groups living outside mainstream boundaries and poorly connected to services, which surveys tend to miss (Page and Singer).

Cultural relativism

A method that strategically suspends moral judgment in order to understand practices; it is not approval of drug use (Page and Singer; Bourgois and Schonberg).

Drug scare

A period when claims makers define a drug as a new social problem, out of proportion to its actual harm, usually linking it to a scapegoated group (Boyd and Carter).

Claims makers

Moral reformers, police, politicians, and media who produce authoritative-seeming knowledge about a social problem (e.g., Emily Murphy, Harry Anslinger) (Boyd and Carter).

Racialization

Attaching a drug to a racialized group and presenting both as a threat, such as opium and Chinese men, or marijuana and Black and Mexican men (Boyd and Carter; Grayson).

Nation building

The project of defining the nation (here, a “strong white Canada”) through which drug laws drew racial boundaries (Boyd and Carter).

Social gospel

A Protestant reform movement that made society, not just the individual, “the object of salvation” and justified state moral regulation (Grayson).

Biopolitics / governmentality

Foucault’s terms for government that manages the health, morality, and conduct of a population (Grayson; Bourgois and Schonberg).

Securitization

Framing something as a threat to a valued object (here, Canadian national identity) to justify exceptional state action (Grayson).

Structural violence

Harm built into the political and economic organization of society that falls on vulnerable groups (Farmer; Bourgois and Schonberg; Brown et al.).

Symbolic violence

The mechanisms that lead subordinated people to “misrecognize” inequality as the natural order of things and blame themselves for their position in social hierarchies (Bourdieu; Bourgois and Schonberg).

Everyday violence

Part of a continuum of violence that normalizes daily brutality and interpersonal conflict within marginalized settings (Bourgois and Schonberg).

Moral economy

Norms of sharing, reciprocity, and obligation that organize exchange among drug users; gifts go “hand in hand with rip-offs” (Bourgois and Schonberg).

Lumpen abuse

Bourgois and Schonberg’s concept linking intimate suffering, interpersonal violence, and self-destruction to large-scale forces such as deindustrialization and the War on Drugs.

Gray zone

Primo Levi’s concept used to describe how structural pressure and the demands of survival blur the boundaries between victim and perpetrator among marginalized drug users (Bourgois and Schonberg).

Peer researcher

A community member with lived experience on a research team, who should be an equal partner and paid fairly in cash (Research 101 Manifesto).

Reciprocity

The obligation that researchers’ benefits (such as degrees, grants, and publications) be matched by tangible benefits flowing back to the community (Research 101 Manifesto).

Harm reduction

An approach focused on keeping people alive and as healthy as possible until treatment or abstinence works; the fourth pillar of Vancouver’s drug strategy (Lupick).

Four Pillars

Vancouver’s 2001 drug strategy framework consisting of prevention, treatment, enforcement, and harm reduction (Lupick).

Heroin-assisted treatment

Prescribing pharmaceutical heroin (diacetylmorphine) to long-term users, as tested in the NAOMI and SALOME clinical trials (Lupick).

Managed alcohol program (MAP)

A harm reduction program that provides beverage alcohol on a structured schedule to reduce the harms of heavy or non-beverage drinking (Brown et al.).

Illicit alcohol

Alcohol not meant for human consumption (such as rubbing alcohol, mouthwash, and hand sanitizer), illegally produced alcohol, or store-bought alcohol consumed in an illegal way, such as public drinking (Brown et al.).

Racial caste

“A stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom,” which Michelle Alexander argues describes mass incarceration in the United States.

Mass incarceration

The web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control people labeled criminals both in and out of prison (Alexander).

Prison label

The felony record that imposes permanent, legal discrimination in voting, employment, housing, public benefits, and jury service, regardless of time served (Alexander).

Pretext stop / consent search

A traffic stop used as an excuse to hunt for drugs (Whren v. United States); followed by a search justified by consent that “hardly anyone dares” to refuse (Florida v. Bostick) (Alexander).

Civil asset forfeiture

The seizure of property allegedly involved in a crime, often without a criminal charge; under federal law, law enforcement agencies could keep up to 80 percent of seized proceeds (Alexander).

Privilege

Social and economic resources (family support, school standing, middle-class networks, whiteness) that shape how people deal drugs and protect them from severe legal consequences (Crawford).