The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande
Angela Garcia
Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing
PEN Center USA’s University of California Exceptional First Book Award
One of the most widely taught contemporary books in anthropology
The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States.
In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispanic addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled.
We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its experience of the opioid epidemic as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them.
With lyrical prose, evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of immigration and addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call to political activists, politicians, and medical professionals for a new ethics of substance abuse treatment and care.
Published By: University of California Press
Publication Date: June 8, 2010
Pages: 264 pages
ISBN: 978-0520262089
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Praise for The Pastoral Clinic:
“A new and refreshing study. . . . This is a powerful testament, and Garcia presents a vision of where we need to go when it comes to preventing the slow suicide of addictions.” ― The Progressive
"Angela Garcia provides a painful, multilayered ethnographic portrait of the people who inhabit the valley villages, and their struggles with endemic heroin use. Like other recent works that examine the interpénétration of illicit drugs with the lives of particular places, Garcia's book is both an exploration of local culture, geography and history, as well as a deeply personal narrative journey. . . . A perceptive, compelling piece of work." ― Social Forces
“Stunningly written and deeply intelligent. This is anthropology at its best.” ― American Anthropologist
“Speaks volumes about the failure of US drug policy, while at the same time making a powerful case for the dangers posed by drugs.” ― Drugs and Alcohol Today
“A brutal description of drug addiction in the Española Valley and why it exists, and the terrible toll that it takes on those communities.” ― New Mexico Magazine
“A lyrical and haunting ethnography of heroin addiction. . .an authentic and soulfull ethnography that narrates individual stories of life, loss, and addiction.” — American Ethnologist
“A magisterial, unsettling account of heroin addiction among a Hispanic community in Espanola Valley.” —Somatosphere