In recent years, anthropologists have built a rich body of ethnography on the experience of addic... more In recent years, anthropologists have built a rich body of ethnography on the experience of addiction, including important cultural critiques of treatment systems. Yet little has been written from the perspective of those who work in the everyday to help others recover from substance abuse. In this article, I reflect on my labor as a clinical social worker providing therapy for homeless women and men who struggle with addiction. Building on the eloquence of those who seek to recover, recovery poets, I demonstrate how the work of a team of frontline workers operates in a particular intersubjective realm that creates different conditions for understanding addiction and recovery than does anthropological fieldwork. By detailing the labor of recovery as I performed it using different evidence-based therapies to permit the emergence of a new consciousness, I aim to bring to center stage the complex labor of frontline workers so that their working conditions will be taken into account more often in anthropological work on addiction and treatment.
The history of brutal state repression of farmers fighting for social justice during the 1970s in... more The history of brutal state repression of farmers fighting for social justice during the 1970s in the countryside of Misiones, Argentina, still presents daunting challenges to political organizing in the area. Nevertheless, struggles for the rights of small farmers, landless workers, women, and indigenous people continue today throughout the province, even as activists battle the division and distrust that riddles the social landscape. This paper focuses on the intricacies of conducting politically engaged ethnography in such a climate. In revisiting a particular ethnographic encounter, I argue that cultivating and preserving a politics of trust at the interpersonal level is an essential precondition to practicing politically engaged ethnography, particularly in work with those who live deepest in the countryside, off the political grid.
In recent years, anthropologists have built a rich body of ethnography on the experience of addic... more In recent years, anthropologists have built a rich body of ethnography on the experience of addiction, including important cultural critiques of treatment systems. Yet little has been written from the perspective of those who work in the everyday to help others recover from substance abuse. In this article, I reflect on my labor as a clinical social worker providing therapy for homeless women and men who struggle with addiction. Building on the eloquence of those who seek to recover, recovery poets, I demonstrate how the work of a team of frontline workers operates in a particular intersubjective realm that creates different conditions for understanding addiction and recovery than does anthropological fieldwork. By detailing the labor of recovery as I performed it using different evidence-based therapies to permit the emergence of a new consciousness, I aim to bring to center stage the complex labor of frontline workers so that their working conditions will be taken into account more often in anthropological work on addiction and treatment.
The history of brutal state repression of farmers fighting for social justice during the 1970s in... more The history of brutal state repression of farmers fighting for social justice during the 1970s in the countryside of Misiones, Argentina, still presents daunting challenges to political organizing in the area. Nevertheless, struggles for the rights of small farmers, landless workers, women, and indigenous people continue today throughout the province, even as activists battle the division and distrust that riddles the social landscape. This paper focuses on the intricacies of conducting politically engaged ethnography in such a climate. In revisiting a particular ethnographic encounter, I argue that cultivating and preserving a politics of trust at the interpersonal level is an essential precondition to practicing politically engaged ethnography, particularly in work with those who live deepest in the countryside, off the political grid.
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Papers by Jennifer S . Bowles