The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande [Paperback]

The Pastoral Clinictakes 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 Clinicis 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.

Angela Garciais Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: American Pastoral

1. Graveyard
2. The Elegiac Addict
3. Blood Relative
4. Suicide as a Form of Life
5. Experiments with Care

Conclusion: A New Season

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Timely, disturbing, and luminously written,The Pastoral Clinicis anthropology at its best, bringing into view a devastating piece of reality, highlighting larger processes and human singularities, and calling for a new public and ethics of care. Jo?o Biehl, author ofVita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

Garcia calls for a new ethics of care for heroin addicts, exposing the insufficiency lc�