In Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the RIo Grande, the author tells us about the unsettling grip that heroin holds specifically within a hispanic community region along the Rio Grande. What I found particularly interesting is the fact that the author is able to articulate her findings and interpretations of the ethnographic study from the perspective of a detoxification attendant at a drug addiction treatment clinic. It is through this worldview that Garcia is able to explore what she defines as the “patient-prisoner” phenomena, and how the logic, hardship, and juridical regimes play into her witnessing of heroin addiction. It is this hardship that numerous patients are forced to endure that Garcia witnesses extract a sense of failure and “collective sense of hopelessness and, in turn, the regional heroin problem itself” (pg 9). Thinking about the geography of the addiction and how regional factors may interlock with local history, politics, and culture allowed for the development of, what I perceived to be, a more holistic view and understanding of heroin prevalence in the Espanola Valley specifically. Garcia is constantly experimenting with the idea of morality and subjectivity, and how interconnected they are with the idea of addiction, contributing to her desire to rethink how drug addiction is currently situated in the framework of our society and how we move to define this demographic of people.
In terms of tying this into my own research, I’m left wondering how Garcia seeks to define this group of people, let alone provide them relief. Who should be providing them relief, to what extent should legislative measures or government involvement be taken? I’m also interested in her ethnographic techniques specifically as it pertained to participation observation in the clinic setting in which she was working— where does one draw the line between what we define as participant observation versus a higher level of direct involvement?