Garcia’s ethnography on pastoral clinics and rural heroin addiction in New Mexico humanizes heroin addiction. She emphasizes the societal, familial, and systemic issues that contribute to pastoral clinics’ purported failure by measures self-discharge and relapse. Garcia’s quote in Chapter 5 where she talks about how the biggest problem with clinic life is life outside of it sums up her emphasis on societal factors. Heroin addiction is not an individual failing, as shown by her relationship with her subjects who have relapsed into heroin addiction. Rather, heroin addiction can be due to a multitude of factors outside of one’s control such as familial involvement in heroin trafficking and lack of long-term treatment programs that accommodate childcare needs.
Her methods bring up the question of research ethics. Garcia became part of the clinic because she was hired as a detoxification attendant. She took the job primarily because she wanted to get closer to her subjects and get them to trust her. My question is, did she disclose her motivations for taking the job to her subjects? If so, did she disclose her motivation before or after developing relationships with them? Working in the clinic obviously gave her insider status so that the clinics’ patients would be more likely to confide in her. However, I’m interested to hear others’ perspectives on the ethics of taking a job to get closer with one’s ethnographic subjects.
Granted, Garcia does not center her work as a detoxification attendant. Rather, she centers the experiences the patients who cycled in and out of the clinic. If she hadn’t disclosed that she worked at the clinic, I would not have guessed that she did. However, knowing that she worked at the clinic, it makes sense why she faced little barriers to accessing the clinics’ patients and gaining their trust. I also wonder what information she might be omitting in her ethnography to protect the clinic and its patients because of her insider status.
Hi Angela! I think you make a great point about the societal factors that perpetuate heroine addiction in this rural part of New Mexico. And I agree that Garcia definitely humanizes heroine addiction. She not only humanizes it, but also clarifies several misconceptions about it. Garcia challenges the idea of the stereotypical heroine addict: someone who uses drugs to cope with isolation, and someone who is further isolated from their family because of drug use. She makes it very clear throughout her ethnography that the family is often the site at which heroin addiction is reproduced and passed down through generations. In some of the previous chapters, you can see how heroin use is actually the thing that connects some family members together (I previously read this book for another class!). Overall, I do agree that addicts’ lives tend to be governed by the greater institutions in their lives along with the failures of these institutions. And it is interesting to see how new systems of care are born from the failure of these greater institutions and through collective loss.
I agree that research ethics are a huge factor to consider with this ethnography. Personally, I think working at the clinic was the right thing to do. I think that getting so involved in the course of the clinic gives her research purpose. It shifts the story from simple observation to advocacy for people that suffer with addiction. But at the same time, there are parts throughout the book where I seriously question her ethics. At one point, she looks into patient files to piece together a narrative and that REALLY didn’t sit right with me. Also about the information she is omitting… I have the same question. Some of these subjects end up having such insane life stories and tragedies, that I feel like if you’re from the region it would be really easy to put the stories together and identify the patients. Choosing what to omit is something I am actually also struggling with in terms of my own ethnography. My subjects are international engineering students. For one in particular, he is literally the only male student at Vanderbilt from his country, so I feel like I can’t even mention where he is from. But at the same time, where he’s from adds so much depth to his story and is so critical for my analysis.
I also found the ethics of Garcia’s work to be incredibly interesting. In particular, how she discusses her subjects and those who aren’t her subjects in Chapter 5. Living where she lives, she is intimately involved with the individuals whom she is studying, they’re her neighbors, they’re relatives of her neighbors, and they’re people she works with, as you point out. However, at the beginning of Chapter 5, she talks about how she does not consider the drug dealers she lives around to be her subjects because she decided that it was too “dangerous” (p. 184). I would consider her work to be dangerous in more situations than just working with dealers; in her job, she experiences people breaking the terms of their probation to obtain more heroin because of their addiction. I found it interesting that she set her boundary with dealers, and it made me curious as to how she decided to set that boundary?
Additionally, with her subjects being heroin addicts, Garcia walks this fine line of being worried about her subjects and their behavior while also studying them. I found this to be an extremely important aspect of her methods because her concern is mixed with her ethnographic interest in the topic. That also leads to the question: is that mixture ethical? I don’t know.