[Linganth] Nick Bartlett on Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Nick Bartlett answers Yun Chen's questions about
addiction in China:

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan
known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a
short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical
changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining
industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the
mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term
heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment
of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles
either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the
disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers.
Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts
to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on
more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how
individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of
inhabiting China’s contested present.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20230410/e031b0c2/attachment.htm>