Beyond the Point: Dislocation, Marginality, and Survival Among City-Dwelling and Long-Term Drug Users
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2011
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Haverford College. Department of Anthropology
CPGC: 2010 Summer Intern, Serv Learning
CPGC: 2010 Summer Intern, Serv Learning
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
This paper is a cross-cultural and socio-historical comment on the experience of long-term drug addiction, and the ways in which social agents and social forces shape that experience. It is based on a 6+ month ethnography based in two harm reduction community centers located in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Primarily, it is a discussion of the concept of psychosocial and physical dislocation, as manifested within the context of drug use and addiction in an urban, "ghetto" space. It is also a reflection on dislocation as it relates to municipal efforts addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic within the drug user community. I additionally deconstruct the individual and more universal ways that abandonment and acknowledgment of drug addiction acts within the larger scope of dislocation to enforce the notions of symbolic and structural violence within physical and ideological zones of abandonment. Finally, I ask whether or not there is a physical space or a place in contemporary society for long-term drug addicts, and how other global phenomena can inform this problem.