Anthropology

Merrill Singer and J. Bryan Page

Chapter 10 in Research Handbook on Drugs and Society, 2026, pp 111-123 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter traces the history of anthropological research and applied engagement with drug use across time and location and from a marginal place in the discipline to a core arena of anthropological work. Emerging from a prolonged era of proto-anthropological accounts of drug use by travelers, adventurers, missionaries, and colonial administrators, a distinct modern anthropological focus on the use of mood- and mind-altering drugs dates to the 1930s. Despite this early work, it was not until the early 1970s that anthropology developed an explicit drug research tradition, especially with respect to the use and abuse of drugs other than alcohol. Over time, anthropological work in this arena has drawn on emersion-based ethnographic studies as well as the role of power and inequality in shaping drug-use patterns and the societal treatment of drug users. This work has led to the development of several alternative perspectives on the understanding of drug use and drug users.

Keywords: Ethnography; Sociocultural model; Critical medical anthropology; Addiction; Drug use and HIV/AIDS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781802209136
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