The Purposeful Pain of Drug Addiction: A Biocultural Approach

Abstract

In the United States, there are two familiar ways to explain addiction: a moral failing or a brain disease. Anthropologists have often recreated these familiar explanations. On the cultural side, instead of a moral problem, it is a social problem, with addiction caused by inequality. On the biological side, the brain is vulnerable to the “false fitness signals” that pleasurable drugs provide. Both approaches fail by being too familiar. Addiction is deeply strange. People who abuse alcohol and drugs say they want to stop; their lives are often filled with pain. Yet they continue to use in spite of what they say and feel. This chapter examines how addicts get caught in a pattern that causes misery, rather than the relief or pleasure that many initially find in drugs. But it does not offer a simple answer to the question, Why do they do that to themselves? Anthropologists, like society at large, have often rendered what is unfamiliar, even exotic, about addiction into familiar and facile terms. This chapter takes an alternate tack, examining how bioarchaeology has addressed substance use and abuse, covering prominent evolutionary and social science approaches to addiction, and finally describing how neuroanthropology, which brings together neuroscience and anthropology, aims to explain addiction. Ethnography and brain research can facilitate a biocultural approach that combines science and humanism, and offer ways to better grasp addiction as a purposeful habit, a way of coping that becomes ritualized in ways that creates consequences beyond any individual’s control.