In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn How to Love Dependency in a Damaged World

In this scrupulous study, anthropologist Roberts (God’s Laboratory) mines her fieldwork in Mexico City to upend judgmental Western notions of addiction. Drawing from a local philosophy that sees compulsion in the context of its circumstances, she distinguishes between addictions, which happen in community and can be connective, and vices that draw people apart. (The same substance, like alcohol, can be an addiction when used at parties, or a vice when someone isolates themselves while drinking.) Tracing the history of the term addiction, she explains how its 16th-century meaning as “devotion, loyalty, attachment... especially pertaining to the worship of God” was slowly pathologized in the West as post–Protestant Reformation individualism took hold. The focus on personal morality and self-control, she writes, transformed addiction “from being viewed as a regular part of the human condition to a disease” and thus a source of shame, while discounting its structural roots, including economic inequality. As an alternative, she suggests embracing a definition of addiction that centers “devoted and connected pleasure,” reduces shame, and embraces community. While she sometimes leans into extremes (“What if abject junkies could revere heroin for all to see, instead of isolating themselves, ashamed in vice?”), Roberts does a masterful job of excavating the social and cultural roots and ramifications of addiction, exploring along the way AA’s questionable methods (some argue that it replaces one kind of addiction with another), her own disordered eating history, and more. It’s a worthy take on a challenging topic. (Feb.)