• Recovering Histories
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Recovering Histories

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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,” coinci...
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  • 20 October 2020
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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. 
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Price: $29.95
Pages: 222
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 20 October 2020
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520344136
Format: Paperback
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"A meditative and poignant ethnography. . . . Recovering Histories offers moving, complex, and layered portraits of people in recovery. Through former heroin users’ struggle to reinhabit the everyday, we see how the everyday is not necessarily a respite, but rather, is shot through with new uncertainties and challenges."

— Somatosphere

"This book shows the human toll of radically transforming a society in the matter of a decade and the people the government chooses to leave behind. Recovering Histories is an essential read not just because it puts a human face on China’s reform and opening policy but, in its radical empathy, puts a human face on people with a history of drug use globally."

— China Law and Policy

"Recovering Histories is an engaging read; Bartlett is a good storyteller, and his ethnography offers a novel way of looking at recovery. . . .Readers interested in addiction studies, questions of memory and nostalgia, and social change in China will no doubt find this book insightful."
— Exertions

"This ethnography is a welcome contribution to the anthropology of China, and to our understanding of harm reduction and its limits."


— The China Quarterly

"Recovering Histories displays Bartlett’s great talent for weaving together theoretical analysis of temporality and ethnographic evidence to unpack individual and collective experiences of time. The empathy for the major figures aroused by the small gestures and actions elegantly described in the book—fishing for keys left behind in a locked office, reactivating the long-dormant bodily skills of playing table tennis, and having a little chat in a hot spring—lingers for days after putting the book back on the shelf. . . . A theoretically engaged, sophisticated yet accessible work."


— Ethos: Journal of Psychological Anthropology

"Even though its analysis is focused on a particular group of the workforce in one city, Bartlett’s attentive narration makes the reforms’ sweeping and profound impact on labor palpable."


— Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of Americans

"Recovering Histories transcends the usual theoretical and disciplinary categorization. . .[the book]  provides an excellent window for students of history and ethnography on how to do research and write about the contemporary PRC."


— PRC History Review Book Series
Nicholas Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society at Barnard College, Columbia University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Phenomenology of Recovery 
1. Mayhem on the Mountains: The Rush of Heroin's Arrival
2. Recovery as Adaptation: Catching Up to the Private Sector
3. Absence of a Future: Narrative, Obsolescence, and Community
4. Idling in Mao's Shadow: The Therapeutic Value of Socialist Labor
5. A Wedding and Its Afterlife: Relationships, Recovery 
6. "From the Community": Civil Society Ambitions and the Limits of Phenomenology
Epilogue 

Appendix: Events Impacting the Heroin Generation
Notes
References
Index