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The Pastoral Clinic

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The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in th...
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  • 08 June 2010
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The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispanic addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its experience of the opioid epidemic as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. With lyrical prose, evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of immigration and addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call to political activists, politicians, and medical professionals for a new ethics of substance abuse treatment and care.
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Price: $95.00
Pages: 264
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 08 June 2010
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520258297
Format: Hardcover
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"Angela Garcia provides a painful, multilayered ethnographic portrait of the people who inhabit the valley villages, and their struggles with endemic heroin use. Like other recent works that examine the interpénétration of illicit drugs with the lives of particular places, Garcia's book is both an exploration of local culture, geography and history, as well as a deeply personal narrative journey. . . . A perceptive, compelling piece of work."
Angela Garcia is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: American Pastoral

1. Graveyard
2. The Elegiac Addict
3. Blood Relative
4. Suicide as a Form of Life
5. Experiments with Care

Conclusion: A New Season

Notes
Bibliography
Index