As Eugene Raikhel (2015) notes, the enlargement of addiction’s rubric to house this greater diversity hinges on the now-pervasive idea that these kinds of activities stimulate our brains in the same way as psychoactive substances do, paving the way for similar forms of self-destructive and compulsive behavioural patterns. In recent times, the category of addiction itself has expanded to include a far greater range of human endeavours than it has historically encompassed. Activities like sex, technology-use, gambling, shopping and eating now sit alongside the more time-honoured activities of drug-taking, drinking and smoking.

Indeed, if anthropology is the study ( logia) of man ( anthrōpos), then addiction is more than a worthy object of investigation. This body of work has been instrumental in depathologising the lived world of addiction, demonstrating in vivid colour the complex sociality, cultural values, status dynamics, forms of intimate belonging, embodied experiences, and sociostructural inequities that lie at its heart.Īs a prism through which to contemplate the contemporary human condition, there are few phenomena that can rival addiction. The core contribution of anthropology in the study of addiction has been the generation of rich ethnographic data on the lived experiences and everyday realities of substance-users. These developments fed into the tradition known as critical medical anthropology, which sought to join experiential accounts of suffering and illness to politico-economic approaches that examined the systemic conditions of inequality. This shift has accelerated the birth of a therapeutic-carceral industry, where substance-users occupy the dual role of patient and criminal. This entry traces the development of anthropological thoughts on addiction, demonstrating how cultural approaches to non-Western alcohol use in the 1950s were adopted and expanded as Western social scientists sought more nuanced sociocultural models for understanding substance-use within their own societies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, addiction has increasingly become an object of both biomedical and criminal intervention.

The study of addiction encompasses anxieties regarding the changing nature of selfhood, control, and agency, as well as moral and political concerns relating to what counts as ‘proper’ versus ‘deviant’ behaviour. Anthropology has played an important role in unpacking the multiple meanings contained within this phenomenon, tracking its expansion and enmeshment across a diverse range of human domains. Whilst all these activities have generated rich fields of inquiry across the social science disciplines, this entry focuses primarily on the changing nature of substance addiction. What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive behavioural patterns, including not just drug-taking and drinking, but gambling, eating, sex, video gaming, and even shopping.

Rat utopia addiction