This article critically interrogates contemporary forms of addiction medicine that are portrayed by policy-makers as providing a ‘rational’ or politically neutral approach to dealing with drug use and related social problems. In particular, it examines the historical origins of the biological facts that are today understood to provide a foundation for contemporary understandings of addiction as a ‘disease of the brain’. Drawing upon classic and contemporary work on ‘styles of thought’, it documents how, in the period between the mid-1960s and (...) the mid-1970s, such facts emerged in relation to new neurobiological styles of explaining and managing social problems associated with drug abuse, and an alliance between a relatively marginal group of researchers and American policy-makers who were launching the ‘War on Drugs’. Beyond illustrating the political and material conditions necessary for the rise of addiction neuroscience, the article highlights the productivity of neurobiological thought styles, by focusing on the new biological objects, treatments and hopes that have emerged within the field of addiction studies over the last several decades. (shrink)

This article compares health promotion attitudes towards prostate cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Our aim is to demonstrate that these two apparently distinct conditions of the aging body – one affecting the male reproductive system, the other primarily the brain – are addressed in similar fashion in recent public health activities because of a growing emphasis on a ‘cardiovascular logic’. We suggest that this is a form of reductionism, and argue that it leaves us with a dangerous paradox: while re-transcending, at (...) least partially, the conceptual separation of body and brain, it clouds much-needed discussion and research, such as contingent issues of socio-economic and socio-cultural disease disparities. (shrink)

This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and political ideologies by focusing on China’s first residential community drug treatment center, called Sunlight. I argue that the migration of contemporary treatment therapies from one continent to another initiates certain practices that re-appropriate and remake drug-using bodies that live and work at Sunlight. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically also allows for broader theoretical exploration. When bodies do not operate under the common trope of possessive individualism different forms of biopolitical (...) and therapeutic power are at play. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this article begins with a discussion of why migration is a useful rubric for understanding how therapeutics and bodies become global entities and practices through the movement of three things: heroin, humanistic therapy and political ideology. It then presents an ethnographic slice of life at Sunlight to demonstrate how these practices and ideologies play out in the everyday. It finally returns to the question of why these therapies re-appropriate the post-socialist drug user’s body and psyche through a discussion of the term ‘psycho-sociability’. Psycho-sociability can be read as a demand for becoming a good biological citizen, as well as a theoretical rubric for explaining non-Western biopolitics. (shrink)

The focus of this volume, which collects both recent and now-classic essays, is the historical emergence of concepts and objects, through new uses of words and ...

In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breath and verve, The Taming of Chance (...) brings out the relations among philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the "probabilization" of the Western world. (shrink)