Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The author reports on, and reflects upon, the anthropological research that she conducted in the region where she herself grew up: the Española Valley in Northern New Mexico. It is a region that few outsiders have taken the trouble to understand, while insiders (who generally feel beleaguered) are usually not eager to disclose to Anglos like me what their lives are like.
Dr. Garcia displays an all-too-rare insistence on questioning nearly everything. She thinks for herself in a refreshing and provocative way. In the process, she humbly yet methodically undermines conventional wisdom about the nature of addiction and the treatment of addicts.
In the past few years, I've seen enough of northern New Mexico to realize that alongside its grandeur and hospitality is a troubled and despairing aspect. Yet until now I had little idea of the depth, pervasiveness, and complexity of its problems. This book exposes them while providing a wide-ranging context. The author's systemic perspective encompasses geography, history, government social services, and more. As such, the book is appropriately disturbing on many levels. At the same time, it also bears poignant witness to human decency and loyalty and compassion under trying circumstances.
The scholarly stuff (such as literature reviews and methodological reflections), which is important to experts, is confined largely to the first few pages of each chapter. The rest of it reads much like an article in The New Yorker: straight-talking, compelling writing that is accessible also to non-experts.
This book gave me much more of an insider's view of (one slice of) Hispano life in the Española Valley than I imagined I'd ever be privileged to know. It has opened my eyes, and for that I'm grateful.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
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 Hispano 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 material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its heroin problem as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. Lyrically evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call for a new ethics of care.
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