Can a Neighborhood Fall Sick? Opioid Addiction, Collective Violence and Currents of Death in Contemporary India

Abstract

Opioid abuse is an increasingly global phenomenon. Rather than assuming it to be a uniformly global or neoliberal pathology, how might we better understand comparative and locally specific dimensions of opioid addiction? Working with neighborhoods as a unit of analysis, this article analyzes the striking differences between patterns of addiction and violence in two proximate and seemingly similar urban poor neighborhoods in Delhi, India. Rather than global or national etiologies, I suggest that an attention to sharp ecological variation within epidemics challenges social scientists to offer more fine‐grained diagnostics. Using a combination of quantitative and ethnographic methods, I show how heroin addiction and collective violence might be understood as expressions of what Durkheim called “suicido–genetic currents.” I suggest the idea of varying currents as an alternative to the sociology of neighborhood “effects” in understanding significant differences in patterns of self‐harm and injury across demographically similar localities.

Kamzori: Aging, Care, and Alienation in the Post‐pastoral Himalaya

“…Here, I am inspired by an anthropology of care that is concerned with the unstable, contingent networks of capitalism that surround us as they shape intimate life and generate unequal forms of personhood (Bear et al 2015). Taking the domestic, or the neighborhood "ecology of care" as a point of departure (Das 2015;Gammeltoft and Oosterhoff 2018;Singh 2021;Snell-Rood 2015), scholars have been able to scale upward to broader politico-economic forces, and downward to intimate, sensory modes of embodiment. This careful scaling reveals that economic and political adjustments manifest in everyday life in ways that are not straightforward and cannot be captured in social diagnoses like the "breakdown of the family" or "rise of consumer society" (Han 2012: 11).…”

“…While the impulse to understand how structural conditions are experienced in the body is commendable, there is a lack of precision in the attribution of illness to broad structural forces condensed down into individual bodies (see Singh 2021). Such accounts tend to patronizingly assume suffers' own accounts of illness aetiologies are false consciousness, or focus only on the alienation of mind from body, rather than the ways that people are alienated in a wider sense from social relations.…”

The contagion of mental illness: Insights from a Sufi shrine

“…Since July 2015, Singh has been conducting ethnographic work in the urban poor neighborhood of Trilokpuri 14 in east Delhi, where the Department of Psychiatry of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) runs a clinic oriented primarily toward Opioid Substitution Therapy. As part of a larger study on mental illness and opioid abuse among the urban poor (Singh 2021;Singh & Rao 2021), we carried out three phases of socio-demographic and psychiatric instrument-based surveys among men and women in 90 households in Trilokpuri across a period of six months (January-June 2016) to understand household economies, health-seeking behavior, and disease burdens, including but not limited to mental illness.…”

Challenges and Concerns in Assisting Indigenous People with Suicide Attempts

“…), and continue to be unfolded contemporaneously (cf. Singh, 2021). In fact, the very meaning of 'social' departs from the traditional sociological understanding of the world.…”