Recovering Histories. Nicholas Bartlett
By the early 2010s, its use was limited to approximately twenty-five hundred predominantly middle-aged local residents.6 A heavy toll of overdoses and infectious diseases, as well as intense stigmatization of the drug by nonusers, had contributed to the rapid reduction of what was once a sizable heroin-using community.
I was also mistaken in thinking that most heroin users I encountered would be heavy users. Though “sneaking a puff” (touxi, the intermittent heroin use sometimes referred to in English as “chipping”) was not uncommon, few of the individuals I came to know well were engaging in the “ripping and running” often associated with acute physiological addiction (cf. Agar 1973). By the time I arrived in Gejiu, the availability of methadone substitution therapy and intense police crackdowns on organized crime and drug dealing had noticeably constricted supply and demand in the local heroin market. In addition, supporting heavy habits had become more difficult for aging users, who were increasingly excluded from licit and illicit forms of economic activity. Cumulatively, this shifting scene led drug users and non–drug users alike to remark that I was “late” to arrive; if I was interested in experiences of an epidemic, I should have been in Gejiu to witness the widespread use that started in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s.
Unlike many studies that have focused on encounters taking place in a clinic, service agency, or residential center (Carr 2010; Waldram 2012; Hansen 2018), my fieldwork in Gejiu was conducted largely outside of spaces dedicated to drug treatment. As I lacked an official hosting institution, Green Orchards, an internationally funded, government-affiliated drop-in center for heroin users, became an important fieldwork site. During frequent visits to the patio where “members” (huiyuan) congregated, I met a rotating group of people with heroin use history—some actively using and others abstaining—who stopped by to while away the afternoon hours. In addition, former IHRD grantees from the regional network introduced me to their friends. Meals and tea in private homes and at outdoor restaurants, wedding celebrations, family and job-related events, and weekend hot springs retreats provided occasions for me to form longer-term, more intimate relationships with a smaller group of recovering users. Through these interactions, my initial interest in the intersection of drug use practices and state policing came to be replaced by a desire to better understand lived experiences of recovery.
The people with heroin use history I came to know in Gejiu fundamentally challenged my own preconceptions about addiction and recovery. Rather than seeing themselves as individual patients suffering from a relapsing brain disease, this group often spoke about their struggles as a generation of workers who had become lost while attempting to “get ahead” of other local residents as teenagers and young adults. Forging a life after heroin required searching for opportunities to live and labor in a world that bore little resemblance to either the Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos associated with the mining boom of their early careers. Personal experiences of recovery were thus intimately shaped by their understanding of the collective horizons of their heroin-using cohort, the city, and the nation.
Recovering Histories describes distinct ways that individual members of this generational cohort conceptualized and moved toward life after addiction. In contrast to the government’s attempts to define distinct phases of recovery defined by bodily recovery, long-time heroin users in Gejiu frequently disagreed about what bodily habits, friendships, and career ambitions they should preserve from their pasts and what vision of a future life they should pursue. If the addicts in Burroughs’s fictional accounts existed outside of historical time, the recovering drug users who appear in these pages were intensely concerned with both the lived temporality of their own lives and the shifting collective time associated with China’s reform and opening. Close attention to their experiences reveal a complex temporal politics of healing and conveys powerful, rarely considered perspectives on China’s historical trajectory.
APPROACHING HISTORICITY
Conversations about historicity in anthropology, philosophy, and related disciplines provide conceptual scaffolding and methodological inspiration for this investigation. Phenomenologist David Carr argues that scholars interested in historicity “want to know how history is encountered, how it enters our lives, and in what forms of consciousness and experience it does so” (2014, 47). Carr’s formulation immediately raises important questions: What is the relationship between lived individual and collective experiences of time? To what degree are ways of encountering, living, and becoming conscious of history distinct processes? How might centering these philosophical questions inform a study of recovery from heroin addiction?
This account starts with a phenomenological interest in the lived time of individuals. While early phenomenological work aimed at developing a technical vocabulary to describe the unifying structure of temporal experience (Husserl [1928] 1964), more recent phenomenological attention to temporality by anthropologists has shown how individuals’ lived relationships to past and future horizons are shaped by concrete experiences in the world (Desjarlais and Throop 2011).7 Historicity grapples with the overlapping lived relationship between an individual’s immediate past and future (the flux or flow of qualitative time); more habituated ways of engaging the world (temporal orientations or shifting horizons of approaching the past or future); and the reflexive, shared narratives, discourses, and events that connect individuals to broader groups (Stewart 2016, 86). Historical time understood as the connection between the lived time of individuals and groups has been approached as social experience; a type of narrative; a form of consciousness; and shared knowledge, intuitions, and feelings. I briefly introduce three distinct approaches to historicity.
Certain cultural Marxist scholars emphasize the importance of historical consciousness as a critical means of gaining a perspective on the present. One author defines historicity as “a perception of the present as history; that is, a relationship to the present which somehow de-familiarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective” (Jameson 1990, 284). Whether struggling in a “thick present” of the post-9/11 global order (Harootunian 2007) or living “pure and unrelated presents in time” in late capitalism (Jameson 1990, 27), historical actors often struggle to understand how the collective past shapes the present. Particular individuals—often academics and cultural producers, but also workers (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992)—through attention to historical process come to effectively diagnose, grasp, and critique events in an otherwise opaque historical present.8
If the writers in this first group see historicity as enabling a critical perspective on the complex reality of the present, postcolonial scholars and some anthropologists have emphasized the potential dangers of drawing on European ways of accounting for social time. This historicity scholarship discusses the cultural assumptions and political implications associated with historicism, the tradition undergirding modern understandings of history. Originating in the writings of eighteenth-century scholars in Europe and disseminated through commerce and conquest, the principles associated with historicism—including assumptions about chronology, historical linearity, and ideals of progress—spread around the world, partially displacing other modes of understanding the past and the present and shaping commonsense ways that individuals and groups experienced the movement of time (Anderson 1983; Koselleck 2004; Iggers 1995; Bambach 1995; Hodges 2019).
Assumptions associated with historicism inflect academic writing, national media campaigns, and individual narratives in potentially destructive ways (Fabian 1983; Young 1990; Chakrabarty 2000). In exposing the relationship of “Westernization,” modernization, and development, anthropologists have shown how tenets of historicism justified the spatialization of global hierarchies and advanced European and American colonial and imperial ambitions (Ferguson 2006; Pursley 2019). For example, at the height of the Cold War, Zambian urban residents were encouraged to embrace “expectations of modernity” and focus on the “not-yet” of a future horizon of imminent economic and social prosperity (Ferguson 1999). Dreams associated with narratives of Zambia’s future position in a global order worked to silence workers’ dissatisfactions in the present. In the new millennium, historicism continues to exert powerful effects on how people in many parts of the world experience and narrate their own positions within a shifting global order.
A final cluster of historicity scholarship has focused on “forms