The pastoral clinic

Drawing from the social sciences, the humanities and the field of medicine, The Pastoral Clinic examines heroin addiction and the linkages between history, loss and subjectivity in northern New Mexico's rural Española Valley. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, it chronicles the lives of several heroin addicts, situating them within a constellation of intimate and institutional dependencies, including the family, medicine and the state. The Pastoral Clinic approaches addiction as an analytic in which culture, politics and history coexist as a site of struggle, and come to bear on forms of heroin use. It demonstrates how therapeutic and penal interventions ultimately "lock" subjects into an addictive and melancholic state, through which new "forms of life" emerge, including the local phenomenon of intergenerational heroin use and suicide via heroin overdose. It explores the rationality and sentiments of these "forms of life," particularly as they occur among women. At its core, The Pastoral Clinic argues that heroin addiction exposes shared human vulnerability and draws upon the concept of commensurability to formulate a new ethics of care.