Righteous Dopefiend
DRUGS & SOCIETY – SUMMER 2013
~Habitus~
• Links a person’s position in social space with their practices
• Dispositions, shaped by early experience, that “generate &
organize” practices throughout life, which become like enduring
“habits” within the person
• Habitus is deeply embedded within the person
• Embodied – physically enacted!
• Flexible and durable– guides patterned action, but also improvisation
• The way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting
dispositions (tendencies toward action, thought, feeling)
• Examples: Career expectations, who to marry, how to raise kids,
whether or not to talk about politics at dinner…
~Habitus: Interplay between
structure and practice
Social positions in a field
Habitus– deeply rooted, but flexible
guidelines that “orient” the person
toward a particular way of seeing
and being in the world.
HABITUS
Practices: actions, behaviors,
choices, etc. that signal your
social position
The habitus mediates between positions and practices.
Righteous Dopefiend – Theories
Go through the introductory chapter, and work in
groups of 2 to find definitions for the following:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
“Moral economy” among Edgewater homeless
“lumpen,” “abuse,” and “theory of lumpen abuse”
Symbolic violence
“Subjectivity”
“lumpen subjectivity of righteous dopefiend”
“Gray Zone”
Righteous Dopefiend
Ch 1: Define “intimate apartheid.” Describe the ethnic
hierarchies on the street scene. Give an example of how US
racial divisions were “embodied” through the habitus of the
Edgewater homeless. (Also Ch 3- “racialized habitus”)
Ch 2: Describe Tina’s life. How can we understand her
involvement in sex work in the context of her past, and in
larger gendered power relations in the US?
Ch 3/9: Describe the public health system these addicts
encountered. How do the authors critique this system?
Ch 3/5: Define/describe the “moral economy of sharing.” Give
3 specific examples of income-generating strategies among
the Edgewater homeless.
Recap: Sociology of Addiction
• “Choice” is bounded within culture and biology. “Free willed
individual” = cultural myth.
• Social categories shape our experience.
• Habitus: Addiction is the physical embodiment of social inequality,
violence, histories of systemic abuse, and widespread suffering.
(Righteous Dopefiend)
• Normalization, socialization – Long-term suffering becomes
“routine.”
• Alexander: Addictive suffering is the product of large-scale economic
and social transformations.