2007 Handbooks

This unit will examine the production, exchange, and consumption of drugs in non-Western and Western societies with special reference to their cultural meanings and their social functions (including their role in establishing and reproducing relations of inequality and equality, and the politics of their use, prohibition of production and consumption, financing of political and criminal conflict).

Topics will include the international traffic in opium/ heroin and cocaine, in the Golden Triangle of mainland South-East Asia and in South America, the way it intermeshes with regional politics and local tribal, peasant and commercial systems of production and exchange; the social history of drugs in the West (US, UK and Australia); youth culture and drugs in the West; AIDS and intravenous drug use; addiction and treatment; drugs and the law; hallucinogens and shamanism in relation to religious experience and healing; anthropological studies of drinking (including the role of alcohol in Aboriginal communities in Australia).