Nick Bartlett
Bio
Nick Bartlett is Assistant Professor in Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society. He holds a B.A. from Pomona College, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. Before coming to Barnard, he lectured in the anthropology departments at UCLA and the University of Southern California while pursuing training at the New Center of Psychoanalysis.
Growing out of previous public health activities, his first research project offers a phenomenological exploration of long-term heroin users’ recovery from addiction in a mining community in southwest China. A book manuscript under preparation explores entrepreneurialism, state labor as drug treatment, social rituals, and civil society through the experiences of a cohort who imagine individual and collective futures to guide their “return to society.” His second research project will investigate the reception of Freud in China. |
Publications
Recovering Histories: Heroin, labor and life after addiction in Reform era China (book manuscript under preparation)
2020 Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China. Oakland: University of California Press. (See below for further information.)
2018 “The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China.” positions: asia critique, 26.
2016 “Idling in Mao's Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, doi:10.1007/s11013-016-9512-9.
2014 With Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott. “What’s in the ‘treatment gap’? Ethnographic Perspectives on Addiction and Global Mental Health from China, Russia and the United States.” Medical Anthropology, 2014 33(6).
2020 Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China. Oakland: University of California Press. (See below for further information.)
2018 “The Ones Who Struck Out: Entrepreneurialism, Heroin Addiction, and Historical Obsolescence in Reform Era China.” positions: asia critique, 26.
2016 “Idling in Mao's Shadow: Heroin Addiction and the Contested Therapeutic Value of Socialist Traditions of Laboring.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, doi:10.1007/s11013-016-9512-9.
2014 With Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott. “What’s in the ‘treatment gap’? Ethnographic Perspectives on Addiction and Global Mental Health from China, Russia and the United States.” Medical Anthropology, 2014 33(6).
Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China
Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became “easier to buy than vegetables,” coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country’s rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to reimagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Drawing on more than eighteen months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.
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