ANTH106 Lecture 4: ANTH106 - Lecture 4

• School: Macquarie University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH106
• Professor: All

Document Summary

This lecture outlines theories of drug use in context, with emphasis on the way rituals and social sanctions operate in drug sub-cultures and the contribution of ethnography to understanding these processes. There will be some discussion of the symbolic analysis of drugs in relation to drug problems". Drug symbolism in popular culture sex, death and consumptive beauty. D. manderson metamorphoses: clashing symbols in the social construction of drugs" (journal of. Analysis of drug symbols: when our friends and family behave irrationally, indulging in fears and behaviours that even they agree are dysfunctional, eventually we stop reasoning with them and send them to an analyst instead. It is their irrational impulses that need to be understood if they are to change. After 50 years of prohibition, we know that banning heroin has not worked. It is time to psychoanalyse our drug policies, searching for the irrational fears and anxieties that lie at its heart.