Sandra Hyde | McGill University (original) (raw)
Papers by Sandra Hyde
Anthropology and humanism, Jul 9, 2023
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Jun 1, 2013
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences
Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining ... more Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegal substance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining ... more Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegal substance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.
Body & Society, 2011
This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and po... more This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and political ideologies by focusing on China’s first residential community drug treatment center, called Sunlight. I argue that the migration of contemporary treatment therapies from one continent to another initiates certain practices that re-appropriate and remake drug-using bodies that live and work at Sunlight. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically also allows for broader theoretical exploration. When bodies do not operate under the common trope of possessive individualism different forms of biopolitical and therapeutic power are at play. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this article begins with a discussion of why migration is a useful rubric for understanding how therapeutics and bodies become global entities and practices through the movement of three things: heroin, humanistic therapy and political ideology. It then presents an ethnographic slice of life at Sunlight to d...
Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health, 2010
This article focuses on one residential therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin and opi... more This article focuses on one residential therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin and opiate addiction in contemporary China. It discusses 2 case vignettes and shows that although addictions are extremely difficult to treat, there are small successes being reached in China’s southwest. Residential treatment communities follow mobile global practices that link Western models of 12-step Narcotics Anonymous, self-healing, to other Chinese practices like Maoist “speak bitterness.” In China it is in the drug aid theaters where Sunlight-International traveled to do three things: (a) stave off the American drug market, (b ) reduce drug trafficking across national borders, and (c) address the psychosocial problems associated with global drug trafficking and consumption. Through the process of unraveling the on-the-ground practices of public health international humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and some of their therapeutic models, we begin to see new alliances formed acros...
Medical anthropology, Jan 25, 2016
In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order t... more In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order to understand its quotidian therapies, its fraught nature binding China's past with its future, and the to care for the self under postsocialism. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically allows for broader theoretical exploration into how China's economic transition created tensions between capitalism, socialism, and communism; between individual and community, care and coercion, and discipline and freedom. Sunlight blended democratic, communal, and communist values that in several ways transition drug addicts into a market-socialist society. In focusing on the socialist transition to capitalism much work concentrates on the neoliberal transition as the only path out of communism rather than exploring its exceptions. In exploring China as an exception, I ask: What do the residents, peer-educators and administrators reveal in their stories and reactions to community-based therapeutics o...
Eating Spring Rice
Interviews in this book were conducted in Mandarin Chinese or English. Although I am not a lingui... more Interviews in this book were conducted in Mandarin Chinese or English. Although I am not a linguist, I want to emphasize that in writing about the Tai people in China, one is faced with several choices in terms of transliteration. Just as there is neocolonial slippage between "Sipsongpanna," the current word used by the Tais of that place, and the Mandarin transliteration of Xishuangbanna (or in the local vernacular, just "Banna"), there are also two different linguistic terms for the same ethnic population, "Tai-Lüe" and "Dai-le." In referring to the Tai, I use "Dai" only when it is used in official Mandarin place names, and "Tai" or "Tai-Lüe" in all other cases. I rely on pseudonyms for the majority of informants, and in cases requiring confidentiality, I have disguised identities and added characteristics that would make it difficult to identify persons. To further protect informants' identities, I have given them only one name instead of the usual two metonyms used to denote respect in China. In addition, some of the descriptions of persons are composites. I found these measures were crucial given the sensitivity of HIV/AIDS as a topic of inquiry and the legal issues involved in working with people who are ostensibly outside the law and thus potentially subject to prosecution. In the few cases where proper names are common knowledge and thus already published in newspapers, medical journals, government reports, or conference proceedings, I use people's given names. All references to the Chinese yuan refer to the exchange rate of 1 U.S. dollar = 8.3 yuan (the average rate from 1997 to 2002).
Anthropology and humanism, Jul 9, 2023
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Jun 1, 2013
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences
Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining ... more Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegal substance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining ... more Harm is a concept that permeates behavioral and public health discourses on addiction. Examining addiction recovery services in settings beyond the OECD led me to the question: What does harm mean in an un-urban, un-Western, and un-democratic space? While some emphasize the human rights potential of reducing harm, others speak to the violence of cure. My ethnographic research in a Therapeutic Community (TC) for drug treatment in Southwest China pushed me to consider how the potential for reducing the harms of illegal substance use balance with the complex psychological demands of cure. The alliance linking Sunlight Therapeutic Community with the provincial drug abuse institute and a foreign NGO was fragile. At the TC, they had difficulty weaving the Western psychological construct of the singular self through the Chinese scaffolding of institutional and cultural practices around the group. In thinking with the concepts of harm and reducing harm, I move across time and space to consider how current tensions link to and reflect: 1) the historical harms of opium imperialism; 2) reducing harm in translation; and, 3) reducing harm in the recent psycho-boom.
Body & Society, 2011
This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and po... more This article explores the translation and migration of illegal drugs, humanistic therapies and political ideologies by focusing on China’s first residential community drug treatment center, called Sunlight. I argue that the migration of contemporary treatment therapies from one continent to another initiates certain practices that re-appropriate and remake drug-using bodies that live and work at Sunlight. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically also allows for broader theoretical exploration. When bodies do not operate under the common trope of possessive individualism different forms of biopolitical and therapeutic power are at play. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this article begins with a discussion of why migration is a useful rubric for understanding how therapeutics and bodies become global entities and practices through the movement of three things: heroin, humanistic therapy and political ideology. It then presents an ethnographic slice of life at Sunlight to d...
Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health, 2010
This article focuses on one residential therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin and opi... more This article focuses on one residential therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin and opiate addiction in contemporary China. It discusses 2 case vignettes and shows that although addictions are extremely difficult to treat, there are small successes being reached in China’s southwest. Residential treatment communities follow mobile global practices that link Western models of 12-step Narcotics Anonymous, self-healing, to other Chinese practices like Maoist “speak bitterness.” In China it is in the drug aid theaters where Sunlight-International traveled to do three things: (a) stave off the American drug market, (b ) reduce drug trafficking across national borders, and (c) address the psychosocial problems associated with global drug trafficking and consumption. Through the process of unraveling the on-the-ground practices of public health international humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and some of their therapeutic models, we begin to see new alliances formed acros...
Medical anthropology, Jan 25, 2016
In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order t... more In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order to understand its quotidian therapies, its fraught nature binding China's past with its future, and the to care for the self under postsocialism. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically allows for broader theoretical exploration into how China's economic transition created tensions between capitalism, socialism, and communism; between individual and community, care and coercion, and discipline and freedom. Sunlight blended democratic, communal, and communist values that in several ways transition drug addicts into a market-socialist society. In focusing on the socialist transition to capitalism much work concentrates on the neoliberal transition as the only path out of communism rather than exploring its exceptions. In exploring China as an exception, I ask: What do the residents, peer-educators and administrators reveal in their stories and reactions to community-based therapeutics o...
Eating Spring Rice
Interviews in this book were conducted in Mandarin Chinese or English. Although I am not a lingui... more Interviews in this book were conducted in Mandarin Chinese or English. Although I am not a linguist, I want to emphasize that in writing about the Tai people in China, one is faced with several choices in terms of transliteration. Just as there is neocolonial slippage between "Sipsongpanna," the current word used by the Tais of that place, and the Mandarin transliteration of Xishuangbanna (or in the local vernacular, just "Banna"), there are also two different linguistic terms for the same ethnic population, "Tai-Lüe" and "Dai-le." In referring to the Tai, I use "Dai" only when it is used in official Mandarin place names, and "Tai" or "Tai-Lüe" in all other cases. I rely on pseudonyms for the majority of informants, and in cases requiring confidentiality, I have disguised identities and added characteristics that would make it difficult to identify persons. To further protect informants' identities, I have given them only one name instead of the usual two metonyms used to denote respect in China. In addition, some of the descriptions of persons are composites. I found these measures were crucial given the sensitivity of HIV/AIDS as a topic of inquiry and the legal issues involved in working with people who are ostensibly outside the law and thus potentially subject to prosecution. In the few cases where proper names are common knowledge and thus already published in newspapers, medical journals, government reports, or conference proceedings, I use people's given names. All references to the Chinese yuan refer to the exchange rate of 1 U.S. dollar = 8.3 yuan (the average rate from 1997 to 2002).
Good. MJD, Hyde, S.T., Pinto, S. and Good, B. (eds.) (2008) Postcolonial Disorders. Ethnographic ... more Good. MJD, Hyde, S.T., Pinto, S. and Good, B. (eds.) (2008) Postcolonial Disorders. Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Series, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reviews published in Daedalus, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropological Quarterly, Metapsychology, American Journal of Sociology, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Common Knowledge, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Common Knowledge, Hemispheric Institute, Journal of Anthropological Research.