In Praise of Addiction

At a sociocultural moment saturated with chatter over wellness, optimization, and self-improvement, Clio’s invites you into a radically different conversation: one that dares to praise addiction.

Please join anthropologist Elizabeth Roberts to discuss the ideas and experiences informing her provocative new book, In Praise of Addiction. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City, personal memory, and her training in anthropology, religion, philosophy, and harm reduction, Roberts challenges one of our most entrenched assumptions: that addiction is primarily about individual weakness or moral collapse.

Roberts understands addiction intimately, through her sister’s alcoholism and prescription drug dependency, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. Like so many of us, she experienced the shame, self-loathing, and isolation that often accompany addiction. But during years of fieldwork in Mexico City’s colonias populares, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrating their compulsions rather than hiding them. Alcohol, Coca-Cola, drugs, junk food: Dependencies were lived openly, relationally, and without apology. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.

What she came to see was not denial, but an ecological reality: addiction shaped by NAFTA, the drug war, chemical exposure, poverty, and structural violence. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.

Provocative, unsettling, and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites us to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.

Elizabeth will be joined in conversation by Clio's founder Timothy Don. Copies of her book are available for purchase in advance with your ticket.

Elizabeth F. S. Roberts is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author ofGod’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes. Since 2013, she has participated in collaborative environmental health research in Mexico City.

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