Reconfiguring the empty center: Drinking, sobriety, and identity in Native American women's narratives
Reconfiguring the empty center: Drinking, sobriety, and identity in Native American women's narratives
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DOI：
10.1007/s11013-007-9064-0
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发表时间：
2007-12-01
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
Prussing, Erica
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Prussing, Erica
尽管人类学家很少关注美国流行的关于成瘾和康复的心理学话语，但北美原住民社区参与的文化政治值得更深入的研究。通过民族志语境化的个人叙事，本文介绍了成瘾/恢复话语已被选择性地从事年轻一代的妇女在北方平原保留社区。清醒不仅是一种治疗性的转变，也是一种社会协商的身份改变，在这个社区，因此，从事持续的地方身份政治。许多社区成员通过本质化原住民和非原住民之间的界限，以及过去和现在之间的界限来评估对原住民身份的合法性，这是一种被O 'Nell称为“空中心的修辞”的话语惯例。Berkeley：University of加州出版社，1996年，第55页）。然而，通过选择性地挪用成瘾/康复话语的元素，20世纪90年代的年轻女性越来越多地将情感体验和表达定位为土著身份合法性的核心仲裁者。在这样做的过程中，他们重新配置了空荡荡的中心的言论，引起了更大社区的争议和支持。这项分析突出了当代北美土著成瘾/康复话语的社会生活的新维度，并呼吁增加民族志关注本地化的文化政治如何引导社区参与治疗话语的方式。
Although anthropologists have paid little attention to popular American psychological discourse about addiction and recovery, the cultural politics of its engagement by Native North American communities warrant closer examination. By ethnographically contextualizing personal narratives, this paper describes how addiction/recovery discourse has been selectively engaged by younger generations of women in a northern Plains reservation community. Sobriety is not only a therapeutic transformation but also a socially negotiated identity change in this community and, therefore, engages ongoing local identity politics. Many community members evaluate the legitimacy of claims to Native identity by essentializing boundaries between Native and non-Native, as well as between past and present-a discursive convention that O'Nell has called "the rhetoric of the empty center" (Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity and Depression in an American Indian Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 55). Yet by selectively appropriating elements of addiction/recovery discourse, younger women in the 1990s increasingly positioned emotional experience and expression as central arbiters of the legitimacy of Native identity. In so doing, they reconfigured the rhetoric of the empty center, eliciting both controversy and support from the larger community. This analysis highlights new dimensions of the social life of addiction/recovery discourse in contemporary Native North America, and calls for increased ethnographic attention to how localized cultural politics can orient the ways in which communities engage therapeutic discourses.