Toward a bio-cultural and political economic integration of alcohol, tobacco and drug studies in the coming century

The 18th and early 20th centuries witnessed the disintegration of a unified approach to understanding the human condition. Political economy, the broad study of human society, fragmented into an array of university-based disciplines, each reductionistically focused on its narrow arena of specialized research. Medicine, which had been concerned with health in social and historic contexts, narrowed its focus to the microscopic level and to encapsulated understandings of the immediate effects of pathogens and of the structures of disintegrated organ systems. Similarly, anthropology, which continued to wave a banner of holism, retreated for much of the 20th century into fine-grained cultural studies of seemingly isolated human communities on the one hand, and highly specialized biological and biobehavioral analyses of only tangential concern to cultural concerns on the other. Consequently, it has appeared at times as if anthropology would fragment into two or more disciplines and the opportunity for an integrated understanding of the human condition would be lost in the process. As we approach ever closer to the 21st century, however, the felt need for interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary reintegration has grown stronger. This trend is manifest increasingly in the field of alcohol, tobacco, and drug studies, and suggests one of the places anthropology may be going in the future. In this light, this paper examines the use of a critical biocultural model employed in the anthropological assessment of the Hartford Syringe Exchange Program. This model integrates the political economy of risk behavior, the ethnographic examination of insider understandings, meaning systems and behaviors, and the biological analysis of health-related issues. Methodologically, the assessment combined methods and concepts from all of the major subfields of anthropology.