ABSTRACT
Shannon Lee Dawdy's conceptual and methodological innovation raises questions for re-imagining and re-orientating Philippe Bourgois' empirical research on shooting up and the shooting gallery. This chapter investigates the impact of Igor Kopytoff's methodology on the social life of objects for an empirical study of the spaces of injecting drug use. It shows how a Social Science of the Syringe can engage the tangled history of space, time, ontology, affect, matter and health in new and challenging ways. The chapter addresses the empirical problems and possibilities raised by Doc in Bourgois' ethnography of the shooting gallery. Doc's response certainly forces us to confront the context of the shooting gallery. For Bourgois, the strength of his ethnographic approach is that it enables him to observe and interpret the nature of the injecting drug user's social reality in a social context. The gathering of context data facilitates the emergence of 'new context specific, drug prevention and harm reduction initiatives'.
