ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits a nearly 30-year-old ethnographic project. Since 1981 I have been studying alcoholism in treatment centers across the country, and in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In this chapter I discuss the theoretical underpinnings of this project, and how they came to be. My argument unfolds in three parts. I begin with a discussion of the scientific literature on alcoholism, including scientific theories of alcoholism. I then take up my AA study, showing how it became a critique of this literature. This propelled me, via postmodern ethnography, toward a more holistic, emotional, and nonreductionist analysis of alcoholics and alcoholism in American society. I then discuss the generation of the key concepts that emerged through my research: AA and science, AA’s theory of alcoholism, the AA group as an interactional site, and AA’s modes of understanding. I show how AA provides the context for self-help groups to develop their own modes of social control and empowerment. I contrast, in this regard, science’s theory of alcoholism and the alcoholic with AA’s theory. My research resulted in four publications: The Alcoholic Self; The Reco-
vering Alcoholic; Treating Alcoholism: An Alcoholic’s Anonymous Approach; and The Acoholic Society: Addiction and Recovery of the Self (Denzin 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1993). Treating Alcoholism was explicitly written for alcoholics, their families, and for alcoholism counselors. Hence, from the outset, these works have been identified with the AA approach, and antithetical to the behavioral view that dominates in this field. In The Alcoholic Self and The Recovering Alcoholic I developed a Foucault-like critique of positivism, behavior modification theories of treatment, and the institutional models of control that exist in modern alcoholism treatment centers. While grounding my text in the major findings of the research, I write through the lens of
theory. A multi-voiced interpretive postmodern ethnography should take sides, examine lived experience, uncover the models of truth and discourse that operate in the research site, and privilege the languages of emotionality. I examine the origins of AA’s theory in medicine, science, religion, and prag-
matic philosophy. I compare the structures of AA’s “local knowledge” (Geertz 1983) of alcoholism, to the scientific discourse on treatment. I then suggest that a postmodern ethnography of the “alcoholism” experience in American society must deal with the structures of experience modern science has created. Such a work must also speak to the interactional experiences of alcoholics who recover through AA. Postmodern, interpretive ethnography (Denzin 1997; 2001; 2003) writes the interpretive theories of the oppressed, “diseased” subject that modern, emancipatory science has helped create (see Clifford and Marcus 1986; Turner and Bruner 1986; Geertz 1988). Hopefully such work will allow these subjects to gain greater control over their own lives.
