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Paper short abstract:

Based on three years of ethnographic research with clients of a drug treatment network that serves as an alternative to incarceration in Philadelphia, this paper paper considers the moral journey “out of the hole” as a form of ethnographic praxis.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have long argued that structurally violent conditions of poverty, racism, and incarceration can all constrain agency and thwart human flourishing (Bourgois 2009; Powder-Maker 1939). As Neely Myers (2015) has demonstrated, these same conditions can limit moral agency, or the opportunities to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships that reflect back “goodness” onto social actors. For those who are in the space of breakdown, as Myers puts it, or in the throes of active addiction, incarceration, or mental illness, the path back is not easy. Based on three years of ethnographic research with clients of a drug treatment network that serves as an alternative to incarceration in Philadelphia, this paper explores the relational development of moral agency as a fraught and complex method. Specifically, I explore the political and methodological dimensions of reckoning with moral injury and accountability, two concepts that became relationally critical when supporting interlocutors in their journey to escape cycles of street-based crime and addiction. In so doing, this essay reckons with a dark shadow of mainstream academic and political discourse that emphasizes the structural constraints on agency, yet often effaces the intimate process of grappling with the moral injury incurred as a result of engaging marginalized social and economic systems to survive structural dislocation and abuse. What role can ethnographic relationships play in this intimate process of reckoning? And further, what unique forms of fraught positionality come with this commitment? This paper considers the moral journey “out of the hole” as a form of ethnographic praxis.