Paper short abstract:

In Indian-occupied Kashmir, former heroin users offered complex, elaborate, ethnographically and historically grounded arguments for how addiction was a tool of statecraft. In this paper, I use a decolonial approach to read former addicts as theoreticians, rather than as ethnographic 'subjects.'

Paper long abstract:

In Indian-occupied Kashmir, former heroin users offered complex, elaborate, ethnographically and historically grounded arguments for how addiction was a tool of statecraft. In this paper, I use a decolonial approach to read former addicts as theoreticians, rather than as ethnographic 'subjects.' In foregrounding my interlocutors’ capacities for theory making through attention to the political etiologies of heroin addiction, I follow many feminist and decolonial anthropologists’ calls to challenge the role of the anthropologist as expert and the political economy of knowledge production more broadly (Cusicanqui 2012; Harrison 1991; Swarr and Nagar 2010). As Faye Harrison (1991a: 6-7) noted more than two decades ago, the decolonization of the discipline must entail dismantling a conservative Eurocentric and androcentric canon, while also making space for indigenous theorists that “allow for and support the democratization of intellectual and theoretical authority.” To be clear, Harrison calls for going beyond an approach of “giving voice” to our informants. Instead, she draws our attention to the need to relocate authority in indigenous voices and claims. In this article, I bring to bear a decolonial sensibility on existing anthropological frameworks of addiction and social suffering in order to decenter the knowledge-making capacities of the anthropologist who unintentionally perhaps, end up “speaking for” addicts and other socially marginalized communities. Instead, I take my interlocutors as theory makers (Ralph 2020).