In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World
By (Author) Elizabeth F. S. Roberts
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
13th May 2026
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Health, illness and addiction: social aspects
Physical Properties
Hardback
304
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
Description
A transformative way of understanding addiction-and an invitation to find connection in the pleasures of life we know are bad for us
Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister's destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother's hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought shame, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in disgrace. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.
In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependency on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures-and suffering-of dependency.
Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgement associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.
Author Bio
Elizabeth F. S. Roberts is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of God's Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes. Since 2013, she has participated in collaborative environmental health research in Mexico City.
