Angela Garcia

Assistant Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Harvard, 2007)
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 3332
(949) 824-9298
email: angarcia at uci dot edu

Angela Garcia earned her Ph.D in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2007. Her research interests include medical anthropology, subjectivity, suffering and psychoanalysis. She works in the United States and Latin America, particularly Mexico.

Currently, Angela is completing a book entitled The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Río Grande, to be published by the University of California Press. For this project, she explores the phenomenon of heroin overdose among rural Hispanos in northern New Mexico. By analyzing the relationship between intergenerational heroin users, discourses of addiction, and unequal social relations, she describes a much larger political, economic and social history of a region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession. She argues that, in this context, the region’s heroin phenomenon is a contemporary expression of a familiar history of land exploitation, social and intimate fragmentation, and the corporal and existential desire for a release from these.

Angela is working on a second, related project exploring the entanglement of medical and social services for addiction, the state’s authority to control “criminal” individuals and populations, and processes of legal “re-entry” and everyday repair that incarcerated and paroled drug addicts undertake. In addition, in 2008, she began exploring the phenomenon of crack cocaine in a working-class suburb of Mexico City in terms of the relation of drugs to history, displacement and the market.

Prior to entering graduate school, Angela was Director of Women’s Treatment Information and Advocacy for Project Inform, a leading HIV advocacy organization. She has worked as a medical journalist, writes occasionally for the popular press, and plays the cello.

Selected Publications
“The Elegiac Addict: History, Chronicity and the Melancholic Subject.” Cultural Anthropology, 23(4):718-745, 2008.

Under revision
The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press.

In preparation
“Blood Relative: Intergenerational Heroin Use and the Mark of Inheritance.”