Nicholas Bartlett's Recovering Histories is a thought-provoking ethnography of recovering heroin users, who have been caught during China's transition from a centralized command economy to a market-driven, laissez-faire way of living, in a limbo full of irony and agony. Specifically, this book presents the author's phenomenological analysis of his field interlocutors’ thoughts and words, which sheds light on their “life without work” or “idling” after rehabilitation. “Idling” was a common complaint among the generational cohort of Bartlett's interlocutors, because their addiction record led them to be stigmatized and marginalized in an incrementally market-oriented socialist country.
The background of Bartlett's long-term research can be summarized as follows: in Gejiu, a tin-mining city in the south of Yunnan province, the cohort under study were childhood friends who grew up in households of the state-owned tin factory employees during the collective era. In the 1980s and 1990s, some of these young people, mostly men, refused to inherit their parents’ dull state-provided jobs in the tin factory and sought opportunities in private, profit-making enterprises. At the same time, in the 1980s, heroin use became widespread in Gejiu. As elsewhere in southwest China and beyond, the heroin epidemic coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the privatization of the state-owned industry and marketization. The macro social changes and liberation of individual pursuits meant the cohort first experienced exciting market opportunities, then heroin use and detention centres, and lastly the struggle to regain a “normal” life. With this general background, the author describes and analyses the narratives and thoughts of his middle-aged interlocutors about their desire and frustration of “returning to society.”
This ethnography is divided into an Introduction, followed by six chapters and an Epilogue. The Introduction explains the author's choice and interpretation of “historicity” as a key concept that frames the book. Bartlett adopts the phenomenological approach to analyse the “historicity” of his interlocutors’ interpretations of their own life experiences. In the following chapters, several interlocutors appear alternately to present certain analytical aspects relating to discussion about life and work after heroin. Although insightful, the author's analytical interpretation of an episode sometimes interrupts the storytelling and tends to uplift a single episode to a higher and abstract level. For instance, a brief dinner conversation about the metal window guards at an interlocutor's home is amplified quickly to signify national development (pp. 80–81). Or, taking that the recovering heroin users expected assistance from the state in finding them jobs, the author relates such occasions as “reflecting of the intertwining of personal and national histories” (p. 88). This interpretation is interesting; yet it would have been more convincing if further information and discussion had been provided.
Chapter five provides a relatively complete narrative about a woman and her later-to-become husband. This chapter illustrates clearly how strenuous it can be for recovering heroin users to try to “return to society,” as well as how they legitimized, self-persuaded and strategized their goals and actions. Chapter six also presents a more comprehensive story about a key interlocutor who is an addict-turned-harm-reduction activist. Like the interlocutors in chapter five, this former addict reveals complexities in self-legitimization, pursuit and desire. Through the analysis of the three interlocutors, the author reflects upon his own positionality and the limits of his phenomenological analysis. These two chapters are engaging and reflexive. The Epilogue describes the rapid changes of Gejiu in recent years, as a microcosm of the country's expanding economy; Bartlett is empathetic toward his long-lost interlocutors’ feelings of lagging behind in China's drastic development.
This ethnography is based on Bartlett's 18-month fieldwork in the region and two decades of research and writing. Perhaps it is the long haul of this study that compels the author to explore how these recovering heroin users have been stuck between Maoist China and China's “historical present.” As the author puts it, “Whereas ‘idling’ in the 1950s included both the aimless suffering of unemployed workers and bourgeois ‘leisure activities’ such as gambling and opium use, leisure and idling in the early 2010s were considered to be distinct activities, with the latter increasingly understood as the individual problem of unemployed workers” (p. 101).
The cohort that Bartlett researches is not a typically marginalized group as often seen in subaltern drug-use studies in China and beyond. His interlocutors belonged to the circle of a state-owned enterprise employees and even middle-class families, and they later became losers in a growing city because of heroin use and business failures. Although information about the number of the group or the positionality of the interlocutors in the group is not clear, this book explores intimate, personal feelings and thoughts for readers to understand such people, who have hitherto been less studied. This ethnography is a welcome contribution to the anthropology of China, and to our understanding of harm reduction and its limits.
