Killer Commodities addresses the impact of harmful products on consumers throughout the world. These case studies highlight the processes of production and marketing of these products, as well as the nature of relevant public health policies.

Killer Commodities: Public Health and the Corporate Production of Harm

Merrill Singer

Hans A. Baer

Self-Help

AltaMira Press

Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action

This new text provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical anthropology. As such, it is guided by three unifying themes. First, medical anthropology is actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the globe through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives. Second, illness and disease cannot be fully understood or effectively addressed by treating them solely as biological in nature; rather, health problems involve complex biosocial processes and resolving them requires attention to range of factors including systems of belief, structures of social relationship, and environmental conditions. Third, through an examination of health inequalities on the one hand, and environmental degradation and environment-related illness on the other, the authors emphasize the need for a comprehensive medical anthropology that integrates biological, cultural, and social factors, in order to understand the origin of ill health and to contribute to more effective and equitable health care systems.

Hans Baer

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Book six of the Ethnographer's Toolkit series discusses the special requirements that doing ethnographic research imposes on its practitioners. The authors first describe how the work of researchers is inextricably tied to their personal qualities, the social and cultural context of the research site, and the tasks and responsibilities that ethnographers assume in the field. The book then examines how qualitative researchers assemble research teams, establish partnerships with individuals and institutions in the field, and work collaboratively with a wide range of people and organizations to solve mutually identified problems. The book has a strong focus on the ethical components of doing research, and on the importance of collaboration and action-based research strategies. The authors also offer multiple strategies for working with institutional review boards (IRBs).

Researcher Roles and Research Partnerships (Ethnographer's Toolkit)

Politics & Social Sciences

Margaret Diane LeCompte

Jean Schensul

Margaret Weeks

Social Sciences

Whether it is to understand the networks of individuals, the physical makeup of a household or community, or to develop strategies for finding difficult-to-reach populations such as the homeless or drug-addicted, applied researchers increasingly need to understand spatial methods. In this brief volume, the techniques of network analysis, mapping, and finding hidden populations are explained in simple, practical language. The authors describe when and how to use these techniques and offer numerous examples of how the methods have worked in community psychology, drug research, risk assessment, and network analysis, among other settings.

Mapping Social Networks, Spatial Data, and Hidden Populations (Ethnographer's Toolkit)

Jean J. Schensul

Margaret LeCompte

Robert Trotter

This research-based, theory-driven account of the changing underground world of drug use and associated health effects covers the essential ground in a brisk, authoritative fashion. After a thorough outline of the nature and history of drug use dynamics, the author assesses the role of youth in new drug use practices, the impact of illicit drug distribution and the war on drugs, and the public health risks of new trends in drug use behavior. The volume provides an up-close, ethnographic account of the social worlds of drug sellers and users and the processes of change in patterns of drug consumption. Additionally, it considers mechanisms for effective public health responses to emergent health risks associated with changing drug use patterns. Because Singer carefully explains all technical terms, uses clarifying examples, and avoids jargon, readers will walk away from this volume with a deeper grasp of this social problem; with appreciation for how change figures into drug use practices; and with knowledge of key social, cultural, political-economic, criminal justice, and health factors. While ideal as a text in the undergraduate classroom, its targeted focus on a specific topic and careful exploration of that issue—including new concepts and theory that advance the fields of drug studies and public health—make it appealing for use at more advanced levels.
 Also by Merrill Singer and available from Waveland Press: Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality (ISBN 9781577664949); Drugs and Development: The Global Impact on Sustainable Growth and Human Rights (ISBN 9781577665724); and The Face of Social Suffering: The Life History of a Street Drug Addict (ISBN 9781577664321). Title of related interest from Waveland Press: Glasser, Anthropology of Addictions and Recovery (ISBN 9781577665588).

Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug Use and Community Health

Anthropology

Waveland Pr Inc.

This brief, compelling life story of a drug addict poses and answers questions of broad public concern about social responsibility, illicit drug use, hidden economies, and social inequality. Merrill Singer, a medical anthropologist involved in the public health impact of alcohol and illicit drug use, conducted interviews over a seven-year period with Tony, a street drug addict who grew up in the inner city. Tony learned the ways of using and selling drugs from his father, became an enforcer in a street gang, spent considerable time in prison, committed seemingly heartless, violent acts, and has had to struggle with the knowledge that he suffers from HIV infection. Tony's life story is an insider, personal view of a tumultuous, marginalized world that intertwines closely with the wider social milieu constructed and sustained by the U.S. political economy. Unique to this book is its attempt to understand the forces that contribute to the risky behavior of drug use, even at a time when drug users know about its deadly and damaging connection to diseases like HIV and hepatitis. Tony's story demonstrates that none of us make choices in a vacuum. Further, the book addresses important issues about how structures of social inequality in our society impact the lives and options of those at the bottom of the social ladder.
Also by Merrill Singer and available from Waveland Press: Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality (ISBN 9781577664949); Drugs and Development: The Global Impact on Sustainable Growth and Human Rights (ISBN 9781577665724); and Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug Use and Community Health (ISBN 9781577663768). Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Glasser, Anthropology of Addictions and Recovery (ISBN 9781577665588); Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families (ISBN 9780881335262); Pfohl, Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577666196); Shannon, Urban Problems in Sociological Perspective, Fourth Edition (ISBN 9781577661955); and Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads (ISBN 9781577660859).

The Face of Social Suffering: Life History of a Street Drug Addict

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Singer offers a fresh set of ideas for understanding how the global socioeconomic system insures that massive quantities of psychotropic drugs reach the poorest sectors of American society. Drugging the Poor provides a unified theoretical framework to assess how all drugs, including tobacco, heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and diverted pharmaceuticals contribute to maintaining social inequality among the wealthier and poorer social classes in American society. Singer's analysis rejects conventional approaches that see tobacco or alcohol manufacturers and distributors, on the one hand, and drug cartels and mafias, on the other, as completely different entities. Instead, he shows how legal and illegal "drug corporations" share key features and follow the same economic principles. He also emphasizes that mixing legal and illegal drugs to self-medicate against social discrimination, poverty, and structural violence offers short-term relief, but in the long run, it functions to maintain an unjust and oppressive system. Drugging the Poor actively challenges the assumption that how things are is how they always have been or how they need to be.
 Also by Merrill Singer and available from Waveland Press: Drugs and Development: The Global Impact on Sustainable Growth and Human Rights (ISBN 9781577665724); The Face of Social Suffering: The Life History of a Street Drug Addict (ISBN 9781577664321); and Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug Use and Community Health (ISBN 9781577663768). Titles of related interest also from Waveland Press: Dei, Ties That Bind: Youth and Drugs in a Black Community (ISBN 9781577661993) and Glasser, Anthropology of Addictions and Recovery (ISBN 9781577665588).

Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality

In a globalized world, people, ideas, organizations, and commodities—including drugs—flow rapidly from place to place and are tied together through the market, advanced communication systems, and rapid transportation technologies. Drug distribution and use both reflect and reinforce an exploitive political economy that has connected the West with developing nations since the rise of capitalism. Singer's fast-moving, authoritative treatment examines the impact of legal and illegal drug distribution and use on relations among richer and poorer nations, in particular their influence on social and economic development in the Third World. Guided by a critical perspective and drawing on his own crosscultural research in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Singer analyzes drug-related developmental challenges around the world and assesses the impact of licit and illicit drug use, drug trafficking, the War on Drugs, and drug-related health consequences like HIV/AIDS.

Drugs and Development: The Global Impact on Sustainable Growth and Human Rights

Affordable and conceptually accessible, this succinct volume captures the distinctive anthropological perspective on global health issues for undergraduates in the social and health sciences. Ideal for professors who want to add an experiential human face, a cultural dimension, and an emic understanding of health in cross-cultural contexts to interdisciplinary course content, Global Health exposes the day-to-day health challenges people around the world face. Key to its message is that, despite strides in improving worldwide health, human impacts on the environment, violent social conflict, and increasing social inequality diminish the success of global health initiatives to protect against illness, disability, and death.
 Readers, gripped by the impact of undeniable, far-reaching realities such as global warming, infectious disease, food insecurity, water crises, war and genocide, and refugee crises, will learn to apply a holistic, anthropological framework in search of solutions to such complex biosocial conditions.
 Title of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Van Arsdale, Global Human Rights: People, Processes, and Principles (ISBN 9781478632948).

Global Health: An Anthropological Perspective

Pamela I. Erickson

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Books by Merrill Singer