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Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries - Hardcover

Hansen, Helena

 
9780520298033: Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0520298039 ISBN 13: 9780520298033
Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

How are spiritual power and self-transformation cultivated in street ministries? In Addicted to Christ, Helena Hansen provides an in-depth analysis of Pentecostal ministries in Puerto Rico that were founded and run by self-identified “ex-addicts,” ministries that are also widespread in poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. mainland. Richly ethnographic, the book harmoniously melds Hansen’s dual expertise in cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Through the stories of ministry converts, she examines key elements of Pentecostalism: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the idea of other-worldliness. She then reconstructs the ministries' strategies of spiritual victory over addiction: transformation techniques to build spiritual strength and authority through pain and discipline; cultivation of alternative masculinities based on male converts’ reclamation of domestic space; and radical rupture from a post-industrial “culture of disposability.” By contrasting the ministries’ logic of addiction with that of biomedicine, Hansen rethinks roads to recovery, discovering unexpected convergences with biomedicine while revealing the allure of street corner ministries.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Helena Hansen, MD, PhD is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at New York University.

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"Addicted to Christ is an extraordinarily inspiring account of how addiction can meet with reinterpretation through a vision of Christian life imbued with moral meaning. Unforgettably, we learn how Puerto Ricans have overcome social disintegration and impoverishment by building social relationships based on mutual aid. Hansen’s lively first person perspective makes this book not only a breakthrough in medical anthropology but also an anthropological page turner."—Emily Martin, Author of The Woman in the Body, Flexible Bodies, and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture

"Hansen has written a deeply empathetic ethnography of the struggle for recovery from addiction in Puerto Rican Pentecostal drug recovery churches. With critical humility and solidarity she also draws from her own hospital-based psychiatric clinical service to produce a tour de force of critical engaged medical anthropology. Plumbing creatively and critically from within her multiple positionalities as a clinician, a social scientist, an African American woman, and the child of a powerful extended matriarchal family touched by the entangled traumas of oppression, mental illness and addiction she is advancing a creative new psychoanalytic and political economic theoretical understanding of gender power relations, family trauma, racialized colonial oppressions, the art of clinical practice and biomedical science, the potential for healing and spiritual social solidarity-- and the relentless brutality of contemporary neoliberalism."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Dealing Crack in El Barrio, and Righteous Dopefiend. 

“I enjoyed Addicted to Christ a great deal. It is well-written, innovative, salient and it has an important story to tell."— Arthur Kleinman, MD, author of Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, The Illness Narratives, and What Really Matters.

“Can one’s relationship with God overcome the power of narcotics? Or is it necessary to use one drug to check another?  This is the dualism that Dr. Helena Hansen leads us through, unpeeling the layers of lived experience until we can see the biosocial illness which requires that we bring many tools to the healing process.  This is a book to be read and treasured by doctors, patients, legislators – everyone hoping to manage addiction and limit its dreadful toll on our society.” — Thompson Fullilove, author of Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities

“This book is an important contribution to our understanding of addiction, as it bridges the fields of anthropology and psychiatry with remarkable insight and scholarship. It is remarkable in that it provides a humanistic approach, one that is so often lacking in how the medical field deals with this major public health problem."—Marc Galanter, MD, Past President, American Society for Addiction Medicine, author of Spirituality and the Healthy Mind. 

“In the midst of a national epidemic of addiction, Helena Hansen provides a timely and sobering tale of reality, recovery, and ultimately, hope. With enormous compassion for the communities involved in grassroots evangelical addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, she offers a clear and welcome challenge to single model solutions for addiction, while urging us to account for the larger political and economic conditions of postindustrial social disintegration and displacement that must be at the center of any multipronged recovery effort."—Arlene Dávila, author of Latinos Inc. and Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the Neoliberal City

“Addicted to Christ is a passionately written scholarly contribution to important debates about the causes of and cures for drug addiction. Helena Hansen uses both her personal experiences and her knowledge of  medicine and culture to weave a narrative of the personal journeys and social implications of Pentecostal addiction treatment centers.”—Margarita Mooney, author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora

"This is a fabulous and unique book that marks an excellent contribution to medical anthropology, public health, religion, gender, and Latin American and Caribbean studies."—Carolyn Rouse, author of Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment


Aus dem Klappentext

"Addicted to Christ is an extraordinarily inspiring account of how addiction can meet with reinterpretation through a vision of Christian life imbued with moral meaning. Unforgettably, we learn how Puerto Ricans have overcome social disintegration and impoverishment by building social relationships based on mutual aid. Hansen’s lively first person perspective makes this book not only a breakthrough in medical anthropology but also an anthropological page turner."—Emily Martin, Author of The Woman in the Body, Flexible Bodies, and Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture

"Hansen has written a deeply empathetic ethnography of the struggle for recovery from addiction in Puerto Rican Pentecostal drug recovery churches. With critical humility and solidarity she also draws from her own hospital-based psychiatric clinical service to produce a tour de force of critical engaged medical anthropology. Plumbing creatively and critically from within her multiple positionalities as a clinician, a social scientist, an African American woman, and the child of a powerful extended matriarchal family touched by the entangled traumas of oppression, mental illness and addiction she is advancing a creative new psychoanalytic and political economic theoretical understanding of gender power relations, family trauma, racialized colonial oppressions, the art of clinical practice and biomedical science, the potential for healing and spiritual social solidarity-- and the relentless brutality of contemporary neoliberalism."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Dealing Crack in El Barrio, and Righteous Dopefiend. 

“I enjoyed Addicted to Christ a great deal. It is well-written, innovative, salient and it has an important story to tell."— Arthur Kleinman, MD, author of Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, The Illness Narratives, and What Really Matters.

“Can one’s relationship with God overcome the power of narcotics? Or is it necessary to use one drug to check another?  This is the dualism that Dr. Helena Hansen leads us through, unpeeling the layers of lived experience until we can see the biosocial illness which requires that we bring many tools to the healing process.  This is a book to be read and treasured by doctors, patients, legislators – everyone hoping to manage addiction and limit its dreadful toll on our society.” — Thompson Fullilove, author of Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities

“This book is an important contribution to our understanding of addiction, as it bridges the fields of anthropology and psychiatry with remarkable insight and scholarship. It is remarkable in that it provides a humanistic approach, one that is so often lacking in how the medical field deals with this major public health problem."—Marc Galanter, MD, Past President, American Society for Addiction Medicine, author of Spirituality and the Healthy Mind. 

“In the midst of a national epidemic of addiction, Helena Hansen provides a timely and sobering tale of reality, recovery, and ultimately, hope. With enormous compassion for the communities involved in grassroots evangelical addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, she offers a clear and welcome challenge to single model solutions for addiction, while urging us to account for the larger political and economic conditions of postindustrial social disintegration and displacement that must be at the center of any multipronged recovery effort."—Arlene Dávila, author of Latinos Inc. and Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the Neoliberal City

“Addicted to Christ is a passionately written scholarly contribution to important debates about the causes of and cures for drug addiction. Helena Hansen uses both her personal experiences and her knowledge of  medicine and culture to weave a narrative of the personal journeys and social implications of Pentecostal addiction treatment centers.”—Margarita Mooney, author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora

"This is a fabulous and unique book that marks an excellent contribution to medical anthropology, public health, religion, gender, and Latin American and Caribbean studies."—Carolyn Rouse, author of Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment


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Addicted to Christ

Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries

By Helena Hansen

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29803-3

Contents

Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. The Cosmology of Conversion, 
2. On Discipline and Becoming a Disciple, 
3. Visitations and Gifts, 
4. The New Masculinity, 
5. Spiritual Mothers, 
6. Family Values, 
7. Bringing It Home, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index,


CHAPTER 1

The Cosmology of Conversion


Pentecostal knowledge is experiential. It is based on a sensory theology, a theology of emotional and tactile encounter — some call it possession — that is all-encompassing. The encounter heightens awareness of the motives of others, and of one's own interior state. Street ministers describe the encounter as intimate contact with the Holy Spirit, marked by the sensation of being filled or embraced. They use the encounter to retrain desire, by giving personal testimony, by reinterpreting sensory experiences as signals from an occult spiritual realm, and by reframing setbacks as spiritual tests. The ultimate goal of the encounter is to achieve a complete break with pre-conversion ways of seeing the world, and to re-people the world with enchanted experiences, beings, and passions. Christian knowledge, then, only is gained through radical rupture with everyday perception.

This concept of knowledge presented me, a non-Pentecostal, with a dilemma of understanding. As Pentecostals are fond of saying, to know it, you have to live it. I could have dismissed their point as a ploy to convert me, but I sensed that it was also correct. The core of what sustained them and shaped their view of the world was not available through books, charts, or scientific instruments; not in the way that I'd acquired biomedical knowledge. To appreciate Pentecostal knowledge, I had to travel new ground.


* * *

The road to Restoration House is lined by wild grasses and mango trees, crossed by chickens and thin, balding dogs. The route passes old Spanish colonials of the town plaza — their boarded windows covered with graffiti, rows of tin shacks with peeling paint — over bridges, through fallow fields, and past shirtless men sipping beers in the heat on the porch. After a half mile on a dirt road up a mountain, I came upon a tall white gate attached to a twelve-foot iron fence. A young man sat in the guard's booth. He greeted me with "Te bendiga" ("God bless you"). I explained that I was there to see the director, and the gates slowly drew open.

Inside the gate, trimmed hedges, planted flowers, and rocks painted with biblical quotations contrasted with the wild grasses outside. The asphalt driveway from the gate implored those exiting the program in white and blue paint: "Detente, Piensa: Cristo te Ama" ("Stop, Think: Christ Loves You") (fig. 5). The muraled stucco buildings encircling the grounds read "Cafetería," (Cafeteria), "Capilla" (Chapel), "Barbería la Fe" (Faith Barbershop) (fig. 6), "Biblioteca" (Library), "Dispensario" (Dispensary). The quiet of midday siesta penetrated the banana grove and the basketball court (fig. 7), as well as the dormitories, each named for a book of the Bible, including "Corintios" (Corinthians) and "Romanos" (Romans). I noted how much the Christian programs resembled each other physically: on a mountain, with carefully groomed grounds and open space for games and gardens. The grit of condemned buildings and abandoned cars in the urban neighborhoods from which converts came was washed away in this bucolic rendition of a home for addicts. No more than five miles from the town center, the small compound nonetheless evoked the pilgrimage of prophets into the wilderness, its elevation conjured Moses on the mountain. The gates might have referenced New Jerusalem had the twelve-foot iron fence that enclosed it not been topped with barbed wire, as much to keep residents in as unwanted visitors out.

The guard led me through a glass door to Director Menocal's desk. Stocky and gray-haired, Menocal was flanked by plaques from the city recognizing his service to the community, and from a seminary in San Juan for his scholarly achievements. His curriculum, he explained, involved three basic steps: Detoxification in the dormitories for six months, recuperation while living on program grounds for up to twelve months, and spiritual growth in the community after that. As residents reached the recuperation stage they got weekend passes to leave the compound. They attended culto, or religious services, Bible classes, and were assigned tasks such as cleaning or cooking. They also learned potential occupations such as frame making, lamination, and barbering.

In the last phase, that of spiritual growth, some took university courses or got married to the women with whom they'd been living before treatment. Menocal pointed to wedding photos of program graduates on his desk. Success, he told me, is that the residents work, attend school, have a family and children, and that they are a Christian presence in their community.

Twenty-eight years prior, Menocal himself was a heroin user, living on the streets of San Juan. He went to prison and was rehabilitated in Silo, one of the original evangelical addiction treatment programs in Puerto Rico. He found the Lord there, and his calling in life; he graduated from seminary in Bayamón, then came to the South side of the island to found Restoration House with the help of local Pentecostal and Baptist churches, as well as a grant from the mayor. He was now a professional administrator, and some on his staff had state certification in counseling, social work, and nursing. For him, though, it was significant that he had been addicted.

There are so many churches in the South of Puerto Rico, but few rehabilitation programs. It's hard work. You have to have had the experience (of addiction) and feel it in your heart.


Menocal pulled over a staff member, Juan, a round man with a round face and a closely cut greying afro. "This one is a university student," Menocal said with a grin. "You have a lot in common." Juan led me across the compound to a room with plastic flowers framing the doorway and a metal desk in the center. The moist air weighed down on us.

He launched into testimonio (testimony) with no further prompting: this was his third time at Restoration House. The first time he came from jail. His mother was Catholic, and the Catholics let you smoke and drink, they don't teach that God is against that. Then he heard who Jesus was. Holding up a cup, Juan explained "I was like an empty glass. If you want to change, you have to do it inside," pointing inside the cup. "When I came, I cried for three days, I didn't know why. I heard 'Who wants Jesus? He'll change your life.' I said 'Me!' " Juan saw the events of his conversion as auspicious.

Why three days the first time? Because Jesus rose in three days! ... I was in the program three days, closed my eyes, woke up on the floor. I wanted [Jesus] from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to talk with God. I read the Bible two times in three years. I learn so much.


Juan explained that what he and the other men who come to the program need is love. When he converted, he asked for God's love, but did not know he had it until he physically felt God's presence: "One day I asked Him to...

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Verlag
University of California Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0520298039
ISBN 13 
9780520298033
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar