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Bernardino de Sahagún is known to history as a man who passionately devoted himself to interviewing Aztecs—in the Nahuatl language—about their history and culture. A Spanish Franciscan friar assigned by his church to travel to the New World (just eight years after Hernando Cortés’s soldiers and Indian allies had conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521), Sahagún served as a teacher and evangelist at the Imperial School of the Holy Cross in Tlatelolco, Mexico. He learned and wrote about the traditional use of various drugs in pre-Columbian Mexico as a result of his research. With reference to use of the spineless, napiform cactus, peyote (Lophophora williamsii), for example, he recorded: There is another herb . . . called peiotl . . . it is found in the north country. Those who eat or drink it see visions either frightful or laughable ; this inebriation last [sic] two to three days and then ceases. It is a sort of delicacy . . . , it sustains them and gives them courage to fight and not feel fear, nor hunger, and they say it protects them from any danger. (Sahagún 1956, 292) In this and other passages about indigenous drug use in his massive twelvevolume General History of the Things of New Spain (1956), the assiduous Sahagún, called by some the father of modern ethnography, made important contributions both to the careful documentation of pre-Columbian drug use patterns (among many other topics) and to the use of qualitative methods in the study of drug use. His interviews and those of his assistants carried out in several Mexican cities, based on a recognition of the need to query multiple native informants to understand a culture from the insider’s point of view, led to the production of a body of work that today would be called a form of salvage ethnography (intended to record a way of life as it passed out of existence; in Sahagún’s case, it was in light of the destruction of indigenous records by the Spanish conquistadores and the 25 2 The Emergence of Drug Ethnography Catholic Church). This work suggests some important questions about the ethnography of drug use: What are the actual origins of drug use ethnography? How has the field developed and changed over time? What factors have influenced its evolution? Who were the founders and contributors to this line of research, and what motivated and influenced their work? Answering these questions about the history of drug use ethnography and the influences that shaped its development is the purpose this chapter. Our intention is to locate ethnographic work on drug use within the worldwide historical contexts that have played a role in pushing the field in particular directions, focusing its attention on specific issues and putting it to work in the application of ethnographic knowledge to solve drug-related health and social problems. Before addressing these issues, we must first consider why it is important to know about the history of drug ethnography, including the key players who have contributed to the field and the routes taken in ethnography’s evolution as an intellectual pursuit. Our answer to this question stems from our concern that this book contribute to the training of the next generation of ethnographic drug researchers. As the emergence of AIDS or the even newer syringe-related leishmania epidemic teach us, drug-related health problems remain significant and vexing public health issues. Even in the midst of the global AIDS pandemic, drug-related HIV risk behaviors have continued to spread to new populations, as have other forms of drug consumption. Because ethnography has proven to be a valuable approach to understand drug use and drug users in social contexts, and to develop reality- and evidence-based, contextual interventions, improving the skill set of drug ethnographers warrants disciplinary attention. Notably, in this regard, research has shown that the best teachers in any field of study are those who “have an unusually keen sense of the histories of their disciplines,” a capacity that enables them “to reflect deeply on the nature of thinking within their fields” and to convey a more integrated understanding to their students (Bain 2004, 25). It is for this reason that we devote three chapters in this book to carefully tracing the historical development of drug ethnography and charting in some detail the unfolding of this arena of research. This chapter introduces a developmental framework that begins with the earliest recorded observations of drug use behavior and traces the emergence of...

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