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Among anthropologists and sociologists, gender has become an increasingly important topic as gender roles in Western societies have undergone transformation . Androcentric interpretations of early twentieth-century anthropologists ’ ethnographic data, in which women’s roles were either underreported or ignored altogether (e.g., Lamphere 2006) gave way in the 1970s and beyond to feminist interpretations that weighted women’s roles more equitably in the same societies studied during the emergent era of ethnographic fieldwork by Bronislaw Malinowski and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Beginning in the late 1960s, anthropologists’ studies of subsistence and other activities in highly varied cultural contexts contributed fine-grained analyses of gender roles in terms of how tasks are assigned and what that system of assignments means to the group as a whole (e.g., Lee 1968). These analyses led to the conclusion that, across wide varieties of cultural traditions, women and men contributed to the subsistence of the group at least equally, if not unequally in favor of women, a finding that questioned the Western notion that men were responsible for subsistence and women were responsible for child-rearing and food preparation. In contemporary Western societies, division of labor can be based almost entirely on the individual’s preference for a given type of work or set of tasks, rather than on limited choices based on sex-linked characteristics involving physical bulk, strength, stature, or suppleness of hand (as in the early industrial era’s preference for women and children to operate machines). The transitions that took place in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, resulting in fully transformed gender roles, continue to affect human relations, including the contexts in which people use drugs. As the nature of gender relations changes, formal scientific approaches to characterizing gender-related aspects of drug use have to adhere to gender-neutral perspectives. 149 8 Gender and Drug Use Drug Ethnography by Women about Women No woman in the times of Herodotus or Sir Richard Burton would have embarked on journeys to discover little-known peoples and their customs, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, Western women were engaging in anthropological fieldwork in remote places. Nevertheless, for reasons having to do more with personal preference than with risk or danger (with anthropological expeditions up the Sepik River, Margaret Mead took as many risks as any of her male ethnographer contemporaries), males conducted most of the early ethnography of drug use. Lowie became interested in tobacco societies, and Schultes became interested in plant-derived drugs, and they therefore pursued these interests in patterns of drug use. Mead, on the other hand, was interested in how children learn gender roles (Mead 1963). Because women were at the forefront of ethnography by the early twentieth century, their involvement in drug ethnography was not only inevitable, but necessary. In the cultural complexes where drug use takes place, gender has great importance in shaping behavior. Female ethnographers of drug use became prominent by the early 1980s, as shown in previous chapters, with Marlene Dobkin de Rios leading the way in her ethnography of curanderos’ therapeutic uses of ayahuasca (Dobkin de Rios 1972a), and Melanie Dreher was not far behind with her work on ganja use in Jamaica (1982), as part of the research team headed by Rubin and Comitas (1975). These researchers’ most important contributions to the overall understanding of the human condition of drug users lay in their analyses of female drug users’ life circumstances and in their exposition of female drug users’ perspectives and roles in the drug trade. Women Studying Street Drugs Not very long at all after Agar’s Ripping and Running (1973) attracted attention to the ethnographic study of drug use, Patricia Cleckner (later, Morningstar)1 began publishing articles about her ethnographic studies of street-based drug use patterns, using her observations and interviews conducted in Miami, Florida to describe variants of cocaine use (Cleckner 1976a), heavy polydrug use and trafficking (Cleckner 1976b), and interactions among young black males who were involved in various ways in the distribution and consumption of illegal drugs (Cleckner 1977). These papers demonstrated the useful perspectives that a skilled ethnographer can gain after achieving access to cultural contexts where people use illegal drugs. They taught the reader how to decipher the conversations of users and dealers in terms of “game,” “player,” and “hustle” as conceptual frameworks for actions related to the consumption and marketing of drugs (Cleckner 1977). Cleckner’s work also differentiated among the people involved in cocaine use in terms of...

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