The Cycle of Addiction and the Neuroanthropology of Ritual

 Addiction consists of a cycle of behaviors and experiences that lead to great excess and lost engagement in other social activities.  Derived from long-term ethnographic research, the five steps that comprise the overall cycle are: (1) feeling ambivalence, (2) seeking out drugs, (3) preparing to use, (4) using drugs, and (5) the end of the altered state.  A major challenge is explaining how this disparate set of elements comes together as a whole, without resorting to monocausal approaches such as addiction being a brain disease or an epiphenomenon of structural inequality.

This talk will use neuroanthropology, the integration of neuroscience and anthropology, to better explain the cycle of addiction.  It will examine how cognitive neuroscience, which focuses on the processes underlying behavior and experience, illuminates how the cycle knits itself together.  It will also draw on work on ritual and ritualization to better explain the overall pattern of the cycle.  Together, processes and patterns provide a robust understanding of addiction as a cycle.  This joint focus on processes and patterns has implications for the further development of neuroanthropology and can help indicate where experimental work might test and refine different pieces of the overall explanation.

Daniel Lende, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida.  Co-editor of The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (MIT Press) and co-founder of the Neuroanthropology blog, part of the Public Library of Science.