Anthropological perspectives on alcohol and drugs at the turn of the new millennium

This introduction to the collection provides our thoughts on where alcohol and drug studies in anthropology are going as we enter the new millennium. After commenting briefly on each of the papers that comprise the rest of th e volume, we discuss what we see as the most important and exciting issues in the future and give our views on what alcohol and drug studies can offer to medical anthropology, anthropology writ large, interdisciplinary and mu ltidisciplinary research, and the realm of public policy and practical affa irs. We call for a continued study by anthropologists of the whole array of pharmacologically active substances used by humans in different parts of t he world, whether or not such studies are situated within medical anthropol ogy. We note that many of these substances have received little attention f rom anthropologists to date, quite strikingly so in the cases of substances such as marijuana and methamphetamines. We emphasize that most scholars wo rking in the anthropology of alcohol and drugs are concerned with the appli cation of their findings to social problems, and we note that this has been especially true of research on alcoholic beverages and injection drugs. Th is leads us to a discussion of anthropology's involvement in public health intervention and policy work in a variety of settings. Such involvement is shown to have informed anthropological theory (notably political economic a pproaches) and to have enriched the methodological toolkits and forms of da ta analysis anthropologists use. Perhaps more importantly. we argue that su ch multidisciplinary involvement in applied work is most likely to eventuat e in theoretical progress in alcohol and drug studies, since theory in the social sciences is not bound to singular disciplinary approaches. Thus we a dvocate for a "hybrid vigor" in this specialty area in the years ahead. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.