Human Nature,Addictions,and the Geography of Disorder in Three Cultures

Abstract

This paper compares social and cultural handling of addicted persons in three large-scale nation states: Russia, China and the United States—all three of which have defined alcoholism, opiate addiction or both as serious social problems calling for social control, and persons who abuse such substances as deviants.

Implicated in all frameworks for classification of deviants are fundamental cultural images of “human nature,” and underlying these are notions of order and disorder in human existence. Cognitive mapping of the territory of Disorder in many cultures—including those considered here—draws an important boundary between “disordered” and “disorderly” behavior. Disordered persons are “sick,” hence blameless and in need of help, while disorderly persons are “criminals” or “evildoers,” hence culpable and requiring punishment. They fall, consequently, under the dominion of different sorts of agents of social control.

Though the “topography” of the territory of disorder (i.e., features specifying the locus of the problem, given the nature of man as a species) remains rather stable within each cultural tradition, the “political” boundaries whereby deviants are assigned to various agents of social control (such as police or physicians) respond more readily to other social and historical changes. The addictions occupy an ambiguous position on the socio-cultural “maps” of all three cultures considered here, with addicts on the borderline of both “sick” and “criminal” territories. One function of modernization, however, seems to be to enlarge the population within the region inhabited by the “sick” as opposed to the “criminal.” In the United States, which has progressed to the post-industrial age, both addicts and alcoholics are increasingly assigned to the care of medical personnel, a trend far less advanced in the USSR and virtually absent in China. The test of this hypothesis, perhaps, is to witness what will now occur in China as she moves toward industrialization in the post-Mao era.