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The Space between Community and Self-Interest: Conflict and the Experience of Exchange in Heroin Markets

The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations

ISBN: 978-1-78635-228-6, eISBN: 978-1-78635-227-9

Publication date: 1 September 2016

Abstract

Purpose

To expand understandings of conflict, this chapter offers a detailed assessment of how exchange is enacted within local heroin markets. Addressing drug dealing and heroin users’ buying drugs for their peers (i.e., brokering), this research expands how illegal drug markets are commonly understood. A generalized framework is presented that highlights patterns of exchange.

Approach

Findings come from a 36-month study of a demographically diverse sample of 38 heroin users in Cleveland, OH. Methods involved open-ended, semi-structured interviewing and participant observation, conducted by the author and a team of graduate students.

Findings

Instead of framing exchange as either an economic or social act, this chapter shows how trade in heroin markets is often both. Here Gudeman’s (2001) dialectic between market and community is embodied in inter-subjectivities of traders, promoting both trust and conflict. In this context, conflict is the result of perpetual ambiguity all market participants can experience.

Research implications

Applying a blended notion of exchange as both social and economic offers new insight on conflict and expands its orientation beyond narratives of political economy. Here, in addition to the economics that often promote conflict, the social elements of exchange (e.g., reciprocity) are emphasized.

Originality

Research has understood conflicts in drug market operations through trader characteristics (e.g., poverty, race, class, privilege). This chapter emphasizes opportunities for conflict irrespective of individualized characteristics by outlining structural elements of exchange.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge and thank the participants of this study, the graduate students (Allison Schlosser, Sarah Koopman-Gonzalez, Jonathan Metcalfe, and Smaranda Ene) who worked on this project, and the National Science Foundation for their support of this research BCS-0951501. Finally, a special thanks goes to Allison Schlosser for professionally editing this manuscript, as well as discussing and critiquing its content extensively with the author.

Citation

Hoffer, L.D. (2016), "The Space between Community and Self-Interest: Conflict and the Experience of Exchange in Heroin Markets", The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 36), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 167-196. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120160000036007

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited