LIEPP's Health Policies research group is pleased to convene the seminar: 

After Opium: the braided meanings of drug addiction and recovery in colonial Vietnam

April 23rd. 5pm-6pm.

Sciences Po. Salle du LIEPP. 1 place Saint Thomas d'Aquin. 75007 Paris. 

Mandatory registration to participate in person. 

Mandatory registration to participate via Zoom. 

Speaker: 

Claire Edington (University of California – San Diego)

Abstract:

Rather than adopt a timeless or universal understanding of the “addict” or “addiction” – a common tendency among historians of the opium trade – in this talk, I instead examine its late colonial iteration in Vietnam as the product of multiple strands braided together: the new psychiatric underpinnings of addiction science, colonial ideologies of race and mental health, as well as Vietnamese understandings of illness and the body, and worries about addiction as a threat to any independent, postcolonial future. I argue that French and Vietnamese views on addiction in the interwar years developed in tandem, at times intersecting, even as they pulled from different epistemologies and politics to frame the risks of drug use, both for the self and society at large. By the late 1930s, they would draw together to produce a new class of addicts, a relatively restricted group, defined by their pathological dependence on drugs and their social exclusion. This was not only a state-directed project, but a popular, Vietnamese one as well, which would persist well past the end of colonial rule.