I recommend anything by Joseph Gusfield, Steve Kunitz, and Dwight Heath. Mary Douglas' edited volume is very good. Mac Marshall is another author to hunt down. There's a couple of things on the use of hallucinogenic drugs in ritual. Look also to some of Walter Becker's early work, like "Becoming a Marijuana Smoker."
Social scientists also need to be historically informed. You can't have good anthropology or sociology without a historical perspective, and unfortunately, many social scientists are out of step in that regard.
I think about C. Wright Mills' sociological imagination. That is the ability to see the relationship between personal life and social conditions, and between history and biography.
I benefited greatly from the responses to my last question, so I feel
emboldened to ask a broader and more controversial question: what can
alcohol/drug historians learn from the social sciences? The old, sad
joke is that historians are a generation or two out of date in their
borrowings from the social sciences. What do ADHS social scientists
think? What would they recommend historians read?
Maria G. Swora, Ph.D. MPH
Department of Sociology
Benedictine College
Atchison, Kansas 66002
Don't believe everything you think.
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