A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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and the tracing of global connections across a closed and totalized globe, as Anna Tsing’s notion of friction could be read.6 Instead, I seek to explore how situations as widely diffused assembled phenomena that are differentially distributed participate in the ontological conditioning of our contemporary worlds and yet as assemblages always hold the potential to become otherwise.7 The drug war is one such phenomenon.
ASSEMBLIC ETHNOGRAPHY
The study of widely diffused assembled phenomena requires an ethnographic method and style of writing that I call assemblic ethnography. Assemblic ethnography as a method shares some similarities with multisited ethnography as George Marcus originally and schematically articulated it.8 But in practice and true to its name, most multisited research has tended to focus on a few, oftentimes prechosen, sites and the connections between them. In contrast, assemblic ethnography is a method of chasing and tracing a complex phenomenon through its continual process of assembling across different global scales and its temporally differential localization as situations in diverse places. Just as one never knows if, when, and where she or he will get caught up in a situation, so too the anthropologist doing assemblic ethnography can never know beforehand when and where the research will lead. For example, in 2006 I began research at an Orthodox-run rehabilitation program in Russia,9 during which I became attuned to the political struggle there for harm-reduction services. This led me to the central role of user unions in this struggle, which had been initially funded by the Open Society Foundation based in New York. While in New York researching this initiative, I became attuned to Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-NY),10 a local political organization dedicated to fighting the drug war and its pernicious consequences, and how they politically address their drug war situation, which, I came to learn, was partly informed by the successes in Vancouver, where I then went before going on to Copenhagen, Denpasar, and elsewhere.
Unlike the traditional ethnographer, then, the assemblic ethnographer realizes that research focused on any one site—and in practice, most multisited research as well—results in a decomplexification of the situation under study. This is so because the assemblic ethnographer recognizes that complexity is knotted nonlocally at least as much as it is locally. Perhaps most significantly, to do an assemblic ethnography is to recognize that this knotted complexity is the consequence of the temporary emergence of nontotalized assemblages, and thus a primary characteristic of this method is tracing the various assemblic relations that constitute the assemblage. Thus, my research did not simply move from one site to the next but rather moved along diverse assemblic relations of the drug war. For example, when the aspects of carceral political economics and state-based surveillance revealed themselves in New York, I traced those assemblic relations and their differential distribution to Denpasar and back again to Russia; when the aspect of biopolitical therapeutics revealed itself, I traced it from Russia to New York to Vancouver to Copenhagen. In contrast to a project with one or several fieldwork sites, then, this research unfolded along assemblic relations as they became differentially distributed. Thus, in order to consider anthropologically the contemporary condition, it is not enough to note the various frictions that constitute local intricacies;11 we must ourselves travel along the assemblic relations that constitute the nonlocal complexity that sets the shared conditions for ways of being in diverse locations across the globe.
Assemblic ethnographic writing seeks to mirror this method in that it describes horizontal thickness, as it were, just as much as vertical thickness. In other words, assemblic ethnographic writing gives as much attention to tracing the widely diffused complexity of a situation across its various assemblic relations as it does to localized complexity. This book is an attempt at such assemblic ethnographic writing. For through my analysis of the ways in which the anti–drug war movement fights the drug war through political experimentations for being-together otherwise, I will also analytically describe the widely diffused complexity of the drug war that becomes differentially distributed across the globe and that in large part constitutes the shared conditions of those who get caught up within it.12 Primarily, I will do this through a number of localized drug war manifestations where this widely diffused complexity has become particularly knotted and the response of the anti–drug war movement has been particularly intense; that is, in New York City, Vancouver, and Copenhagen.
But because assemblic ethnography traces assemblic relations and does not focus on sites, I will also occasionally follow these relations so as to better understand just how truly complex this nontotalizable assemblage has become. Because the anti–drug war movement, in a sense, has already been doing assemblic analysis of that against which it fights, this book will primarily follow those involved in their endeavors to win this now forty-plus-year-old “war on people” so as to disclose some of the contours and limits of the complexity named the drug war and how it affects the being-in-the-world of those who have become caught up in its situated manifestations. In the rest of this chapter, then, I will begin by disclosing, in very broad strokes, some of the assemblic relations that constitute the drug war. In the first section, I try to show the widely diffused complexity of the drug war by briefly tracing some of its various assemblic relations as they become manifest as situations in diverse parts of the globe. After a brief interlude in which I attempt to clarify the concept of situation, I turn to Vancouver in the final section for a closer analysis of one localized and rather intense manifestation of the drug war situation and the political response to it. By briefly illustrating how anti–drug war agonists in Vancouver started doing a situation-based politics of worldbuilding and how this kind of political activity has influenced the global anti–drug war movement, I hope to provide a hermeneutic entrée into the rest of the book so the reader can better understand how the political and ethical experimentations of the anti–drug war movement unfold within the interstices of variously localized drug war situations.
WIDELY DIFFUSED COMPLEXITY AND THE SHARED CONDITIONS OF THE DRUG WAR
In October 2013, while doing research with anti–drug war agonists in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, I attended a public anti–drug war event on the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity).13 The Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who was the guest of honor at this Vancouver event, organized the Movimiento as a response to the death of his son by drug war violence, and it now consists of thousands of family members of persons similarly killed or disappeared in the violence of the drug war situation in Mexico. This is a situation in Mexico that has taken its current form in large part by means of American funds, equipment, support, and training to carry out a war in and on the border of Mexico. This is a war in which over one hundred thousand people have been killed since 2006,14 many of whom, if not the majority, were not drug users, traffickers, cartel members, or police. Rather, most of these drug war dead were simply “average” people who happened to get caught up in this drug war situation.15
The Movimiento today is most known for the traveling protests it organized called the Caravan for Peace. In 2012 the Caravan traveled throughout Mexico and the United States disclosing the violence of the drug war through stories and performances they enacted in public protest of the unnecessary deaths brought on by the drug war. Through the stories told and performances given by the Caravan, the public image of the drug war as a war against dangerous cartels that seek to harm “our children” is deconstructed, and instead a “war on people” is disclosed as an assemblage partly constituted by militarism, border security, and inequality. The hope of such deconstructive political activity is that it can dislodge hegemonic views and practices and thus provide a clearing from which political possibilities for conceiving, doing, and becoming otherwise emerge.
While this localization of the drug war situation in Mexico, like that of the localization in Colombia, tends to dominate public discourse, such localizations far from exhaust this widely diffused and differentially distributed phenomenon. Consider, for example, the short poem read at the opening of this Vancouver event by Bud Osborn,16 the Vancouver-area user-agonist-poet and one of the founding members of that city’s user union. I choose to begin with Bud’s poem, which is called “Ironic” and depicts an experience he had while hitchhiking in the United States, because it offers a hermeneutic entrée into the drug war-situated assemblage and discloses the complex, widely diffused nature of this phenomenon. Much like the deconstructive