Safe cigarettes

Addiction in the Making

This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise showcases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.

Ethnographic Research on Modern Business Corporations

Ethnographers have approached the modern business corporation (construed as cultural formation) from two directions: (a) the effects of corporations—on workers, communities, consumers, and the broader environment; and (b) the inner workings of corporations as small-scale (or even large-scale) societies. Although academically based ethnographic research inside corporations has grown only modestly since the 1980s, the number of anthropologists working for corporations has mushroomed. Coupled with the expansion of research on various corporate effects over the past three decades, this development, we argue, positions the discipline to make intellectual advances in theorizing the corporation (synthesizing the internal social group view with the external effects-producing agentive view), as well as practical contributions not only in monitoring harmful impacts but also in suggesting directions to enhance societal benefits. At the same time, we note that questions of access to corporate inner workings pose both practical and ethical challenges.

Nicotine control: E-cigarettes, smoking and addiction

BACKGROUND

Over the past year or so, electronic cigarettes, more commonly known as 'e-cigarettes', have achieved widespread visibility and growing popularity. These products, which deliver nicotine via an inhaled mist, have caused no small amount of controversy in public health circles, and their rise has been accompanied by energetic debate about their potential harms and benefits.

METHODS

Interspersed with an analysis of current media coverage on e-cigarettes and the response of mainstream tobacco control and public health to these devices, this article examines the emergence of nicotine as both as an 'addiction' and a treatment for addiction.

RESULTS

We argue that by delivering nicotine in way that resembles the visual spectacle and bodily pleasures of smoking, but without the harms of combustible tobacco, e-cigarettes highlight the complex status of nicotine as both a poison and remedy in contemporary public health and tobacco control.

CONCLUSION

In consequence, e-cigarettes jeopardize the carefully drawn distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' forms of nicotine.

Smokeless tobacco: a gender analysis and nursing focus

In recent times, rates of consumption of smokeless tobacco have increased significantly amongst specific subgroups of men, particularly young college men. Recent increases in smokeless tobacco consumption have been characterized by a shift from chewing tobacco to moist snuff. In addition to laying out the health risks of moist snuff, this article describes the social and gendered meanings of smokeless tobacco that reinforce its use. Men-centered approaches to raising awareness about the connections between moist snuff and oral cancer and the availability of oral cancer screening are highlighted as 2 key nursing practice considerations.

Tobacco

Anthropologists have long studied tobacco, what is today the world's greatest cause of preventable death. Their publications have garnered modest attention, however, even as the academy is increasingly interested in global health, transnational commoditization, pharmaceuticals, and the politics of life and death. We take stock of anthropology's tobacco literature and our discipline's broader appetites. We review how colleagues have studied health issues related to tobacco and engaged with theory and policy pertaining to the production, consumption, and regulation of drugs. We assess ways scholars working at the interface of anthropology and cigarettes have analyzed gender and ethnicity, corporate predation and industry-related harm, governmental management of disease, and the semiotics of misinformation. We discuss why anthropology has not more broadly and ardently engaged the study of tobacco. And we identify areas for further research capable of illuminating more fully tobacco's analytical potential and toxic effects.

Tobacco talk: reflections on corporate power and the legal framing of consumption

This article examines how North Carolina tobacco farmers think about the moral ambiguities of tobacco business. Drawing on ethnographic research with tobacco farmers and archival research on the tobacco industry, I specify the core psychological defense mechanisms that tobacco companies have crafted for people associated with the industry. I also document local social, cultural, and economic factors in rural North Carolina that underpin ongoing rural dependence on tobacco despite the negativity that surrounds tobacco and structural adjustments. This article contributes to our knowledge about tobacco farmers and tobacco farming communities, which is important for tobacco-control strategies. I reflect on ethical and economic paradoxes related to the rise of corporate social responsibility in the tobacco industry, where an official legal framing of consumption, focused on informed adult consumer autonomy and health education, is promoted to undermine more robust public health prevention efforts.