Event overview
Battling Cocaine and the Devil in Guatemala City, with Kevin Lewis O'Neill, University of Toronto
Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala City are informal responses to growing levels of drug use. Often staged inside of abandoned factories and condemned buildings, these centers hold drug users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. Suffused with the rhetoric of domesticity, these all-male institutions do their best to save these drug users from what Pentecostals understand to be the devil. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters, and wives of these users serve as de facto judges and jurors as well as social workers and parole officers for what amounts to an unregulated system of community-based drug courts. This talk, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organizes the outer edges of today’s war on drugs.
About the speaker:
A cultural and social anthropologist, Kevin Lewis O’Neill is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of City of God (California 2010), Secure the Soul (California 2015), and Hunted (Chicago May 2019).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Nov 2018 | 12:00pm - 2:00pm |
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