Residential ethnography, mixed loyalties, and religious power: ethical dilemmas in faith-based addiction treatment

Abstract

The paper provides a platform for geographical reflection on the hidden struggles ethnographers face working in the area of religion, addiction and drug treatment. Specifically, it examines the complex ethical and practical dilemmas involved in residential ethnography inside a faith-based therapeutic community working in the area of addiction and rehabilitation. Residential ethnography provided valuable insights into social life in therapeutic community, and more broadly, offers an ethical and participatory approach to research in closed institutional settings. Residential immersion in faith-based therapeutic environments however raised significant challenges around identity management; access and consent; and the dilemma of ‘mixed loyalties’ – a term that describes a set of ethical practices characterised by ethical conflict, compromise and negotiation in which the researcher, by nature of their participation, is expected to conform to certain values, practices, and procedures that may contradict their own personal ethics. To ground discussion on the variegated and contested nature of mixed loyalties, this paper examines the exercise of religious power and the ways ethnographers become enrolled in, and must negotiate, a series of power-dynamics that are unclear, uncomfortable, and potentially exclusionary. By illustrating the difficult decisions ethnographers must make when negotiating pressures to uphold – or challenge – religious beliefs and practices in faith-based addiction treatment settings, this paper calls for greater critical reflection on the ways geographers are implicated in the field and the practical ethics of engagement used to navigate ethical tensions.

Résumé

Cet article fournit une plate-forme à la réflexion géographique sur les luttes invisibles auxquelles les ethnographes doivent faire face dans le domaine de la religion, de l’addiction et du traitement médicamenteux. En particulier, il examine les dilemmes éthiques et pratiques complexes impliqués dans l’ethnographie résidentielle au sein d’une communauté thérapeutique confessionnelle travaillant dans le domaine de l’addiction et de la réhabilitation. L’ethnographie résidentielle a apporté de précieux renseignements sur la vie sociale au sein des communautés thérapeutiques et de façon plus générale, elle propose une approche éthique et participative à la recherche dans des cadres institutionnels fermés. L’immersion résidentielle dans des environnements thérapeutiques confessionnels a toutefois soulevé des défis importants concernant la gestion de l’identité, l’accès et le consentement et le dilemme des « loyautés contradictoires », un terme qui décrit un ensemble de pratiques éthiques caractérisées par un conflit éthique, un compromis et une négociation. Les chercheurs, en raison même de leur participation, sont censés se conformer à certaines valeurs, pratiques et procédés qui risquent d’être en contradiction avec leur propre éthique personnelle. Pour fixer la discussion sur la nature diverse et contestée des loyautés contradictoires, cet article examine l’exercice du pouvoir religieux et comment les ethnographes se retrouvent impliqués dans des séries de dynamiques de pouvoir, qu’ils doivent négocier, qui ne sont pas claires, sont désagréables et sont des sources potentielles d’exclusion. En illustrant les décisions difficiles que les ethnographes doivent prendre quand ils négocient les pressions pour faire respecter – ou défier – les croyances religieuses et les pratiques dans la prise en charge du traitement de l’addiction dans un cadre confessionnel, cet article invite à une réflexion critique plus importante sur les façons dont les géographes sont impliqués sur le terrain et l’engagement pratique de déontologie utilisé pour négocier les tensions d’ordre moral.

Resumen

El documento proporciona una plataforma para la reflexión geográfica acerca de las dificultades ocultas que los etnógrafos enfrentan al trabajar en el área de la religión, la adicción y el tratamiento farmacológico. En concreto, se examinan los complejos dilemas éticos y prácticos involucrados en la etnografía residencial dentro de una comunidad terapéutica basada en la fe que actúa en el área de la adicción y la rehabilitación. La etnografía residencial proporcionó información valiosa sobre la vida social en la comunidad terapéutica y, en general, ofrece un enfoque ético y participativo para la investigación en marcos de instituciones cerradas. La inmersión residencial en entornos terapéuticos basados ​​en la fe, sin embargo, planteó importantes desafíos alrededor de la gestión de la identidad; el acceso y el consentimiento; y el dilema de las ‘lealtades mixtas’ — un término que describe un conjunto de prácticas éticas caracterizadas por el conflicto ético, el compromiso y la negociación en los que, por la naturaleza de su participación, se espera que el investigador se ajuste a ciertos valores, prácticas y procedimientos que pueden ir en contra de su ética personal. Para asentar la discusión sobre la naturaleza abigarrada y controvertida de las lealtades mixtas, este trabajo examina el ejercicio del poder religioso y las formas en las que los etnógrafos se inscriben en, y deben negociar, una serie de dinámicas de poder que no están claras, que no son cómodas y que son potencialmente excluyentes. Al ilustrar las decisiones difíciles que los etnógrafos deben tomar en la negociación de las presiones para defender — o desafiar — las creencias y prácticas religiosas en entornos de tratamiento de adicción basados ​​en la fe, este trabajo llama a una mayor reflexión crítica sobre las formas en las que los geógrafos están implicados en el campo y la ética práctica de compromiso utilizada para dirigir las tensiones éticas.

Keywords:

• Residential ethnography
• religious power
• ethical dilemmas
• positionality
• addiction

Mots clés:

• ethnographie résidentielle
• pouvoir religieux
• dilemmes éthiques
• prise de position
• addiction

Palabras clave:

• etnografía residencial
• poder religioso
• dilemas éticos
• posicionalidad
• adicción

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank members of the Hebron community who participated in this research, for their helpful guidance and for welcoming me into their community. I also wish to thank Nadia von Benzon, Richard Gale, Paul Cloke, Mark Jayne, Richard Gorman, Geoff DeVerteuil, as well as Rob Wilton and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. All oversights, however, remain my own.

Notes

1. Ethnographic and participatory work with street drug cultures present a series of additional ethical, methodological and practical challenges. Many of these issues have been addressed in Sandberg and Copes’ (2013) excellent account of the ‘hidden ethnographies’ of street drug cultures, including ethical and practical dilemmas ethnographers must negotiate in the field, with regard to, for example, drug participation, ‘taking sides’, informed consent, confidentiality, payment, and ensuring physical safety and legal security in the field for both participants and researchers.

2. Individuals with higher support needs were encouraged to seek medical detoxification or psychiatric support prior to arrival.

3. It is common in evangelical Christian drug rehabilitation programmes for leaders and staff members to be former ‘graduates’ of the programme in order to enable peer-led recovery.

4. In cases where the researcher is not a permanent member of staff or volunteer of an organisation the idea of mixed loyalties might be better expressed as ‘mixed responsibilities’ to denote the temporal nature of the relationship. However, in organisational welfare settings, particular those which have become professionalised and embed a set code of conduct for volunteers to follow, the term mixed loyalties is appropriate in addressing the conflictual ethical decisions ethnographers must make performing their role as a volunteer. As noted above, ‘mixed loyalties’ is applicable to researcher subjectivity also so as to highlight the more durable and less fleeting ethical tensions that arise as part of the researcher-participant-field dynamic.

5. The notion of religious power more widely relates to the broad set of engagements with Foucault’s examination of religion and its variants of discipline, confessional and pastoral power. These intersections are developed in considerably more depth than can be achieved here (see Carrette, 2000, 2013; Garmany, 2010).

6. For a discussion on masculinity and faith-based recovery spaces, see Hansen (2012).

7. In this way, practices of worship can be partly understood as a technology of the self that entails an acknowledgement of the relation of self to a Big Other which‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’(Foucault, 1988, p. 18).

8. For a critical account on the discourse of ‘recovery’ and its co-constitution via moral, religious, psychological, criminal and medical registers, see White (2005).

9. These practical experiences also led to a wider belief that the criminalisation of drug use is short-sighted as it is counterproductive (Corva, 2008), often pushing people with complex psychological and medical problems further away from accessing the right support services, and perpetuates the abject figure of ‘the addict’ that gives legitimacy for the further retrenchment and moralisation of existing welfare support.

10. Academic criticism of the workings of religious power within ambivalent dynamics of care/control is a necessary but not entirely sufficient account of the complex ethical space of Hebron’s therapeutic community. While my focus here has been the ethnographic challenges entailed in navigating the values and organisational practices of Hebron, faith-based therapeutic communities invite supplementary readings that better bring to the fore the affective and ethical geographies that evade easy categorisation under conventional grammars of analysis (May & Cloke, 2014). This includes the therapeutic and transformative potentialities among both staff and residents, the performativity of religious experience, and the sincere commitment of individuals to spend much of their lives living with and caring for marginal and highly stigmatised populations, and in doing so, take vows to dwell in semi-monastic community that seems counter-cultural to the pervasive values in society: for example, a vow of material poverty, shared finance, and chastity for non-married members. For some staff and residents, this might be understood in terms of ‘protecting’ their own recovery and that of others; but nevertheless this provides an important counterweight to any simple portrayal of Hebron and its organisational practices as a ‘total institution’ in Goffman’s terms.