Abstract
Based on 16 months of fieldwork conducted at drug addiction treatment facilities in Yunnan, Southwest China, this article examines how Chinese drug users invent moralist selves during the frequent occurrences of shifei incidents. Shìfēi, meaning literally right/wrong, is a crucial concept in Chinese society with two contradictory meanings: (1) moral norms/judgment that ought to be discerned and followed (SHI-FEI); (2) “troubles” or “quarrels” that are often morally undesirable (shifei). By delving into a typical incident of shifei, this article analyzes the logic, motivation, and interpretations of the drug users and addiction treatment facility staff who are involved in the local moral world. It argues that for drug users, the relationship between SHI-FEI and shifei is not oppositional, as often assumed. Instead, both are valuable moral experiences and useful cultural means in response to users’ moral demands and tensions. Negotiating SHI-FEI and shifei enables an ambiguous space in which drug users seek, claim, and practice their moralist selves. This article also argues that under various sociopolitical and moral constraints, drug users’ moral selves are characterized by an inward focus on claims of morality and legitimacy. This inward focus reflects a process of moral involution. This study contributes to understandings of moral self-making in stigmatized situations.
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Notes
In my fieldwork, staff members often use the term “medicine drinker”(服药人员), “patients”(病人), or “peers”(同伴) to refer to people who have participated in the MMT program. However, people receiving methadone treatment often refer to each other as “drug users” (吸毒的/吃药的) or “people like us/them” (我们这样的人/他们那种人). In this article, I, thus, use “patients,” “peers,” and “drug users” to describe my informants.
Peer educators are those who not only are receiving methadone treatment but also take roles as staff members in the clinics.
T-1 Station has enrolled more than one hundred patients, but most of them would not join lunch.
The meaning of “shifei” is very different from these words. For example, staff members thought there were few conflicts, but too many shifei incidents at the center. When discussing gossip or rumors, both staff and patients complained that gossip and rumors might lead to shifei incidents.
In Zhuangzi Daozhi (Zhonghua shuju 2010 version of Zhuangzi.).
Most of these clinics are run by China’ Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hyde investigated how the self is cared for when ideologies adopted in confessional modes of 12-step Narcotics Anonymous programs overlap with China's coercive Maoist self-criticism program in a "military-like" residential therapeutic community (Hyde 2011, 2016). During my own fieldwork, “self-remolding” was sometimes mentioned in state-run compulsory rehabilitation centers. However, in the state-run outpatient MMT facilities, “self” was rarely mentioned. “Self-remolding” was considered by many staff members as a “out of fashioned” method.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Benson, Joseph Bosco, Tom McDonald, David Palmer, Steven Pijut, Carolyn Sargent, Lihong Shi, Priscilla Song, Brad Stoner, James Wertsch, Yang Zhan, as well as the editor and reviewers for their insightful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The fieldwork for this article was supported by grants from Washington University in St. Louis, the Hang Seng Bank Golden Jubilee Education Fund for Research, and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project no. HKU C7011-16G), “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th–21st Centuries”).
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Zhang, C. Negotiating SHI-FEI and shifei: Pursuing a Moralist Self in China’s Community-Based Addiction Treatment Programs. Cult Med Psychiatry 46, 435–455 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09724-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09724-7