A Users' Ethnographic Study of Heroine: The Use of the Reflexive Practice

This study is a reflexive exercise based on own experience: an ethnographic study of heroin users carried out in a Barcelona city neighborhood between 1994 to 1997. We will try to demonstrate what reflexive practice is, understood both as a way of making knowledge "objectivable" (rational-epistemological issues, & ethical-political issues). The theoretical frame they have been poststructural perspectives. I have carried out 44 interviews & employed 5 fieldwork research reports. The specific aims are: a) to indicate a procedure that would approximate the audience or reader with the particular experience of the researcher, b) to criticize our own production practice of psycho-social knowledge, & c) to explore the "self" of subjectivity in the research process. In my narrative, "sociologizing" training discourses (ie., legal, relational, cultural matters etc. about drugs) have predominated over those which are "naturalizing" (ie., sensorial, pharmacological, psychological matters etc.). Different "self" are formed at every moment & throughout the development of the narrated experience. By introducing the "self" in the fieldwork (both the "self" as well as the "alter")(Hertz, 1997; Coffey, 1999), I introduce a problemizing of the data. At the same time, I reconceptualize the "self" & resignify the data. Adapted from the source document.