Angela Garcia (anthropologist)
American anthropologist and ethnographer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Angela Garcia (born 1971) is an American anthropologist and ethnographer whose research examines addiction, violence, kinship, and care in the United States and Mexico.[1][2] She is professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (2024)[3][4] and The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande (2010).[5] She is a Guggenheim fellow.[6]
Angela Garcia | |
|---|---|
At the 2024 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | 1971 (age 54–55) |
| Education | |
| Occupations | Anthropologist, ethnographer |
Education and career
Angela Garcia was born in 1971.[5] She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 2007.[7]
Garcia began her postdoctoral work as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA from 2007 to 2008, served as assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine from 2008 to 2011[8], and joined Stanford University's Department of Anthropology as assistant professor in 2011.[9] She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and was appointed professor and chair of the Department in 2024.[6]
Research and scholarly works
Garcia's scholarship interrogates how structural violence, historical dispossession, and intimate relations shape practices of addiction, treatment, and care.[10][11]
Her book The Pastoral Clinic (2010) links intergenerational heroin use in northern New Mexico to colonial histories of land loss and economic marginalization[12], while The Way That Leads Among the Lost (2024) offers an ethnography of Mexico City's anexos—informal, often coercive rehabilitation spaces arguing that they function simultaneously as sites of therapeutic violence, refuge, and kin-protective labor amid widespread state absence and narcoviolence.[13]
Awards
She received the Victor Turner Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Society for Humanistic Anthropology in 2012[14][15] and the PEN Center USA[16] & UC Press Award for Exceptional First Book in 2010.[17]
She also received the Stirling Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology in 2009 for her article "The Elegiac Addict".[18][19]