Life with the Maladie Alcoolique: Conceptions of Drinking and Abstinence in a French Mutual-Aid Group
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores conceptualisations of alcohol dependence and abstinence in Vie Libre, a French mutual-aid group. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Paris, France, both with a local group chapter and addictions specialists at a nearby hospital, it describes how group members conceived of their drinking histories, understood themselves to be suffering the “maladie alcoolique,” and buttressed that understanding via their group involvement. It argues that their concept of the maladie was referentially inclusive, its non-specificity bounded by a tautological relationship with abstinence, and could thus accommodate considerable variations of experience, thought and feeling both between and within individual members. It shows how understandings of their maladie were open to contestation and disruption but that their self-descriptions as malades were collectively stabilised by their participation in Vie Libre. Drawing on participant observation with addictology doctors, it is claimed that clinical encounters were not reductive of patient experiences and self-interpretations, as if “formal” diagnostic entities (as of the DSM or ICD) abutted and threatened them, but in fact were predicated on them. Finally, in comparison with the speaking styles described of Alcoholics Anonymous, it is shown that Vie Libre participation encouraged provisionality and experimentation in self-representation and did not entail the adoption of a specific story of drinking or a substantively restrictive identity as a malade. Altogether, this work offers a description of mutual-aid group participation based on conceptual and affective variability and inclusivity, including that provoked by close collaboration with specialists and formalised involvement in medical institutions, and undergirded by discursive norms that encouraged narrative heterogeneity. This ethnography aims to contribute to the anthropological literatures on ethics, concepts and medical narratives, as well as to understandings of addiction, abstinence, and patient support groups.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".