Angela Garcia (anthropologist)

Angela Garcia
At the 2024 Texas Book Festival
Born1971 (age 54–55)
Education
OccupationsAnthropologist, ethnographer

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]

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]

References

  1. ↑ Kim, Mina (April 30, 2024). "Inside Mexico's Clandestine Drug Treatment Centers | KQED". www.kqed.org. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  2. ↑ Paley, Dawn Marie (June 12, 2025). "A Shelter or a Prison?". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 72, no. 10. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  3. ↑ Ahmed, Azam (April 28, 2024). "Inside Mexico's Brutal Drug Rehabs for the Poor". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  4. ↑ Junghans, Alessa (December 2, 2025). "Book Review: Garcia, Angela (2024) The Way That Leads among the Lost. Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux". Ethnoscripts. 27 (1). doi:10.15460/ethnoscripts.2025.27.1.2458. ISSN 2199-7942.
  5. 1 2 Garcia, Angela (2010). The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande (1 ed.). University of California Press. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1pppms. ISBN 978-0-520-25829-7.
  6. 1 2 Ghosal, Angikar (April 29, 2026). "'How to live when one's way of life has been destroyed': Guggenheim fellow Angela Garcia on loss, resilience and ethnography". Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  7. ↑ "Angela Garcia | Institute for the Study of Societal Issues". issi.berkeley.edu. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  8. ↑ Matsunaga, Kim. "In Conversation with Angela Garcia, UCI Anthropologist". www.socsci.uci.edu. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  9. ↑ Elliott, Denielle (February 12, 2021). "Writing Life No. 8: An interview with Angela Garcia". Writing Life.
  10. ↑ Cooper, Jessica; Romero, Andrés (February 1, 2017). "Violence a Long Way Back: with Angela Garcia". Society for Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  11. ↑ Garcia, Angela (May 2, 2024). "A Struggle for Survival: Inside Mexico City's Illegal Detox Centers". Literary Hub. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  12. ↑ Livingston, Julie (2011). "The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande by Angela Garcia". American Anthropologist. 113 (2): 364–365. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01344_9.x. ISSN 0002-7294.
  13. ↑ Jusionyte, Leva (June 27, 2024). "The Ethnography of Deep Suffering: On Angela Garcia's "The Way That Leads Among the Lost"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  14. ↑ romy (September 22, 2023). "Something We Call Care: Land, Community, and the Social Imaginary". Couched Podcast. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  15. ↑ "Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing | Discover Top Ethnographic Works Today". Society of Humanistic Anthropology. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  16. ↑ "Garcia wins prestigious PEN book award". www.socsci.uci.edu. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  17. ↑ "UC Press ASA Award-Winning Authors". University of California Press. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  18. ↑ "Prof. Garcia receives Stirling Prize from Society for Psychological Anthropology". www.socsci.uci.edu. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  19. ↑ "SPA Stirling Prize – SPA". spa.americananthro.org. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
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