Syllabus
Course: Coca, Cocaine, Demons, and Wars
Instructor: Isaias Rojas-Perez, an instructor in the
Krieger School's
Department of Anthropology
Course description: This course takes the case of
cocaine to consider in historical perspective the social,
political, and cultural processes through which the Andean
coca leaf, as key ingredient of cocaine, has been put at the
center of an international conflict that entails questions of
traditional cultures, indigenous rights, social movements,
national sovereignty, counterinsurgency, and violence in the
United States and Latin America.
Partial reading and viewing list:
The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean
Community, by Catherine J. Allen
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by
Philippe Bourgois
Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of U.S.
Policy, by Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin (eds.)
Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, by Paul
Gootenberg
History of Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas, by W.
Golden Mortimer
The Coca Boom and Rural Social Change in Bolivia, by
Harry Sanabria
Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug
Use and Community Health, by Merrill Singer
Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer
Drugs, by Philip Jenkins
Traffic (film), directed by Steven Soderbergh
Cocalero (film), directed by Alejandro Landes
Maria Full of Grace (film), directed by Joshua
Marston
—DK