| Few scholars who study Alcoholics Anonymous systematically consider the experiential base of its understanding of alcoholism and recovery. Instead, they emphasize the cultural base of A.A. knowledge. Therefore, the literature on Alcoholics Anonymous does not adequately investigate the movement's implicit claim that experience and cultural knowledge must inform each other in each member's recovery. In some cases this oversight has produced misleading scholarly representations of how members recover. A.A. knowledge is considered apart from the members' who hold it, and therefore members are portrayed as passive recipients of healing. Scholarship in Medical Folklife and the Anthropology of Experience emphasizes that individuals rely on experience and cultural knowledge to understand health and illness. These perspectives advocate using ethnographic research methods to describe health and illness phenomena, and analyze subjective understandings of them. Medical Folklife scholars have found that vernacular knowledge about health and illness is systematically organized, and usually grounded in accurate empirical observation and logical reasoning. I rely upon these research perspectives to critically review the relevant literature on A.A. and alcoholism. I demonstrate how, in overlooking the role of experience in A.A. recovery, scholars have presented distorted accounts of it. I then analyze my own data from a year of fieldwork in one A.A. community, in order to explore how members learn and what they learn in recovery. I look at what A.A. members learn about personal change, the nature of life, emotional balance, the recovery of self, humanity and spirituality. I conclude that A.A. members actively engage in intellectual work in order to recover. They make extensive empirical observations and logical connections, in order to fit A.A. knowledge with their experience as active and recovering alcoholics. They thereby test the credibility and validity of A.A. knowledge, and they conclude that it is sound. Narrative serves primarily as a vehicle for this process. In A.A., personal experience and vernacular knowledge inform each other. |
