Talking to ... Danya Fast

There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal
something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s
drawn our attention to a young anthropologist whose work with
young, primarily indigenous drug addicts in Vancouver reveals a
picture that’s as paradoxical as it is surprising: namely a
driving force behind addiction is an irrepressible longing for
normality, that suburban life with a wife, family and steady job
that’s been vaulted by the media in such role models as the
vanilla girl, the tradwife, and the family guy. This indicates
that the ‘normalcy of the everyday’ which the boomer generation
fled has become an unredeemable dream of life for even large
sections of the working class, raising the question if this
normalcy has become an unredeemable life dream even for large
sections of the working class. If that’s the case, it indicates
yet another major upheaval in our current Social Drive. In a way,
this also mirrors Danya Fast’s anthropological career. After
examining the life dreams of young men in Africa as part of her
early collaborative work, her gaze shifted to her native
Vancouver: to the living conditions of young people who, as the
title of her book says, The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention,
and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver. Indeed, the drug crisis,
having been exacerbated by the advent of fentanyl, shapes the
image of this highly affluent city. As in San Francisco, luxury
and misery go hand in hand. In the tradition of participant
observation, which has characterized anthropology since
Malinowski, Danya Fast immersed herself in the underground life
of this city - and that’s what our conversation is all about.


Danya Fast received her MA from the University of Amsterdam and
her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of British
Columbia, where she’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Medicine. Her research papers and interests can be found at
Academia, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar.


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