Making a Home with/in Others: Addiction, Dependence, and Parasitic Politics in Kyrgyzstan

Ascriptions of parasitism in Kyrgyzstan carry the historical legacy of Soviet laws. Bolstered by an ideology that fetishised productive labour, classes of people who were deemed idle and unproductive were criminalised. These included drug addicts, a population that became much more visible in the public sphere after the end of socialism. Entering the lifeworlds of chronically homeless and unemployed individuals who struggle with opioid addiction, I interrogate social and medical discourses of dependence in order to scaffold an analysis of parasitism as a strategy and a politics. I focus on one woman’s search for care and shelter, eventually moving into the home of another, to argue that her parasitism is actually an active endeavour requiring deep relational labour, one that relies on a web of dependencies between people, substances, and things across social and ontological boundaries.