Blackouts, Addiction, and Agency amongst London’s Homeless
By Joshua Burraway
A study of homelessness and addiction exploring the void of drug-induced blackout and its impact on identity and time.
What does it mean to exist outside the normative temporality of life, of housed living, and, ultimately, of selfhood? Becoming Somebody Else takes up this question, offering a window into the fragmented and chaotic lives of people experiencing homelessness in urban London as they drink and drug themselves into blackout in post-austerity Britain. A state of being where time, body, agency, and self collapse into a memoryless abyss, the blackout is a prism into how human beings make and unmake their selfhood in the wake of social suffering and personal trauma. Attending to the words and histories of several individuals, Joshua Burraway knits together structural, psychological, and phenomenological approaches to understand the ways in which memory, agency, and selfhood are sites of struggle and belonging, and in doing so, suggests new ways of thinking about addiction, homelessness, and therapeutic possibility.
“A brilliant ethnography of addiction: superbly written, flush with phenomenally erudite scholarship that is fun to read, and crystal clear. Burraway conveys the spectacular humanity and tormented sociability of people no one wants to be around—unless they are a saint or are drinking-and-drugging themselves to death. He sets them in the historical-structural contexts that ripped their lives apart, while simultaneously exploring their individualities. He plumbs the elusive selfhood of their blotto blackouts, but the vitality of his characters leaps from the pages, including the artistic genius of several of them (with prints of a few breathtaking paintings). This contemporary archive of fallible humanity surplused by Britain’s version of neoliberal racism makes you root for them, and you will find yourself remembering them long after putting the book down.”
— Philippe Bourgois, coauthor of Righteous Dopefiend
“A welcome and rare in-depth work on people trapped in homelessness in Britain’s austerity state. Burraway manages to bring the world of people who live in a London park, seemingly alongside us yet also very distant and often ignored, up close. In engaging detail and flowing prose, he tells us about their desires and companionship, and not simply their suffering. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical and anthropological perspectives, putting the politics of “the blackout” in conjunction with artwork created and lost, this is a timely reminder of the dynamic yet unappreciated lives running parallel to ours.”
— Johannes Lenhard, author of Making Better Lives: Hope, Freedom, and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris
“What happens when time slips and one’s own body fades to oblivion only to return again as an other? Is it possible to answer this? Is it really even possible to ask? These are the kinds of questions one is led to after reading Burraway’s rich, erudite, and—despite the subject matter—beautifully written ethnography of addicted homeless persons in London’s Itchy Park. Becoming Somebody Else is a masterwork in phenomenological anthropology and is destined to be read as such. You should read it now.”
— Jarrett Zigon, author of How Is It Between Us? Relational Ethics and Care for the World
Joshua Burraway is an Honorary Associate Professor in the anthropology department at University College London and writes on social theory, critical phenomenology, psychiatry, and emerging technologies.
© HAU Books 2025
ISBN: 9781914363290 [paperback]
ISBN:9781914363115 [PDF]
6″ x 9″, 325 pp.
$35
Contents
Dropping Like Flies
Anthropology and Intoxication
The Art of Intoxication
What Are We Forgetting?
Unpacking the Toolkit
Clock Time, Subjective Time, and Consciousness
Contextual Chemicals
Difference and Sameness, Phenomenology, and Psychodynamics
Outline of the Book
A Note on Gender
Fields of Play
Itchy Park and Itchycoo Park
The Welfare State and Spaces of Homelessness
Homelessness and New Labour
The Age of Austerity
Itchy People
Waste Not, Want Not
Boredom: A Brief History
Looking the Right Way
The Rush
Bittersweet Branches
Going Out with a Bang
The Godfather
Taking the Piss
The Rumor Mill
Moving On
Real Pain and Letting Go
Interruptions and Dissociation
Memory and Metamorphosis
The Crisis of Presence
Memory, Mourning, and Rituals of the Self
The Singularity
Remember What?
Rewind and Fast Forward
Swiss Cheese and Lost Time
The Last Traveler
Amnesiac Ballads and Double Images
Possession without Spirits
Lost and Found
The Strange and the Familiar
Anthropological Poetics and White Holes
Limitless