The social potential of music for addiction recovery

Abstract

This article examines music and music scholarship vis-à-vis research findings in addictions sciences. It explains how music is socially useful for preventing and treating addiction. Making music with others, and all of the social and cultural activities that go into doing so—musicking—can foster psychosocial integration and social cohesion, via specific cultural and musical mechanisms, and in ways that can salve addictions. Alexander’s social dislocation theory of addiction serves as the theoretical framework for the study. I draw empirical support for the discussion from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork on Indigenous addiction rehabilitation settings in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis of those settings finds that connecting socially via musicking in ways that can prevent and treat addiction happens through different ways of being, ideas and focuses of attention—such as constructs of ethnicity, around spirituality/religion, and social and political values—that are shared among musicking people and perceived via their eight senses (the auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, vestibular, proprioceptive, and interoceptive). This article responds to a lack of music and cultural research on the correlation between social disconnection and addiction as well as a lack of study on the social potential of musical cultures to prevent and treat addictions. The article lays groundwork for future research on the roles that musicking can play in addiction recovery.