Comment on "In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio“ by Philippe Bourgeois
Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is a Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be considered a proponent of neo-Marxist theory and of critical medical anthropology. His greatest influences include the work of French social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. In his research, Bourgeois relied on the participant-observation method, meaning that he chooses to live and integrate himself in the society he studies. To write his book “In Search of Respect”, Bourgeois was living with his family next to a crack house in East Harlem for five years during the 1980s. Furthermore, he later wrote a book called “Righteous Dopefiend” based on his time living among drug addicts on the streets in San Francisco for 12 years as well as his book “Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation” for which he lived on a banana plantation on the boarders of Costa Rica and Panama for the two years of his research in on ethnicity and social unrest.
Bourgeois says of himself that his interest on U.S. apartheid of today was greatly motivated by growing up in a bicultural household in the melting pot of New York City as well as his father’s stories of his experiences during WWII.
In the Preface to the 2003 edition of his book “In Search of Respect”, Bourgeois explains the four major dynamics that have changed life on East Harlem’s streets since the book was first published: the growth spurt of the U.S. economy, the increase in Mexican immigrant population in East Harlem, an escalation of the drug war resulting in a public policy of arresting the poor and socially marginal, and the drug fashion trends among the young.
In contrast to before, heroin consumption became more popular among white youth outside the ghetto whereas the trend among young African Americans and Latinos within the ghetto was to only sell heroin but not consume it (they preferred marijuana and malt liquor beer instead). This sort
Bourgeois says of himself that his interest on U.S. apartheid of today was greatly motivated by growing up in a bicultural household in the melting pot of New York City as well as his father’s stories of his experiences during WWII.
In the Preface to the 2003 edition of his book “In Search of Respect”, Bourgeois explains the four major dynamics that have changed life on East Harlem’s streets since the book was first published: the growth spurt of the U.S. economy, the increase in Mexican immigrant population in East Harlem, an escalation of the drug war resulting in a public policy of arresting the poor and socially marginal, and the drug fashion trends among the young.
In contrast to before, heroin consumption became more popular among white youth outside the ghetto whereas the trend among young African Americans and Latinos within the ghetto was to only sell heroin but not consume it (they preferred marijuana and malt liquor beer instead). This sort