Philippe Bourgois

The son of an Auschwitz survivor and wealthy mother from New York City, celebrated urban and medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois is best remembered for his ethnographic studies of American inner-city life, including In Search of Respect, although he conducted his early research largely in Central America. His dissertation at Stanford was based on his research at a banana plantation on the Costa Rica-Panama border (which formed the basis for his first book in 1989, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation). His early ethnographic work also took him to Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, and Paris. Since the 1990s, however, he has focused on the urban United States, especially New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, on which his third and latest ethnography is based (Righteous Dopefiend, co-authored with Jeffrey Schonberg, 2009). Beyond his three ethnographies, Bourgois has authored hundreds of articles and edited a number of volumes, including two with celebrated anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Violence in War and Peace and Violence at the Urban Margins. His most recent work looks at how medical, psychiatric, and prison systems in the United States are used to manage, evaluate, and castigate Americans living in inner cities. This has also led him to various research projects for the National Institutes of Health and applied work evaluating state policies toward people with mental illness. After a long tenure at San Francisco State University (1988-1998), Bourgois helped found and chaired the interdisciplinary Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where he taught for the next decade (1998-2007). He moved to the University of Pennsylvania from 2007-2016 and returned to California to direct UCLA’s School of Medicine’s Center for Social Medicine and Humanities.