In Search of Respect: Introduction Summary & Analysis

Bourgois begins that he “was forced into crack against my will.” In 1985, when he first moved to East Harlem (“El Barrio”) to study “the experience of poverty and ethnic segregation in the heart of one of the most expensive cities in the world,” crack did not exist yet. But over the next year, “the multibillion-dollar crack cyclone” consumed the neighborhood and  took over the lives of most of the people who lived there. The sidewalk in front of Bourgois’s house became covered in used drug paraphernalia, and remained that way 10 years later, when he published this book. (The only change is the resurgence of heroin).

In his first subsection, “The Underground Economy,” Bourgois explains that his book is really about “deeper dynamics of social marginalization and alienation,” of which drugs are “merely a symptom.” Given their official incomes, most East Harlem residents should not be able to survive in Manhattan—half live below the poverty line, and most survive through the “underground economy,” which includes work ranging from babysitting and bartending to illegal construction jobs and, of course, selling drugs, the most lucrative of all. “Heroin, crack, powder cocaine, hypodermic needles, methadone, Valium, angel dust, marijuana, mescaline, bootleg alcohol, and tobacco” are all available within two blocks of Bourgois’s apartment, on street corners, in crackhouses, and from medical clinics. And millions of dollars flow constantly through the neighborhood, “at least in the short run,” it is more lucrative to join this industry than the legal one that pays minimum wage.

Bourgois emphasizes that official data undercount inner-city residents (men by at least 20%) and finding any data about the underground economy is even harder, but it is telling that only 46% of the households in Bourgois’s apartment’s vicinity reported any official income, since the difference must be made up by some underground source (although not necessarily drugs).

In his second subheading, “Street Culture: Resistance and Self-Destruction,” Bourgois argues that the cultural exclusion youth in El Barrio feel elsewhere in New York has led them to create what he names “inner-city street culture,” a set of “beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies” that allows people to develop dignity while resisting dominant culture, which nevertheless inevitably cannibalizes street culture. And this street culture tends to cannibalize its participants, embroiling them in violence and drugs—even though the majority of the people who live in El Barrio “have nothing to do with drugs.” Yet drugs are visible because they take over public space, and therefore “set the tone for public life.” Because of their influence, Bourgois wants to understand these “addicts, thieves, and dealers” and befriended them during his time in El Barrio. Even if extreme, their stories reveal larger issues and social processes.

Under the introduction’s third subheading, “Ethnographic Methods and Negative Stereotyping,” Bourgois expresses his fear “that the life stories and events presented in this book will be misread as negative stereotypes” and explains that he has tried to balance a consideration of these stereotypes with the need to realistically depict “the suffering and destruction that exists on inner-city streets.” This is necessary in order to reveal “the contradictions of the politics of representation of social marginalization in the United States” and “build an alternative, critical understanding of the U.S. inner city” based in “the interface between structural oppression and individual action,” with a special attention to gender.

Bourgois reiterates that ordinary, quantitative social science “cannot access with any degree of accuracy the people who survive in the underground economy” because these people are largely erased from official statistics and suspicious of those who try to study them. This is why cultural anthropology’s tools are necessary: they are capable of “establishing long-term relationships based on trust” and “collect[ing] ‘accurate data’” even if they “violate the canons of positivist research.” Bourgois passed “hundreds of nights” with people who sell and use drugs, recording their stories and befriending their families.

While “the self-conscious reflexivity called for by postmodernists” helps Bourgois account for the gap between his social position—as a privileged white researcher—and those of his marginalized subjects, he criticizes “the profoundly elitist tendencies of many postmodernist approaches,” which confound “politics” with “poetics” and unnecessarily intellectualize “the urgent social crises” they study, turning “scholarly self-reflection […] into narcissistic celebrations of privilege” and rejecting the structural thinking necessary to confront real oppression.

Bourgois also critiques “anthropology’s functionalist paradigm,” which leads anthropologists to seek to show the “order and community” in the societies they study and ignore marginalized peoples and behaviors that disprove this assumption of order. Anthropologists also sometimes empathize with their subjects to the point of ignoring those people’s negative circumstances, actions, and environments.

Anthropologists also tend to focus on “exotic other[s],” which leads them to avoid the societies where they live and exoticize those societies when they do study them—both trends Bourgois seeks to avoid. He refuses to create “a pornography of violence that reinforces popular stereotypes,” but also does not want to “sanitize the vulnerable” like many anthropologists. Finding a middle ground is difficult in the United States, where the public tends to see the suffering of the marginalized as proof of “[low] personal worth and racial determinism.” Because Americans tend to ignore structural factors and blame people for their own poverty, many academics “have unreflexively latched on to positive representations of the oppressed,” a tendency that has created backlash to Bourgois’s book and silenced the stories he has sought to tell.

Under the introduction’s final subheading, “Critiquing the Culture of Poverty,” Bourgois looks to Oscar Lewis’s infamous 1960s ethnography La Vida, a study of one Puerto Rican family which “scared a generation of social scientists away from studying the inner city” by problematically focusing on personality and family values from a Freudian perspective, but forgetting the role of “history, culture, and political-economic structures.” Despite Lewis’s intent to help the people he studied, conservatives latched onto his argument about the “culture of poverty” to argue that the poor are “unworthy,” and to blame for their own condition. Instead, Bourgois believes that anthropological accounts of inner-city poverty in the Untied States must acknowledge the role of “hostile race relations and structural economic dislocation.”

But remembering structural problems was often difficult on the ground, when, for instance, the pain of watching “a pregnant friend fanatically smoking crack” was not dulled by “remember[ing] the history of her people’s colonial oppression and humiliation.” And thinking only in terms of structure “obscures the fact that humans are active agents in their own history.” It is important to see both agency and structure, like how street culture “shape[s] the oppression that larger forces impose” on the people who live it. While Bourgois “cannot resolve the structure-versus-agency debate” or ensure readers will not try to turn his stories against the people who tell them, he feels obligated (personally, ethically, analytically, and theoretically) to reveal “the horrors [he] witnessed.” This can hopefully allow the United States to confront the racism and systemic poverty that plague it, but there is always a chance that his narrative will turn into “a pornography of violence.”