Philippe Bourgois’s In Search of Respect is the result of the years-long intensive ethnographic research the author conducted in order to “build an alternative, critical understanding of the U.S. inner city.” From 1985-1990, a period now retrospectively considered the beginning of the “crack epidemic,” Bourgois moved to El Barrio, or East Harlem, a largely impoverished and historically Puerto Rican neighborhood of his native New York City. He chooses ethnography because the phenomena he wants to study are illegal and therefore resistant to being known through official or general statistics: to understand El Barrio’s crackhouses, underground economy, and street culture, Bourgois must win, sustain, and respect people’s trust as a friend and confidant. Although many see Bourgois as bravely taking on a dangerous project, his research is risky not because he might get hurt in El Barrio—this assumption is actually part and parcel of the racism he is trying to combat. Rather, the danger he must avoid lies in both the practice and the reception of ethnography: anthropologists can easily abuse the trust they build, and the public can easily misinterpret his research, using it to either sensationalize people’s suffering or portray those people as evil and unworthy of help.
Bourgois chooses a qualitative ethnographic methodology to address the failures of conventional quantitative studies in American inner-city environments. He notes that official statistics undercount inner-city residents, since many lack official addresses, live in illegally overcrowded apartments, or fear contact with the government. And since 54% of the households surrounding his own report no official income (yet still manage to survive), official surveys clearly do not show what inner-city people really do for work. Bourgois succinctly points out the absurdity of conventional, quantitative research on the underground economy when he asks, “how can we expect someone who specializes in mugging elderly persons to provide us with accurate data on his or her income-generating strategies?”
Accordingly, Bourgois realizes that the only way to really understand Americans who live in inner cities and participate in the underground economy is to gain their trust, which his ethnographic participant-observation method allows him to do. Rather than simply showing up unannounced to ask questions, Bourgois moves into the neighborhood and spends most of his nights hanging out with crack dealers. Initially, his acquaintances believe he is an undercover cop, drug addict, or “dirty sexual pervert.” But he works hard to win their trust and eventually grows close to them, even making lifelong friends like Primo. These personal connections also create ethical dilemmas for Bourgois, who must choose between helping his friends and remaining as objective as possible. But, since he rejects the positivist conception of a neutral researcher, he usually chooses the former. He helps his friends transition to legal work and quit drugs, for instance, and convinces them not to sell crack to pregnant women. Bourgois’s research method gives him access but also accountability to his subjects: his life becomes intertwined with theirs.
Through his fieldwork, however Bourgois grows critical of his discipline (anthropology) and its method (ethnography), which he thinks can badly distort the truth. First, he struggles with the problem of reflexivity: while anthropologists must acknowledge their privilege, this often becomes “profoundly elitist” and “narcissistic.” While he sees how his whiteness and class status affect the data he is capable of gathering, he does not let this fact obstruct the central purpose of his research: to understand his subjects’ suffering and possible measures to resolve it. Bourgois also notes that anthropologists often ignore data that does not fit with their picture. In the 1980s and 1990s, although far less so today, anthropologists tried to show the “order and community” in the places they study (but ignored marginal behavior) and picked “exotic” field sites (instead of their own homeplaces). Bourgois breaks with both of these tendencies: he tries to show how a marginal culture develops in New York City, the place where he grew up. Finally, Bourgois critiques anthropologists’ tendency to get caught up in intellectual debates, using people’s life stories as evidence for academic theories, while avoiding those people’s suffering and concrete needs. In fact, Bourgois’s friends in East Harlem simply assume that this is his goal: when he tells them he wants “to give something back to the community,” they assume he is lying and really just trying to write “a best seller” for money and fame.
Bourgois sees anthropological research as dangerous not only because it relies on interpretation, but also because it is open to interpretation from its readers. This is especially true when dealing with a topic as politically sensitive as American inner-city poverty. For instance, in his 1966 study of El Barrio, La Vida, the well-intentioned Oscar Lewis proposed that a “culture of poverty” is responsible for intergenerational suffering. Ever since, Bourgois explains, conservatives have reinterpreted this theory to argue that poor people choose their own poverty, are to blame for it, and therefore are “unworthy” of assistance. These voices use Lewis’s book to fight against the precise solutions he advocated, and Bourgois is afraid that people will do the same thing with his book. He therefore explicitly pre-empts this kind of interpretation, explaining that he aims to show both the structural causes of his friends’ suffering and the self-destructive effects of their choices. Bourgois must neither gloss over ignore inner-city residents’ suffering, nor sensationalize it so much that his book becomes a “pornography of violence” read for enjoyment or shock value.
Bourgois’s book thus represents a delicate balancing act: he wants to truly explain the conditions of inner-city America, which requires him to choose a risky qualitive method. To do justice to his crack-using and -dealing subjects, he must use their stories to start a conversation about the United States’ responsibility for the conditions of its inner cities and capacity to improve them. But, by sharing these stories, he risks helping the public gawk at and morally reprimand the poor, a tendency that originally contributed to the failed policies that multiplied El Barrio residents’ suffering.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Anthropological Research and its Consequences ThemeTracker
Anthropological Research and its Consequences Quotes in In Search of Respect
“Man, I don’t blame where I’m at right now on nobody else but myself.”
In short, how can we expect someone who specializes in mugging elderly persons to provide us with accurate data on his or her income-generating strategies?
The difficulty of relating individual action to political economy, combined with the personally and politically motivated timidity of ethnographers in the United States through the 1970s and 1980s have obfuscated our understanding of the mechanisms and the experiences of oppression I cannot resolve the structure-versus-agency debate; nor can I confidently assuage my own righteous fear that hostile readers will misconstrue my ethnography as “giving the poor a bad name.’’ Nevertheless, I feel it imperative from a personal and ethical perspective, as well as from an analytic and theoretical one, to expose the horrors I witnessed among the people I befriended, without censoring even the goriest details. The depth and overwhelming pain and terror of the experience of poverty and racism in the United States needs to be talked about openly and confronted squarely, even if that makes us uncomfortable.
Furthermore, as the anthropologist Laura Nader stated succinctly in the early 1970 s, “Don’t study the poor and powerless because everything you say about them will be used against them.” I do not know if it is possible for me to present the story of my three and a half years of residence in El Barrio without falling prey to a pornography of violence, or a racist voyeurism — ultimately the problem and the responsibility is also in the eyes of the beholder.
My mistake that night was to try to tell the police officers the truth when they asked me, “What the hell you doin’ hea’h?” When they heard me explain, in what I thought was a polite voice, that I was an anthropologist studying poverty and marginalization, the largest of the two officers in the car exploded:
“What kind of a fuckin’ moron do you think I am. You think I don’t know what you’re doin’? You think I’m stupid? You’re babbling, you fuckin’ drug addict. You’re dirty white scum! Go buy your drugs in a white neighborhood! If you don’t get the hell out of here right now, motherfucka’, you’re gonna hafta repeat your story in the precinct. You want me to take you in? Hunh? . . . Hunh? Answer me motherfucka’!.”
Most people in the United States are somehow convinced that they would be ripped limb from limb by savagely enraged local residents if they were to set foot in Harlem. While everyday danger is certainly real in El Barrio, the vast majority of the 110,599 people—51 percent Latino/Puerto Rican, 39 percent African-American, and 10 percent “other”—who lived in the neighborhood, according to the 1990 Census, are not mugged with any regularity—if ever. Ironically, the few whites residing in the neighborhood are probably safer than their African-American and Puerto Rican neighbors because most would-be muggers assume whites are either police officers or drug addicts—or both—and hesitate before assaulting them.
Primo, Benzie, Maria, and everyone else around that night had never been tête-a-tête with a friendly white before, so it was with a sense of relief that they saw I hung out with them out of genuine interest rather than to obtain drugs or engage in some other act of perdición. The only whites they had ever seen at such close quarters had been school principals, policemen, parole officers, and angry bosses. Even their schoolteachers and social workers were largely African-American and Puerto Rican. Despite his obvious fear, Primo could not hide his curiosity. As he confided in me several months later, he had always wanted a chance to “conversate” with an actual live representative of mainstream, “drug-free” white America.
My long-term goal has always been to give something back to the community. When I discussed with Ray and his employees my desire to write a book of life stories “about poverty and marginalization” that might contribute to a more progressive understanding of inner-city problems by mainstream society, they thought I was crazy and treated my concerns about social responsibility with suspicion. In their conception everyone in the world is hustling, and anyone in their right mind would want to write a best seller and make a lot of money. It had not occurred to them that they would ever get anything back from this book project, except maybe a good party on publication day. On several occasions my insistence that there should be a tangible political benefit for the community from my research project spawned humiliating responses.
The contrast between Ray’s consistent failures at establishing viable, legal business ventures—that is, his deli, his legal social club, and his Laundromat—versus his notable success at running a complex franchise of retail crack outlets, highlight the different “cultural capitals” needed to operate as a private entrepreneur in the legal economy versus the underground economy.
As the historian Michael Katz and many others have noted, U.S. policy toward the poor has always been obsessed with distinguishing the “worthy” from the “unworthy” poor, and of blaming individuals for their failings.
Almost none of the policy recommendations I have made so far are politically feasible in the United States in the short or medium term. I only attempt to raise them for discussion in the hope that in the inevitable ebbs, flows, and ruptures around popular support for new political approaches to confronting poverty, ethnic discrimination, and gender inequality in the coming years, some of these ideas could be dragged into the mainstream of public debates, and that maybe bits and pieces of them could be instituted over the coming decades in one form or another. Once again, on a deeper level, the U.S. common sense, which blames victims for their failures and offers only individualistic psychologically rooted solutions to structural contradictions has to be confronted and changed. We have to break out of the dead-end political debates between liberal politicians, who want to flood the inner city with psychiatric social workers or family therapists, and conservatives, who simply want to build bigger prisons, cut social welfare spending, and decrease taxes for big business and the wealthy.
