Philippe Bourgois (b. 1956) is a Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted research in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (1989). He also did fieldwork in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. His book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio was the winner of the 1996 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1997 Margaret Mead Award. His most recent fieldwork has been among homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco, which is the subject of a forthcoming book co-authored with Jeff Schonberg. He is considered an important proponent of neo-Marxist theory. This article is about the concept. ... This article or section should be merged with ethnic group Ethnicity is the cultural characteristics that connect a particular group or groups of people to each other. ... Spanish Harlem, also known as East Harlem or El Barrio, is a neighborhood in northeastern part of the borough of Manhattan, one of the largest predominantly Hispanic communities in New York City. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... Margaret Mead Award is an award in the field of anthropology presented by the Society for Applied Anthropology solely from 1979 to 1983 and jointly with the American Anthropological Society afterwards. ... Neo-Marxism was a 20th century school that harked back to the early writings of Marx before the influence of Engels which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism, and thus rejected the economic determinism of early Marx, focusing instead on a non-physical, psychological revolution. ...
References
McGee, R.J. and R.L. Warms, Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. McGraw Hill, Boston, 2004. (ISBN 0-07-284046-3)
Philippe has done anthropological research on both heroin and cocaine users over many years and he was in Australia a few days ago and came into the studio with an Australian investigator in this field, Carla Treloar of the National Centre for HIV Social Research.
PhilippeBourgois: No. I it means you have to make friends with people using drugs and hang out with them and be able to see them in their natural environment.
PhilippeBourgois: And from an outsider's perspective, from drug researchers across the world, Australia used to be the gold standard in terms of harm reduction and health intervention.
Bourgois and his wife moved into a tenement apartment in East Harlem, an area referred to as El Barrio, early in 1985 and spent the next three-and-a-half years living among the harsh realities of the ghetto streets in order to gain entrée to a network of Puerto Rican crack dealers and their friends and relatives.
Through this hard-won quasi-intimacy, Bourgois seeks to tell us some things about the symbols and symptoms of ghetto life, the "Achilles heel of the richest industrialized nation in the world." It is this goal that is the source of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Bourgois's study.
Bourgois acknowledges that these people exist, but the strategy of their struggle is nowhere to be found in the interpretative argument Bourgois presents for life and dignity in El Barrio.
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