image: William Julius Wilson describes this book as "A riveting novel of the daily struggles for survival of homeless people with a physical and emotional addiction to heroin". view more
Credit: Jeff Schonberg
In order to get at the heart of taboo subjects—drugs, homelessness, HIV risk and crime—Philippe Bourgois does more than study them from afar. For his newest book, “Righteous Dopefiend,” Bourgois took to the streets. With funding from a National Institutes of Health pilot grant, Bourgois hung out with homeless heroin and crack users a mere six blocks away from his San Francisco home, even sleeping outside in homeless encampments to gain a true sense of what life is like for the addicts. In return, the addicts let down their guard, and shared their stories of survival and addiction, of violence and hope. Righteous Dopefiend is a “photo-ethnography” featuring sixty-four of Schonberg’s black-and-white photographs embedded in a text combining the voices of the homeless, the fieldwork notes of the authors and a critical theoretical anthropological analysis.
Drawing primarily from Bourdieu, Foucault, Marx, Mauss, and Primo Levi the authors develop a theoretical understanding of “lumpen abuse under neoliberalism.” They propose that our current moment in history calls for a redefinition of the concept of social class using Foucault’s insights on subjectivity/subjectivation while at the same time engaging with Bourdieu’s challenge to render visible the ways social inequality impose misery and pain. On a practical and a theoretical level, the text critiques the U.S. model of punitive governmentality with respect to poverty, law enforcement, public health and illegal drug use in the post-cold war era to argue that the suffering of the indigent poor at the turn of the 21st century is politically structured and "useless" in Levinas's terms--and therefore needs to be understood as being politically structured and abusive. Through the concepts of habitus and subjectivity the authors address the racialization of ethnic relations, sexuality and gender power relations, homosociality and love. They also confront and theorize the psycho-affective realms of childhood violence, trauma and family strife and document the brutal logics of economic survival strategies in the face of the disappearance of the industrial labor market and of expulsion from the entry level service sector. From an applied perspective, the book examines destructive bodily practices in relationship to medical and public health services including drug treatment. Although the chapters are organized theoretically around these themes, the text follows a chronological narrative and develops a cast of some dozen characters.
Righteous Dopefiend also makes a methodological argument for collaborative ethnographic work to propose a vitalized mode for collecting, analyzing and presenting anthropological material in photo-ethnographic form. Wrapping analytical narrative, dialogue and fieldwork notes around ethnographic photographs the authors propose the utility of a new representational medium for contemporary ethnography that presents multiple voices and operates on distinct intellectual, aesthetic, emotional and political levels to explore—and to push—the complex politics of representation of the urgent, taboo quandries of our era.
“I realized we don’t know who these people are, we don’t know how they survive and some of us are giving dollars and quarters and all of us are wondering should we or should we not. We project whatever biases we have about the goodness or badness or neediness of people,” said Bourgois. “I really wanted to figure out who these people are and take them seriously as human beings, and learn how they live. That’s what participant observation field work in anthropology allows you to do—you suspend your moral judgment and you dive into the universe of the people you want to study to try to see the world through their eyes and walk in their shoes as much as you can.”
The study plunges the reader into the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For more than a decade, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers in their scramble for survival on the streets of San Francisco. Combining photographs and narrative, Righteous Dopefiend is a chronicle of intimate suffering, solidarity and betrayal. The authors accompany the homeless on their daily rounds and sleep in their encampments to offer a vivid chronicle of harrowing survival and loss, extraordinary caring, and hope. The book develops a trenchant analysis of the structural forces that shape the lives of the destitute in the world’s wealthiest nation. The reader discovers the survival strategies of the destitute poor in the neo-liberal turn of the twenty-first century --from burglary and panhandling, to day labor and recycling. The authors record the painful details of violent childhoods and failed dreams, and track the ongoing tumultuous lover affairs, conflicts, alliances, and interpersonal hierarchies of their destitute characters who struggle for a shred of dignity and meaning in a society that has no use for them. The reader meets the parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren of the principle characters; follows the book's subjects into jail, hospital intensive care units, and drug treatment centers; and learns how social and medical services strive to ameliorate the lives of street-based drug users but often exacerbate their suffering. The book concludes with proposals for policy changes and service interventions, but most importantly, it offers a critique of how and why the U.S. has produced an intractable shelterless population condemned to lives of distress and useless suffering. Careful not to beatify or spectacularize the men and women they have befriended on the street, Bourgois and Schonberg expose the failures of our current models of addiction and redefine the possible terms of engagement with lives resolutely lived outside society’s bounds.
“Nothing is a complete magic bullet, because these are really deep historic problems of the human condition, of social inequality, of historical transformations, of how historical transformations affect the socially vulnerable,” says Bourgois. “But you can certainly, often quite easily, lower the sort of brutal levels of suffering that we have in the United States that are just extreme by any country’s measure.”
Bourgois, the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine, and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, is the author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation. Jeff Schonberg is a freelance photographer and a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley.