Anthropological Research and its Consequences Theme Analysis

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.