Social Class: How Does It Work? Book

Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, currently employed by the University of Pennsylvania, became widely known in social sciences as an author of the book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995), ethnography of inner-city street culture in East Harlem. The study meant a breakthrough as the author was the first person to win trust of drug dealer gang members. Subsequently he conducted a several year long intensive field research. The monograph, in a masterly way combining classical ethnographical style and a modern concept of social structuration, won him legitimately positive reviews and many awards, including Margaret Mead Award and C. Wright Mills Award. After almost fifteen years a new book Righteous Dopefiend was published, co-authored with a photographer and post-graduate medical anthropology student Jeff Schonberg.
Whereas in the previous publication Bourgois described a sub-culture of drug dealers, interpreting it as a manifestation of resistance, a counter-culture offering alternative means of status saturation in conditions of social inequality and exclusion, in the recent title he and Schonberg introduce the reader among drug addicts living in the streets of San Francisco, where the authors found desperation and suffering instead of resistance. They spent incredible twelve years by participant observation of twenty middle-aged intravenous heroin addicts, whose everyday concerns were to satisfy their basic living needs (especially those which result from their addiction) and fight to retain their dignity and respect in gears of marginalization and stigmatization.
The Introduction is devoted to a brief overview of methodology and a more detailed description of theoretical foundations and concepts used to examine the surveyed issue. Nine following topical chapters deal with different aspects of the informants' life: ethnic differentiation, partner relationships, physical and social impacts of addiction, childhood, subsistence, parenthood, homosocial relations, everyday aspects of addiction and addiction therapy. Partial findings lead to theoretical, but more importantly, practical conclusions in the closing part of the book. Although the topics, thoughts and findings appear across the chapters and are occasionally repeated and the text structure is not a very systemic one, the book works as a compact and organic complex. With regards to the length of the survey the authors were also able to tie the text together using a linear plot taking place in the background following the trajectories of the key informants with occasional retarding and retrospective diversions over the course of more than a decade. As anticipated, many of them finish in a tragic way.
This novel-like plot increases the dramatic character and authenticity of the criticism of neoliberalism. The criticism is nowadays modern even among Czech left wing intellectuals. I can see a problem in the fact that similarly to a lot of other critics Bourgois and Schonberg define neoliberalism only very vaguely as a „political-economic model of capitalism", adopting several general phrases from David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), transforming the term in a bit unclear chimera. The term is then hanging over the text as deus ex machina and here and there, whenever necessary, is pointed out as the reason of marginalization, even in the context where conservatism used to be pointed out just several years ago. Evidence of the change of the concept can be found for example in the criticism of War on Drugs, one of the main tools of criminalization and marginalization in the USA. The repressive strategy, declared by Nixon at the beginning of the 1970's, used to be labelled as an idea of authoritarian conservative thinking, but now it is taken as an example of a neoliberal policy. Current intellectual "epidemic" of the vague term of neoliberalism can also be identified in the fact that Bourgois did not mention it once in his previous book. On the contrary, he managed with only a brief criticism of conservatism, although the book was written in mid 90's, the times when, according to the above mentioned David Harvey, neoliberalism had been a dominant doctrine for more than a decade.
Theoretical fundaments of neoliberal American society criticism are based on concepts taken from works of Bourdie, Foucault and Marx. Through the concepts of symbolic violence and habitus the authors deconstruct inequality, poverty and drug addiction as ontological categories and point out their rootedness in the social structure (and the agent's habitus) and their unconscious reproduction by means of everyday actions, in the framework that leads to the categories being perceived as natural consequences of individual's behaviour. The book includes very impressive demonstrations of specific displays of symbolic violence in the form of agents' internalized racism, homophobia or a body technique. The concept of symbolic violence is connected with Foucault's interpretation of biopower, exerted against the surveyed homeless, predominantly through their drug addiction, on the level of anatomo-politics (e.g. the way of abscess therapy or using informants' bodies for medical students' practice), as well as on the level of biopolitics (e.g. substitution therapy or on the contrary criminalization of addiction). Means of exerting biopower could be positive or negative, however, in both cases they can be displayed in the form of symbolic violence. It is probably not surprising that according to the authors the dominant forms of biopower in the current American society are definitely the negative ones. They have destructive impact on marginalized groups of population and they even constitute these groups. With a reference to Marx the theoretical fundaments are in the context of empiric data framed by a complex concept of lumpen-abuse. The concept refers to the process of creating and maintaining a non-productive part of population through social, psychological, physical and economic means of abuse produced by neoliberal society. However, lumpenization does not constitute a social category that would exist as a social class on its own, but is comprehended in the context of Bourdie's system of classes and habitus as a form of subjectivity shared by agents and reproduced by their everyday practice.
Bourgois preserves his clear and readable ethnographic writing style and as in his previous monograph his fieldnotes, or in fact fieldnotes of both researchers, receive a lot of space. In this respect a methodology question might arise regarding the extent of interventions and alterations to the fieldnotes. The notes are in several places so detailed and include direct and extensive quotations of the informants' utterances in situations where an exact recording would be very difficult that it makes one believe they were written in a significant retrospective. The strategy of transforming refined notefields into an independent literary work is definitely effective, as the authors themselves point out, in helping "to understand the pragmatic rationality for what at first sight may appear to be entirely self-destructive or immoral" (page 9). Moreover, the impact is enhanced by another effective documentary technique - photography. The text of the book is accompanied by several tens of photographs made by Jeff Schonberg. Captivating, raw and a bit underexposed black and white photographs do not function only as a staffage in the form of randomly chosen snapshots from field work as it is usual, but they are put on the same level as the text itself and they add a substantial emotional charge to the publication. The way they are presented and their quality turn the book into a full photo-ethnographical study. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that sometimes the photographs only work on the surface and are without more significant analytical importance although the authors point out that „embedding the photograph in text allows an appreciation of the effects of social structural forces on individuals"(page 9).
With regards to publishing the photographs featuring exposed faces of the informants who are often labelled as criminals in the text, a question of the research ethics arises as damage might have been done to the informants or their relatives, friends or contacts. The authors did not answer the question quite satisfactorily as they only changed the informants' names. They cynically add that they had obtained informed consent for publishing the photographs. However, such consent protects the interests of the research institution against possible legal actions rather than the interests of the surveyed people who had voluntarily taken part in the research. They subsequently point out the key reason for publishing non-anonymous photographs, which was the wish of parties, the researchers as well as the surveyed population, to show real stories with real people striving to retain their dignity and respect of the others.
I see the most important strength of the book in its extension to applied anthropology, or more precisely to critically applied public anthropology. The authors unequivocally see anthropology as an engaged subject of science, which "in the early twenty-first century cannot physically, ethically, or emotionally escape the hardship of the lives of its traditional research subjects" (page 320). In accordance with this Bourgois and Schonberg do not formulate their conclusions only in theory, but stating they would otherwise became only "intellectual voyeurs" (page 297), they step outside the comfort of intellectual academic discussions and formulate specific recommendations they think might lead to a remedy or at least improvement of the situation the observed population lives in. One of the recommendations, most of which we have to say is not original, is a socially controversial although pragmatic - and, as shown by criminology as well as medical studies also effective - provision of heroine on medical prescription.
Righteous Dopefiend is definitely a book aspiring to become "classics" and obligatory reading for students of social anthropology and associated disciplines. It has all necessary qualities. In the context of the surveyed issue it is extremely difficult to find a similarly intense and long term study getting to the very core of the ethnography approach and consistently making use of all its advantages. On the theoretical level the authors build on structural theories of power, social agency and inequality elegantly solving the agent-social structure problem and they overcome traditional dichotomy between individual and structural causes of marginalization. On the application level they provide recommendations for changing policies and they engage in the interest of their informants. And last but not least they are very successful in showing the reader a suggestive view of the surveyed environment. As sociologist Loic Wacquant rightfully stated, if Pierre Bourdieu, George Orwell and American photographer of the Great Recession Walker Evans had joined, they would have been unable to produce more revealing insight. Righteous Dopefiend is a breathtaking celebration of anthropology showing its role and contribution for understanding social structure of the modern society at the beginning of the third millennium.