In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

by Philippe Bourgois

Overview

In Search of Respect, Philippe Bourgois's now-classic, ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim after it was first published in 1995 and in 1997 was awarded the Margaret Mead Award. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods in the United States - East Harlem. This edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics in America that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the six years since the first edition. Bourgois, in a new epilogue, brings up to date the stories of the people - Primo, Caesar, Luis, Tony, Candy - who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner-city drug trade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107264014
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/23/2002
Series:	Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences , #10
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	423,018
File size:	3 MB

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2001 second edition; Introduction; 1. Violating apartheid in the United States; 2. A street history of El Barrio; 3. Crackhouse management: addiction, discipline, and dignity; 4. 'Goin' legit': disrespect and resistance at work; 5. School days: learning to be a better criminal; 6. Redrawing the gender line on the street; 7. Families and children in pain; 8. Vulnerable fathers; 9. Conclusion; Epilogue 2001.

Editorial Reviews

Anthropologist Bourgois chose "addicts, thieves, and [drug] dealers to be [his] best friends and acquaintances" during his three-and-one-half-year research residency in New York City's Spanish Harlem. This experience-packed account of social interactions and relations is the result of great amounts of time spent on the street, in crackhouses, and in the homes of East Harlem's residents, who are caught up in a constant struggle against personal powerlessness. A "wealth" of available drugs fosters major substance abuse that overlays and exacerbates the failure of individuals to overcome poverty and unsupportive if not outwardly antagonistic and racist power structures. Bourgois is not sanguine about the implementation of possible solutions to the not atypical plight of El Barrio's poverty-stricken (nonestablishment) people, who are too often self- or other-destructive in their often futile search for integrity. This look at a major inner-city problem is highly recommended for academic and larger public library social science collections.-Susanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Some of the best ethnographic research being conducted today concerns the use of crack cocaine in different inner- and outer-cities. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois spent several years studying the crack trade in his East Harlem community...He was able to gain entry to a world of economic, gender, age, and ethnic relationships that are closed to representatives of official society." ICCA Journal

"offers one of the most closely observed accounts we are likely to get of the urban crack scene...it provides a fascinating account of the obstacles crack sellers face as they seek to earn a living." New York Review of Books

"offers one of the most closely observed accounts we are likely to get of the urban crack scene...it provides a fascinating account of the obstacles crack sellers face as they seek to earn a living." New York Review of Books

"Now In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois, brings the lives of these crack dealers into brilliant focus. Bourgois' raw and poignant book delivers a message about the economics of exclusion that should shake public perceptions of the inner-city drug trade....Bourgois offers us truly culturally privileged information...for anyone interested in the brutal truth about drug dealing in our inner cities, In Search of Respect is the place to look." Washington Post Book World

"Now In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Philippe Bourgois, brings the lives of these crack dealers into brilliant focus. Bourgois' raw and poignant book delivers a message about the economics of exclusion that should shake public perceptions of the inner-city drug trade....Bourgois offers us truly culturally privileged information...for anyone interested in the brutal truth about drug dealing in our inner cities, In Search of Respect is the place to look." Washington Post Book World

"...[a] masterful study of the drug trade in upper Manhattan....[a] fascinating book....Bourgois' wealth of detail adds greatly to his picture of the internal logic of ghetto life....Bourgois' portraits are so carefully executed, so unflinching, that it's impossible to walk away from this book without a profoundly different perspective on the inner city." London Review of Books

From the Publisher