Gerhard: We're here with Philippe Bourgois,
who's the Richard Perry Professor of Anthropology
and Family and Community Medicine at the University
of Pennsylvania. Long title.
Philippe: Yes. Embarrassing, isn't it?
Gerhard: Very impressive.
Philippe: Actually, it's embarrassing because—I
mean, he's a great guy and everything, but
it's all about the whole privatization of
knowledge in the United States. We get funded
by individuals and so forth. He's a wonderful
guy. He's a cool guy, super progressive, nice
person, but it is an ironic thing for someone
who does critical anthropology to be sponsored.
Gerhard: I guess we can talk about more of
that later. Maybe to start off, one question
I've asked everyone in this series is: how
did you come into anthropology? What drove
you into the field or what circumstance? Often
it's a particular luck or circumstance that
brings people to anthropology? What was it
for you?
Philippe: For me, anthropology was one of
the few totally effortless things to stumble
into. I didn't know what anthropology was.
I was a freshman in college. I sort of semi-random
said, "Well, I better sort of—I have to
decide what my major is. I better take a philosophy
class or this. I don't know what this anthropology
is. I'll try that."
I wasn't—I didn't dislike my other classes,
but then none of them excited me. With anthropology,
the first book that they assigned, I just—wow,
it was literally like falling in love. I
remember specifically the—I was on the ski
team, and we were at some whatever—we were
in some gym sleeping on cots, and I couldn't
stop myself from reading the textbooks that
they had assigned.
Gerhard: What was the book?
Philippe: It's an embarrassing book to talk
about now because—especially with the work
that I do on violence because it was a book
that's now completely sort of critiqued in
anthropology for very good reason by Napoleon
Chagnon, "The Fierce People." It was the very
first edition that's even worse than all the
other editions. Some people argue that it's
his rape fantasy—his masculinist rape fantasies.
Basically it's about the Yanomamö Amazonian
native peoples. They're an extraordinary set
of people. He specifically focused on basically
male violence.
Gerhard: From those beginnings, you took it
as a major. What about your graduate work?
Philippe: I didn't take it as a major actually
because in the United States we have this
four-field thing, where we have archaeology—I
don't know if you have that in Australia.
Gerhard: We don't.
Philippe: Thank god. We have archaeology,
biology, linguistics, and cultural. It has
to do, of course, with the origins of anthropology—get
it, understanding humans by any means necessary.
It's a nice romantic idea of being completely
multidisciplinary, multi-method and so forth.
Unfortunately, many of us who were interested
in cultural anthropology just aren't interested
in analyzing bones or analyzing dinosaurs
or analyzing rocks and so forth.
Because it was a US Department, in those days
you were obliged to take one class in each
field. I just didn't want to do that. I only
wanted to do cultural anthropology. I mean,
some of my best friends are archaeologists
and linguists and physical anthropologists…
Fern: Nothing against them.
Philippe: …but I just wasn't interested
in reading that. I majored in social studies
instead and interdisciplinary basically social
theory, which was great because then you just
read the classics: Marx, Freud, Weber, Durkheim
and so forth. It gave you a good background
for then getting into the nitty-gritty of
ethnography and anthropology.
Fern: I was actually wondering if I could
ask about your graduate study fieldwork, and
whether when you entered into that field you
already had the idea. I mean, already you
reference to Napoleon Chagnon in some ways
is it a bit of prelude to your focus on violence
Although I know that it's a bit of
a 180-degree flip, but I'm wondering if you
had the idea to take a particular focus on
the phenomenon of violence as you entered
into grad studies, or if that was something
that was more circumstantial once you got
there?
Philippe: Actually, the very—my actual PhD
was in Central America. It wasn't the work
in the US inner city on drugs and violence.
By then, I had read—the critiques were already
coming out of Chagnon and traditional anthropology
and so forth. I was already very—I was already
trying to buck that trend.
What I wanted to do was study the "boring
people" that—not the exotic other but just
the masses of people that are starving, dying,
and suffering. I studied banana workers on
a United Fruit Company plantation. I also
wanted to study the effects of my own country
on these exotic parts of the world, which
was another thing that—is another one of
the original sins of anthropology in a sense,
where it had been part of a colonial project
often unconsciously, and usually as a progressive
force, usually as people critiquing racism,
as a matter of fact critiquing—yes, basically
wanting—you know, with cultural relativism,
wanting to come in and learn about people
and so forth. What I wanted to do was take
head-on the effects of US multinational corporations
on traditional people. That book ended up
being—gosh, what was it called? It was called
"Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central
American Banana Plantation."
At that point, I wasn't thinking of myself
whatsoever as studying violence. I don't know
if I had the concept yet of structural violence,
but that's what the book ended up being a
study in some sense, of structural violence,
of the effects of these—this was a 6,000-hectare
plantation that spanned the Panama and Costa
Rica border in a beautiful spot right on the
Caribbean of Central America, spectacular
place. It's just turned it into a pesticide
nightmare, destroyed the reefs. What the company
did was import indigenous people and people
from all over the world, people from the Caribbean,
people from—actually they imported Italians
originally, but the Italians all became anarchist
union organizers, so that was the end of that
very rapidly. It was the famous United Fruit
Company, the Chiquita Banana and so forth.
That was what I looked at—was the divide-and-conquer
dynamics that the company used with the amazing
ethnic diversity there.
There were Kuna Amerindians, the Ngäbe
Amerindians, and then about three or four
different Latino ethnic groups, and then people
of Jamaican descent who had a whole new ethnic
identity as creole Costa Ricans.
Gerhard: Before even that, or was it after
you're working in Nicaragua?
Philippe: Yes, actually, that was actually
my really my first fieldwork. What I did was
I dropped out of graduate—I thought I was
dropping out of graduate school in my second
year, when the Sandinistas did the revolution
in 1979 in Nicaragua. I did hedge my bets.
I took a leave of absence, and my University
kindly gave me a leave of absence, but I had
no intention of going back if the revolution
had been the dream that I was hoping it was
going to be. I just went down and volunteered
to work for the Agrarian Reform Ministry.
I was doing fieldwork at the time for my Master's
thesis. I was in Belize, which is a tiny country
that used to be a British colony on the border
with Guatemala and Mexico.
I was depressed. I was with the Mopan Maya
people actually. I'd chosen the place for
very, very practical reasons because I didn't
speak Spanish at the time and they were bilingual
Mopan and English speakers. I was looking
at the construction of a road into this Maya
community to see how it was going to affect
traditional reciprocal labor exchange arrangements
and see if there was going to be cultural
destruction basically because of a greater
integration into the market economy. I was
seeing that it was going to be a disaster,
and I was getting really depressed. Listening
on my shortwave radio that there is this revolution
taking place in Nicaragua, and I said, "Well,
that's where I'm going to go, where there's
some kind of hope, where indigenous peoples
could be—could perhaps benefit from something
from the market economy without getting destroyed
by it,” which was a somewhat naïve thought,
but it was a hopeful thought and it seemed
possible.
I went down, and the agrarian reform folks
said, "You're a gringo. You gringos love Indians.
We're all a bunch of racists here. We don't
like Indians. Go out into the Indian territory
that you gringos like to hang out in and tell
us what the—figure out what the problems
are and find a solution for them." It was
an incredibly exciting thing.
I took a plane into the Miskitia, which is
the territory that's the home territory of
the Miskito Amerindians, as well as the—at
that time they were called the Sumu. Now they're
called Ulwa peoples. They were
at the height—so that was it. That was my
first fieldwork.
We wrote a report. There was a team of us.
We wrote a report that was just a little bit
too radical for the Sandinista revolution.
We called for regional autonomy for the indigenous
people, which in retrospect they actually
accepted that, but their first reaction was
to throw us out. And so they threw me out of the
country, and that's why I ended up going back
to graduate school, thank god, and continuing
anthropology. That's why I continued in the
Caribbean region of Central America during
that period. I just went one country further
south to Costa Rica. By then I spoke fluent
Spanish and then ended up on the United Fruit
Company plantation, still looking at indigenous
peoples but in their active struggles and
interface with being suddenly thrust into
being basically wage laborers on factories
in the field basically, on those huge banana
plantations.
Gerhard: One issue that sort of comes out
of all this is: how do you view anthropology
as a discipline? What do you think the role
of anthropologists is? Is it to affect change
with and for the people we work with, or is
it rather to document the struggles or whatever
their lives are like?
Philippe: It's all of the above and more.
On a very basic level, it's still the original
project for me of anthropology, which is to
understand humans by any means necessary,
in some sense. I think in that sense it's
a discipline. I don't want to be overly hubristic
about our discipline, but I think we have
just this extraordinary method that, for some
reason, other disciplines for the most part
distrust, which is our participant observation
ethnographic methods. It becomes our common
sense. It becomes our way to know about things,
at least in cultural anthropology.
On that level, I am working towards that project,
that sort of romantic project of figuring
out human whatever it is, whether it's—whatever
we are. Then at the same time, there's also
the particular relationship of anthropology
to non-state peoples, to indigenous peoples
who, at the time of the origins of anthropology,
were basically being colonized, genocided,
and conquered.
One of the impetuses—to put a positive spin
on it, the impetus of anthropology was, "Hey,
all these people are being destroyed. There's
a tremendous amount to learn from them. It's
a tragedy. We need to respect them. We need
to learn from them." That was the whole brilliant
insight of cultural relativism and being suddenly - realizing that we can learn about ourselves from others
and also learn about truth from others in
some sense. And that whatever we think is right and
virtuous is not necessarily what others think.
One person's virtue is another's violence
in some sense. Especially now when we look
at whatever the Middle East and so forth,
one person's terror is another's god gift
to humanity.
In that sense, the traditional people that
anthropology had always focused on, indigenous
people, peoples on the margin of state economies,
are, I would argue, the people that are in
the most vulnerable relationship to the contemporary
world. They're the people whose territories
are being destroyed by mining companies that
are—it's where warlords take over and so
forth. They are being dragged into the 21st
century, often from very different modes of
production, from very different ways of understanding
the world, ways of earning a living, of subsistence
farming or hunter-gathering or whatever they're
doing to survive in extraordinarily rapidly—and
so that creates—that's just a recipe for
social suffering in that sense.
That was what attracted me to Central America
and to working with indigenous people that
were in those rapid processes of being incorporated
into states and incorporated into multinational
corporation labor forces, in that sense.
All through that time I really wanted to be
somewhere else. But this was a long time ago.
This was 1979—was when I started my fieldwork
in Nicaragua. It still wasn't quite legitimate,
at least in US anthropology, for someone to
study their hometown. I really wanted to be
studying my hometown in New York City and
to be looking at what I saw to be the central
contradiction and sort of outrage of my society,
which is US inner-city segregation, this phenomenon
of the ghetto, is it was called then. And it's
still a good term for it.
I grew up right on the border between the
very wealthy neighborhood and the poorest
neighborhood of New York, right on the border
of East Harlem on the Upper East Side. I would
see it every day in some sense. I would get
mugged by the kids, the kids and gangs from
the Puerto Rican neighborhood who’d come
down to mug the little white boys. I could
see that this just wasn't normal.
Luckily I had a French—I have a French father.
He's still alive, 92. I mean, it sounds horrible
in retrospect, but basically the rich whites
of the city drive through the poor part of
town to avoid traffic to get to the highways
and that's their contact with segregation.
That's the inter-ethnic contact. That's the
tragedy of the United States in the whole
suburban structure of our cities. My father,
being French, would just start ranting and
raving about how horrible and inexcusable
this racism and segregation was. We'd be driving
out to a countryside to the beaches and he'd
say, "What a shame this wealthy country with
this extraordinary poverty, with this bizarre
structured racism that's just literally from
one block to the next in the United States."
I kept hearing that, and I took it seriously
in some sense. When I came back to write my
dissertation from the banana plantation—I
stayed there two-and-half years. It was right
in the beginning of the Reagan administration.
The first thing that happened was my federal
funding was cut. Everyone was getting cut
back then. It still hasn't recovered, right?
I ran out of money and ended up saying—use
that as an excuse to move into the inner city,
get a cheap apartment, and write my dissertation
there. I wrote my dissertation while living
in East Harlem. When you're writing a dissertation,
you become a great at procrastinating. Anyone
that writes a term paper becomes great at
procrastinating. It's a horrible thing because
you're really suffering if you just sit down
and do it.
What happens is everything anyone says to
you becomes incredibly interesting. You become
so adroit at your socialization, you just
become a great chit-chatter, smooth schmoozer
and so forth. I started hanging out on the
stoop of my house, the stairs in front of
my tenement, and making friends with everyone.
It became a phenomenal fieldwork site.
That led to my second book, which was the
one that's better known, which is "In Search
of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio." The
first book that I wrote, "Ethnicity at Work,"
it only sold 800 copies. I love the book,
but no one reads it. 
This next book, "In Search of Respect," I ended up spending five-and-half years. In that whole process, I was a young
man then, so I went through the normal—whatever
the things that one does, which is get married,
break up, and then have a baby, and get a
job and so forth.
I ended up being five-and-a-half years there. While I was there, the crack epidemic hit the United States. 
It was the moment of transition between heroin and cocaine. The Colombian cartels were just getting into
smuggling cocaine. Then someone figured out
how to make crack, which is just cocaine with
baking soda that makes it easier to smoke
and has a stronger, more immediate effect.
That was the moment when the levels of violence
went shooting up in the United States. This
form of mass incarceration, hyper-incarceration
of poor African-American and Latino young
men mostly began to—started. That was 1985—was
when I started that fieldwork. I stayed there
through 1991—was when I left.
I watched my neighbors and friends get sucked
into that crack economy and become sellers
and users for the most part. I spent most
of my time with one particular network of
sellers who operated—they operated in a
video arcade. Back then it was Pac-Man. I
don't know—people today probably don't even
remember. It was a great game like they just
don't have anymore. It was a Pac-Man arcade,
but it sold crack.
Fern: Crack-Man.
Philippe: Yes, Crack-Man, exactly. It was
called—oops. It was called the Game Room
actually. I think it's a barbershop now. I
didn't really know what I was doing in the
sense. I didn't know that drugs was the—that
the whole relationship with drug selling and
drug using was going to be the focus of my
work at that point, but I had really no other
option in a sense. That's what happened to
the neighborhood. That's where I've been more
or less ever since about—what is that?—20
years later, 30 years later? 30 years later.
Since we do qualitative research, I'm terrible
at counting the years.
I think on some level, the management—not
so much, well, the management, but also the
expression urban poverty often express itself
or centrally expresses itself through substance
abuse, through—partially because it's an
economic resource in the sense that when people
don't have access to legal employment, the
underground economy which—and the biggest
the part of the underground economy is the
global narcotics economy, takes over, and
it becomes the common sense of ambitious people
growing up in neighborhoods, where there is
absolutely no jobs. That's what I was watching.
I was looking at that moment of deindustrialization
of New York City and then the influx of a
new set of jobs that were tragically these
jobs selling crack.
That was that project. The next project I
did was I got a job in San Francisco at the end,
I guess, I basically have to study wherever
I am. I mean, I have to do ethnography wherever
I am. I call it my therapy in some sense.
On some level, it's the only way I know how
to deal with the world. It's also a great
way of dealing with upsetting problems in
some sense because you can document them,
analyze them, and hope that you can represent
them in a way that that tremendous amount
of suffering that you're documenting isn't
for nothing in some sense, that the stories
of people that are being crushed by their
circumstances or that are fighting against
difficult circumstances won't just be forgotten,
won't just be swept under the rug, but can
be brought to a larger audience.
What I did then, upon moving into San Francisco,
which is sort of the city of gentrification—it's
the city with the highest income concentrated
in the United States and so forth was—the
phenomenon of homelessness was just completely
in your face. You couldn't walk anywhere without
someone panhandling. The people from the suburbs
couldn't even drive their cars in without
being panhandled because the homeless would
fly signs, as they say, begging for money
at the highway interpasses and interchanges.
I said that's what I have to study.
Every time I went anywhere out of my neighborhood,
I would have to drive back by one particular
corner where there were guys flying signs.
I said, "That's where I'll be." It was about
six blocks from my house. I made friends with
a network of homeless heroin injectors. I
didn't quite know they were heroin injectors
at the time, but I could sort of tell. They
were nodding out with that telltale heroin
nod. They smoked crack, drank alcohol, and
injected heroin. They were actually my age
at that time. They were in their 30s, late
30s, I guess.
That project took much too long. I had, I
guess, I don't know if you can call it fun,
but I had too much fun. I mean, it's a lot
more fun to do ethnography than to write it
up. I just kept getting—I just kept extending
it saying I don't have enough information.
Then all of a sudden, 10 years had passed.
I said, "Well, now, I have to study the aging
process." That ended up taking 12 years. That
came out as "Righteous Dopefiend."
On some level, it takes off where "In Search
of Respect" ended.
"In Search of Respect," I talk about the dealers, and I talk about the dream of making it in the narcotics economy
and the impossibility of it and the violence
that's associated with all of that, and also
specifically about the colonial US-Puerto
Rican relationship that sets Puerto Ricans
up to be in this most vulnerable position
within the global narcotics economy.
I didn't deal with addiction per se. I had,
whatever, a few hundred field notes on addiction.
It was just one of the chapters that I cut
out because I had to cut the book into whatever
it was, 250 pages. It was a complicated subject
that I couldn't really understand either because
the guys that I was with were selling, so
they always had enough money. They had gotten
addicted, both to smoking crack, and there
was just a psychological addiction, but there
were also getting physically addicted to sniffing
heroin. I was watching it, but they were so
triumphant about it and they had so much money
about it that they were able to maintain a
denial about it.
I was able to sort of—not be able to understand
it, not be able to understand its importance
in some sense. Also, I wanted to stay in denial.
These were my friends. I still had—I still
shared some of their hope even though I saw
that objectively they were going to be spending
the rest of their life cycling chronically
through prison and in and out of treatment
and addiction. They were engaging in tremendous
violence against their loved one and against
themselves and each other as well.
Going to San Francisco gave me the space perhaps
to confront addiction head on. That's what
this second book is about. It's about the
experience of homeless addiction. I followed
them then through their income-generating
strategies, their survival strategies.
I did that as a collaboration with a graduate
student. He was getting a Masters, Jeff Schonberg,
and he happened to be a great photographer.
He didn't quite know it at the time. He admits
to me now that he was just pretending. He
came into my office hours and said—well,
I was in the middle of—I had just begun
the fieldwork, and I realized that this was
just unbelievable. You couldn't write about
this and make it as real as it really is.
People just wouldn't be able to believe the
kinds of things I was seeing, specifically
just the living conditions of the homeless:
how filthy it was, how bloody the injection
process was, how desperate they were, and
also how full of life they were, how they
tried to—how they created a whole community
and decorated their camps and had all kinds
of dreams in terms of their own lives that
they were trying to—that they were searching
for.
I had been taking little snapshots and realizing
that I just—I couldn't tape-record and observe
and talk and take pictures at the same time.
I just don't have that ability in my head.
I started looking for a photographer. I'd
started about maybe a week before Jeff happened
to walk into my office hours. He came in with
his camera. He was going to do a Masters in
photo documentary. He wanted to merge anthropology
and documentary journalism and education.
He'd get at doing something for the people
you're studying in terms of education, and
then journalism in terms of reaching a wider
public, and then anthropology in terms of
having that cultural relativism and theoretical
sophistication to understand that you're studying
a cultural form and to have a critical perspective
that goes beyond the everyday emergency or
the voyeurism that journalism analyzes or
just the service providing that education
does.
Gerhard: Do you think that's the future of
anthropology: to have a broader public—to
have that journalistic aspect, to have the
depth of anthropology through an anthropology
degree?
Philippe: I wish so. I mean, I could be dishonest
and say, "Absolutely," but I’m, in some
sense, not fighting for that, but working
towards that within anthropology, trying to
make whatever effect that I might have on
the field or might momentarily have on the
field until I disappear like everyone else
to promote that kind of a project, to reach
wider audiences.
The frustration that I had—I mean, I tried
just doing that a few times, just doing journalism,
just reaching out, and realized that I was
just becoming confused. I was in an everyday
emergency of addressing sort of political
conjunctural crises. I wasn't understanding
anything. I was not seeing the big picture.
I wasn't able to put—I was unable to even
sort of figure out what I should do next in
some sense. I was just lurching from whatever
crisis was going on at the moment. This was
during the revolutions in Central America.
That's why I think anthropology has so much
potential in doing just what you are saying
in bringing sort of the rigor of social science
theory.
The great thing about anthropology is it also
has humanities theory. We're both artists
and literary critics and philosophers, as
well as social scientists. It's the only field
that really—or one of the only fields that
really straddles two completely different
and often contradictory ways of understanding
and approaching the world: the humanities
and the social sciences. By bringing that
set of theory that we build and that sensibility
that we have to address the urgent crises
that are all around us, we really can do a
lot, I think.
Gerhard: How important do you think—I mean,
in your work, what really comes through is
the fact that you've been with these people
for 5, 10 years, which is, even for anthropology,
extraordinary in terms of the this long-term…
Philippe: Obsessive-compulsive behavior.
Gerhard: …obsessive-compulsive attachment
to the people you work with, facilitated by
the vicinity. I mean, six blocks. I mean,
my fieldwork is thousands of kilometers away,
which is more the norm in anthropology. What
role do you think that has played in how you've
then theorized or written about the people
that are really part of your community in
an everyday context, rather than a more—not
exoticized, but a more out there, other context
that most anthropologists work in?
Philippe: Yes, just logistically, of course,
is what's made it possible. On a very personal
level, it's also what keeps me sane. When
you're at your university, you're teaching
all your students and so forth, you get caught
up in the humdrum of things, and there's all
kinds of squabbles between the professors
and you're writing grants and stuff like that.
Then the great thing about doing fieldwork
on your block, in your hometown, right where
you live is all of a sudden you can step out
of that world that you're in that seems like
your whole universe and be somewhere completely
different.
In that sense, it was always refreshing. I
would come from a set of academic squabbles
in the faculty meeting, and then stop off
at the homeless encampment on the way home
and all of a sudden be in their world and
learning about their logics and how they saw
their hopes and how they were dealing with
the police, specifically. In their case, that
became a big focus of the book—was the carceral
sort of abusive management of poverty and
addiction by criminalizing it. Yes, that made
it possible to do the fieldwork.
On another level, of course, it creates a
different kind of friendship. It's interesting
because I do have the kind of ethnographic
friendships that I'm sure you have that are
a thousand miles away. I have that with the
people I originally worked with in Central
America. You can maintain those friendships.
It's hard on some level just because it's
far and so forth, but it's also, on another
level, quite easy because when you return,
you just hug the person and you haven't seen
each other and you're sort of also in a strange
way safely distant on another level.
With the homeless, I was really in reality.
They knew where I was living. They could come
and break into my windows and steal my television
set, right, which is what they specialized
in doing, or one of the things they specialized
in doing. They could also come and ask me
for money when they were in a bind—and they
did. They didn't steal from me. They were
actually super nice to me. They never stole
anything from me. They only gave me things
actually, which is quite extraordinary when
you think about it. They had absolutely nothing,
and I had so much, and they were generous
to me.
They did it very rarely and with respect,
so it required a whole set of sort of conscious
and unconscious negotiations of the friendship
to try to figure out how to do it with more
structural equality than is built into the
relationship when you're separated by multiple
borders and thousands of miles.
In that sense, the main character "In Search
of Respect," who I call Primo, is still one
of my best friends. Whenever I go to New York,
I try to visit him or I call him up. Often
his phone is disconnected. It's tragic. Actually,
he's better now because he has a great girlfriend,
who has taken him into her apartment, but
for about three, four years, he was living
in a homeless shelter with his kids. His phone
kept getting—he didn't have enough money
to pay for his phone and so forth, so it was
hard to maintain contact. That was like being
a thousand miles away. All of a sudden, no
cell phone—the new technology barriers.
In that sense, you develop different types
of friendship, not that the friendships that
I have been able to maintain in Costa Rica
specifically aren't great friendships, but
they're almost magical imaginary ones in some
sense. Every now and then actually, now with
Internet, the children of my main friend in
Costa Rico will e-mail me when there's an
emergency and ask me to send whatever, 100-dollar
emergency doctor thing. In that sense, boundaries
are reduced in a way that they weren't in
the 1980s.
Fern: I'm wondering, if just on the back of
that, I can ask you a quick question because
I know that we're getting a little bit short
of time.
Philippe: Yes, yes, yes. You can go into…
Fern: Something that's been coming up over
the course of what you've been saying. You're
talking about being depressed when you were
in Belize, and then you said you were engaging
with people in quite close quarters, so you're
very much more embedded in these sorts of
community than I think a lot of people are
in their fieldwork. These are communities
that you identify as high-risk or victims
of structural violence of the state. I'm wondering
how it is that you deal with the emotion of
working within these sorts of groups of people
as a fieldwork site. Is that something that
you consciously deal with or…
Philippe: Yes. It's definitely overwhelming.
I think in some sense part of the way—I
think a large part of how I deal with it is
through, in some contradictory way, the shield
of ethnography. It allows me to be in the
moment and see horrendous things and not completely
fall apart upon seeing them, by saying, "Well,
I have to also document this."
The nice thing with ethnography is that you
can engage as a human being and act ethically
at the moment. If someone is beating up a
little kid or something, you can put yourself
in—and stop the person from beating up the
little kid. You do do that. You find yourself
engaging like that.
At the same time, doing ethnography, you're
not instantly passing judgment and also sort
of getting immediately caught up in that sort
of savior-service type of relationship that
services have. That's very healthy because
a lot of the time—but to answer your question
more specifically, I think on some—one level
I go into denial because it's all un-dealable
with. What do you do when you're hearing a
baby shrieking and noises of hitting and so
forth? How do you deal with that? Well, you
have to figure out whether you should call
child protective services program that's even
more abusive than a family some sense, and
you have to figure out how people deal with
it locally in order to find a grandmother
or something who can intervene and bawl out
the young man who gets drunk and—this is
specifically with—one of the things that's
hardest to deal with is child abuse.
I mean, when I've been away from doing fieldwork
and I go back, I start to realize that I can't
believe that I lived with so much of that
sound of crying babies in some sense. There
is something that happens that you somehow
disassociate in some way just to be able to
just keep operating and to understand things.
I'd talked about this with my collaborators
because I work with collaborators now. I think
one of the things I do also work with collaborators
because there you can share your concerns
with someone. You can ask them for advice:
"Well, what should we do about this? Should
we call the police? Or run from the police?”
We end up having to—we don't—actually,
in this project, we couldn't call the police.
They were just too violent and brutal in Philadelphia,
but in other places, you might find yourself
where you can trust the police, calling the
police to help protect someone or something.
In talking with them, one of the—actually,
this was just told to me just recently by
George Karandinos, one of my collaborators.
He was an undergraduate student when he started
working with me. Now he's a graduate student.
He said that when he moved out of the neighborhood,
for the next six months, he just kept finding
himself bursting into tears at random, not
even knowing why he was crying. I think in
that sense he was doing the fieldwork more
intensively than me. He lived for five years.
This was my last project here in North Philadelphia
on a heroin and cocaine selling block. It's
similar to "In Search of Respect" in that it's a
Puerto Rican neighborhood that's sort of an
epicenter of the distribution networks of
the global narcotics economy.
It's a different moment from the 1980s. This
is the height of the mass incarceration of
the United States, and the extraordinary cutback
of social services, the complete breakdown,
in the case of Philadelphia, of public education.
Our schools are just being absolutely devastated.
They're closing them. They're firing the counselors
and nurses from the schools and raising—all
the things you can't possibly do to help people,
or that you shouldn't possibly do.
He was there for five years and living there
in an apartment that I had rented for him.
I was going up a few times a week, staying
overnight at his place, and we were making
friends again, not just with the sellers but
we wanted to get at the larger neighborhoods,
the larger community—in this case, the block's
relationship to the sellers, which meant the
mothers, fathers, lovers, grandmothers, grandfathers
of the sellers, to see how they were understanding
their sons. There were some daughters as well
involved in selling, but mostly it's a male-dominated
scene.
Yes, it is overwhelming on some level. At
the same time, people are friendly to you;
people are exciting; people are creative and
full of great ideas. You actually think of
the fieldwork in the moment as great fun.
It's like super, super exciting. You sort
of can't believe how everyone is being so
friendly to you and telling you everything
about their way of seeing the world because
they get excited about the project.
I go in and I show them "In Search of Respect"
and say, "Look, I did this book in the 1980s.
I now want to do another book to show what
street life is like in the 2010s." They go,
"Well, you better have at least two or three
chapters on me. I've great stories to tell."
People like to get engaged with it. They like
to be taken seriously, which is just like
you and I would love to be—just like this.
You come and interview me:
“Wow, I'll tell you anything. I'll talk
for…” We love to be heard and have a platform
for getting what we think is important out.
That's how they understand the project as
well. In that sense, it feels great to do
that. You can talk about their dreams. You
can talk about their struggles. You can talk
about what's hurting them and what could possibly
help them.
Gerhard: Maybe on that empowering and positive
note, we'll finish the official part of the
interview. Thank you very much for having
us, Philippe.
Philippe: Yes. Sorry for talking so much.
Fern: It's perfect.
