Righteous Dopefiend

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary: “A Theory of Abuse”

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

The introduction to Righteous Dopefiend explains the researchers’ approaches to working with their interlocutors and the theoretical framework of their analysis. They are working with unhoused people, many of whom deal with substance addiction. Most interview subjects are men over 40 living in a dilapidated warehouse district named Edgewater.

The introduction addresses the complicated ethics of relationships between researchers and their marginalized research participants. Navigating the moral economy that exists in the community they are studying, Bourgois and Schonberg tried to make their research ethical by integrating into the community and approaching their interlocutors with dignity and without judgment. The researchers’ goal is to explore the large-scale institutions and systems that contribute to the marginalization of these individuals, “the human cost of neoliberalism in the twentieth century” (9).

There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of photography: Ideally, photography allows readers to understand the position of the research subjects without turning their suffering into a spectacle.

Bourgois and Schonberg base their analysis of abuse, violence, and suffering in the context of the participants in their research on the power and violence theories of German philosopher Karl Marx, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and French philosopher Michel Foucault. The work characterizes the harsh circumstances of its subjects as a form of violence that is both interpersonal and political.

Introduction Analysis

The initial and final chapters of Righteous Dopefiend are the most theory-heavy chapters in the book. The first chapter lays the theoretical groundwork while also offering glimpses of the primary figures in the book. This book draws heavily from French social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to map out a basis for understanding how structural inequality shapes the lives of those on the fringes of the modern economy, enmeshing them in systems of Politically and Institutionally Structured Violence.

The goal of this book is “to clarify the relationships between large-scale power forces and intimate ways of being in order to explain why the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, has emerged as a pressure cooker for producing destitute addicts embroiled in everyday violence,” (4), while also avoiding portraying the lives of the authors’ interlocutors as a spectacle. Exposing marginalized communities without feeding into the gaze of the morbidly curious voyeur is a significant aspect of the ethics of photo-ethnography. The anthropologists weigh the risks of photography with the advantages of connecting to readers on a visual as well as verbal level. Since this is a work of public anthropology, the authors decide visual connection is worth the drawbacks, particularly considering the invisibility of the population being studied—it is another layer the reader can analyze and potentially respond to. Important to their understanding of the ethics of their work is the concept of “collaborative photo-ethnography.” At all times, the researchers actively enlist the collaboration of their research subjects. The goal of this practice is for research subjects to share agency over the shape of the final product with the researchers themselves.

Beyond the ethical considerations involved in photographing research subjects, the authors also consider the ethics and aesthetics of transcription. The interlocutors’ oral testimony often loses important cultural and aesthetic content in being transcribed into written form. Accents, speech patterns, and intonation are difficult to represent in writing, and attempts to represent these idiosyncrasies phonetically often have a distancing effect. The authors seek to represent their interlocutors’ voices faithfully, constantly aware that their own position as researchers places them in an asymmetrical power relationship to their subjects.