Righteous Dopefiend

Jeffrey is a medical and visual anthropologist. While a graduate student at the University of California, he conducted fieldwork with the Edgewater community. He collaborates with Philippe Bourgois by contributing his experience in photography to make the project a photo-ethnography, bringing images of the interlocutors’ lives into the book as a significant way of building a connection with readers.

Al is a toothless, energetic 40-year-old white man who moves into the encampment at the beginning of the book. He initially has a “girlfriend” named Rosie who uses him for crack, and their relationship reflects the gender dynamics of drug use and life on the streets. Al notably breaks the “intimate apartheid” of Chapter 1 by running with Sonny, a Black man.

CJ is a young Black man who is first involved in the encampment as someone with a place to live and a legal job before losing both and becoming more of a taker in the moral economy, much to the chagrin of the other campers. His relationship with Tina is central to the anthropologists’ portrayal of Gender and Sexuality in Poverty, Homelessness, and Addiction—specifically, the way domestic American values and gender roles play out in the context of an unhoused population. CJ ultimately dies of an overdose at the end of the book, after successfully completing a sobriety program and maintaining that sobriety for a year.

Felix is Frank’s running partner and a Latino man with “honorary white” status. His ethnicity and navigation of his social world come up in discussions of The Racialization of Poverty, Homelessness, and Addiction, as he code switches between white and Latino identity depending on his surroundings.

Frank is Felix’s running partner and a white interlocutor. Frank gets mugged by Felix and Vic during the period when Felix is trying to connect with his Latino identity through Vic.

Hank, an older (mid-fifties) white man, is the last regular inhabitant to move into the camp. He’s known for being exceptionally generous in the moral economy and for being able to do jugular shots for heroin users who have trouble finding veins to shoot up. Hank takes Petey on as a running partner after Scotty dies, prompting an exploration of male love. Near the end of the book, Hank becomes very sick—a “frequent flyer” at the county hospital—and exemplifies the high-cost, high-technology medical interventions necessary for patients who lack regular access to even bare-minimum social services due to police raids on encampments of unhoused people.

Hogan is one of the lowest-ranking members of the encampment; he is a white man shunned for his hygiene habits and obesity. However, when he gets very sick due to a flesh-eating bacteria, everyone feels sympathy for him. His ordeal reflects the high cost of criminalizing drug abuse, as Hogan requires costly medical interventions for an issue that could have been prevented with better access to clean needles and other harm-reduction practices. Tina briefly runs with him after a mishap with Carter’s great-nephew.

Max started the encampment Frank and Felix move into and expects rent in kind from them once a day. Max is an example of the moral economy of Edgewater’s unhoused population: Money is reserved for buying drugs to avoid withdrawal, so acts of generosity, sharing, and in-kind barter make more sense than money for rent.

Aside from Tina, Nickie is the only female interlocutor that Bourgois and Schonberg discuss. In her consent form for a close-up photo of her face, Nickie writes that if the readers can’t see her face, then they won’t have a full understanding of her pain.

Petey, who is originally from Southern California, is Scotty’s running partner. He becomes Hank’s running partner after Scotty’s death by overdose, which some of the community members blame Petey for. In these homosocial relationships, Petey is the “passive” partner. As the book goes on, Petey has more and more frequent interactions with the healthcare system due to liver damage.

Reggie, a 50-year-old Black man, exemplifies the complexity of race and ethnicity in lumpen society as part of a group intermingling with the majority-white encampment. He fantasizes about pimping out Tina, revealing some of the gender dynamics on the streets. After being arrested, Reggie is imprisoned for the remainder of the fieldwork, and the reader does not hear of him again.

Scotty, a young white man originally from the Midwest, is Petey’s running partner. Scotty dies of an overdose during the fieldwork, and while Petey initially blames the systems that put Scotty in his position, others blame Scotty or Petey himself.

Sonny asks Hank to shoot him up in the neck; as a Black man, he also breaks the intimate apartheid of Edgewater by running with Al.

Tina is a central figure, whose charisma and willingness to share details of her life with the ethnographers contribute to nearly every chapter of the book. Her childhood was filled with sexual violence and physical abuse; after growing up enduring such trauma, she turned to sex work as a way to meet her immediate needs as she lived in the streets. Tina stops sex work after establishing a relationship with Carter; before they get together, she has an addiction to alcohol and crack, and after, she begins using heroin as well. Tina is someone readers are invited to relate to and empathize with, and her story is an example of the devastating effects of Politically and Institutionally Structured Violence on women, especially Black women, on the streets.