In search of respect

• 1. Inner-city street culture develops in part as a reaction to exclusion from mainstream economic opportunities and respect in society. Bourgois examines how people in an East Harlem neighborhood created an alternative status system (hustling, machismo, etc.) in the absence of traditional forms of status and respect.
• 1. Participants in the inner-city street culture are not simplistic opportunists, but rather complex individuals responding to difficult circumstances of poverty, lack of opportunities, discrimination and more. Bourgois humanizes people often caricatured in mainstream society.
• 1. Drug dealing and addiction cause immense suffering, but are still rational adaptations to oppressive environments for some people. Bourgois looks at how people get drawn into the underground economy as a means of subsistence and coping.
• 1. Issues like domestic violence, child abuse and neglect are not inherent to inner cities, but rather closely tied to the structural violence - political, economic exclusion - experienced by the urban poor. Bourgois connects social issues to wider exclusions.
• 1. Through long-term participant observation in East Harlem, Bourgois was able to uncover hidden structural factors shaping street culture. His emic, experiential data reveals how marginalized groups develop internal status hierarchies that give alternative meaning to concepts of respect, prestige and self-worth amidst societal exclusion.
• • By living in the neighborhood for years, Bourgois discovers nuances like the "code of the street" governing violence as a tool for gaining respeto and dignity unavailable through legal means (p.22-34). His social proximity and cultural insight reveal what outsiders miss.
• Bourgois' ethnographic work is an example of critical anthropology, which seeks to understand the world from the perspective of the subaltern or oppressed group. He uses his research to challenge dominant narratives about inner city life and advocate for change.
• Bourgois employs an embodied ethnographic approach, becoming a participant observer immersed in the day-to-day lives of crack dealers over 5 years. He provides a dense, textured account situated within intersecting anthropological frameworks.
• Drawing on theories of structural violence, Bourgois shows how the "code of the street" constituting masculine performative identity within the underground economy emerges from and responds to what Farmer called the "social machinery of oppression" associated with racialized inner-city poverty. Habitus and patterns of interpersonal violence among dealers must be contextualized within the racial formation processes that deny access to educational and employment opportunities.
• Dealers frequently employ physical violence as a resource for gaining respect, status, and symbolic capital within the context of what Bourdieu termed "fields of struggle". Fistfights, stabbings and beatings act as bodily inscription of machismo dispositions of hardness, strength, and masculinity. Toughness is literally inscribed on the body through knives, bullets and police batons. Hypermasculine performativity through violence becomes a cultural adaptation to impose power where structurally absent.
• In scenes vividly depicting interpersonal conflict, Bourgois analyzes how the dealer habitus produced through poverty precipitates physical domination in place of reasonable discussion; conflicts between friends or kin frequently transpire on a knife’s edge. Police raids intensify this dialectic, as cop violence feeds street violence in a Mertonian deviancy amplification spiral.
• Bourgois ultimately calls for a political economy and decolonial solutions addressing root inequalities rather than solely seeking law enforcement answers. He argues that interventions should focus on restoring institutions and opportunities enabling respect, dignity and value for those abandoned at the inner-city’s economic and educational margins.
• • Description of how Ray, a 14 year old youth, is pressed into violent underground economy by severe economic constraints, lack of education, and absent social institutions. Learns competitive masculinity and joins fights to gain money and status he is denied structurally aboveground.
• Explanation of how drug dealing provides a means of survival for many young men in poor neighborhoods, but also reinforces hypermasculine culture of violence and disrespect for women.
• Analysis of how the presence of guns in society perpetuates cycles of violence and retaliation.
• Discussion of how police harassment and brutality can exacerbate tensions and fuel further violence.
• Call for more investment in community resources and programs to address the root causes of crime and violence.
• Why can't Nuyricans access certain employment

  Criminal record

  Racial discrimination

  Exclusion from mainstream society

  Economic exclusion

  Lack of education

  Low cultural capital

  Lure of drug trade- economic and status
• violence continuum theoretical perspective

  Political exclusion resulting in poor education and avoiding legal work leading to drug dealing
• Feminist theoretical perspective

  Candy forced into drug dealing,

  Benefits system, houses and childcare
• Violent culture to project a sense of authority- creating a culture of fear
• Structural and symbolic violence PR experience from mainstream society
• Social relationships based on race and ethnicity, essential for societal living, fostering a sense of belonging among individuals based on shared beliefs and cultural truths.
• Social relations present when Ray's gang form hierarchy with Ray as leader, managers and workers. Bourgois, a white, educated individual, considered above others due to this status.
• Changes in gender roles as women take over dominant role of providing for family
• Systematic inequality
• Caesar has extremely violent characteristics from influence of drugs and previous life experience of domestic abuse as a child
• Caesar and Primo rape of young girl considered normal and "training" for service.
• Candy shot husband Felix for sleeping with her sister- physical and emotional abuse resulting in multiple miscarriages.
• Rite of passage- to achieve status in the group- manhood
• Personhood defined by role in drug gang
• Juan: "Blacks and Puerto Ricans really don't get along here"- adaptation of black culture through clothes and music- Acculturation
• Power and Reputation


  Primo: "I have to make something of myself"
• Power and Reputation


  Primo: "I really wanna work legal"
• Power and Reputation


  Laura Nader (Anthropologist): "Don't study the poor and powerless, everything you say about them will be used against them"
• Drugs


  Caesar: "I don't like this crack dealing"
• Women


  Primo: "She's a piece of meat- already fucked up"
• Women


  Primo: "I have to abuse that bitch verbally"
• Power and reputation


  Primo:" You have to do so much work for bullshit money"