Righteous Dopefiend

The introduction to Righteous Dopefiend sets the groundwork for the reader to understand the researchers’ approaches to working with their interlocutors and the theoretical framework of their analysis. They are working with homeless, substance-addicted people who are majority men over 40 living in a dilapidated warehouse district named Edgewater.

The introduction addresses the ethics of the complicated relationship between researchers and their marginalized research participants. Navigating the moral economy that exists among the addicted people, 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 are at play in the marginalization of people who are at the edges of society, “the human cost of neoliberalism in the twentieth century” (9).

There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of photography; the ideal would allow readers to understand the position of the addicted people in American society 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.