Righteous Dopefiend

Bourgois and Schonberg frame Righteous Dopefiend around their theory of lumpen abuse, which “sets the individual experience of intolerable levels of suffering among the socially vulnerable (which often manifests itself in the form of interpersonal violence and self-destruction) in the context of structural forces (political, economic, institutional, cultural) and embodied manifestations of distress (morbidity, physical pain, and emotional craving)” (17). They achieve this framing by oscillating between intimate details of interlocutors’ lives and struggles, and the ways the structures they operate within perpetuate violence that has impacted most of them since birth.

In their work, Bourgois and Schonberg make the seemingly radical assumption that Edgewater residents are rational actors making reasonable decisions based on their situations. Their understanding of the world is shaped by the systems and institutions they know: Growing up in a de-industrializing world that led to insecure employment and economic instability; growing gentrification that drives them out of affordable housing; and neoliberal policies that privilege the free market over the social welfare of marginalized communities. By implementing cultural relativism, the anthropologists suspend their moral judgment of actions that may be considered immoral—everyday violence such as stealing, doing drugs, or physically harming other people—to understand the worldview of people for whom these decisions are reasonable choices.