This powerful work of gonzo journalism, predating the widespread acknowledgement of the opioid epidemic as such, immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers in the San Francisco drug scene, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, larceny, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photography with vivid dialogue, oral biography, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis to viscerally illustrate the life of a drug addict. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, racism and race relations, sexuality, trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of fixes and overdoses; of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the drug abusers’ determination to hang on for one more day, through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.
Philippe Bourgois is Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jeff Schonberg is a photographer and a graduate student in medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco.
"Based on over a decade of field research, Righteous Dopefiend is a searing portrait of the lives of homeless injection drug users in San Francisco and an analysis of the powerful forces that shape their lives. ...This book brings into our visual and moral field the plight of those whom we have condemned to the margins, documenting the struggle that is the condition of their daily existence and exploring the social structures that enforce their suffering." —Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande
"Calling this book ethnography would be like calling The Wire a cop show: what comes roaring out of its pages is almost as visceral and devastating as spending a night in 'the hole' itself."—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
"Plunge beneath the surface of America's no-man's lands. Find in the dead-end alleyways, storage lots, and overgrown embankments the terrifying but strangely ordered world of homeless heroin injectors. This book will test your cultural relativism to destruction, but along the way you will learn a great deal about destitution, about homelessness, about addiction, and about violence at all levels. These dopefiends are 'made in America'."—Paul Willis, author of Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, and co-founding editor of Ethnography
"Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg provide a riveting narrative of the daily struggles for survival of homeless people with a physical and emotional addiction to heroin. The authors' poignant account of these experiences features sophisticated analytic themes that enable them insightfully to integrate discussions of agency and moral responsibility on the part of homeless addicts with an analysis of the powerful structural forces that shape the addicts' lives. Righteous Dopefiend is a must-read."—William Julius Wilson, author of More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
“Bourgois and Schonberg deliver luminous images and intimate portraits of unforgettable Dickensian characters—a host of late-modern hobos, hustlers, dumpster divers, and sweet-talking jivers—whose addiction consigns them to lives of public ignominy and private pleasures transacted under the concrete freeway overpasses of a totally indifferent San Francisco. This tough book is a must-read for all.”—Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death Without Weeping
“If Pierre Bourdieu, George Orwell, and Walker Evans had met in a homeless encampment under a San Francisco highway, they could not have produced a more penetrating portrait of America's urban outcasts than Righteous Dopefiend. Fusing ethnography, photography, and social theory, Bourgois and Schonberg take the reader on the frantic roller coaster ride of daily subsistence among a clique of indigent heroin addicts. This searing anthropology of everyday violence in the underbelly of the American metropolis will challenge social scientists and public health experts, stun lay readers, and shame public officials oblivious to the social dereliction their failed policies are spawning.”—Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban Outcasts and Punishing the Poor
392 pp.7 x 9.5Illus: 64 duotones
9780520254985$34.95|£30.00Paper
May 2009