December 1996 book reviews
In Search of applaud: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Philippe Bourgois. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 392 pp.
CHARLES SHANNON
U of Missouri-St. Louis
Among the many recent experiments in authorship culture that have emerged, few have shown more trueness toward the fieldwork part of the process than Philippe Bourgoiss In Search of Respect. In this pillowcase the field of study was only 20 blocks from the area in Manhattans Upper East Side where Bourgois grew up. Yet those 20 blocks among the Upper East Side and the Puerto Rican population of East Harlem catch up with a socioeconomic chasm stretching from mainstream to marginal. In Search of Respect seeks to create a bridge across that vast fond distance by documenting the range of survival strategies of those at the ingrained end of that marginalizing distance, the crack dealers of El Barrio.
Bourgois and his wife moved into a tenement apartment in East Harlem, an area referred to as El Barrio, early in 1985 and spent the next three-and-a-half historic period living among the harsh realities of the ghetto streets in order to gain entrée to a network of Puerto Rican crack dealers and their friends and relatives.
Bourgois eventually found himself at a storefront called the Game Room where video games provided a cover for the sale of crack. It was the manager of this establishment, Primo, who became Bourgoiss friend and primary computer address of information about life in El Barrio. by means of this hard-won quasi-intimacy, Bourgois seeks to tell us some things about the symbols and symptoms of ghetto life, the Achilles heel of the richest change nation in the world. It is this goal that is the source of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Bourgoiss study.
The transparent strength of the work is its insight into the thought processes of the subjects involved in the underground drug economy of El Barrio. Bourgoiss liberal role of...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay
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