Righteous Dopefiend

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

Bourgois and Schonberg aim not only to document the intimate lives of Edgewater’s unhoused communities but also to show how those lives are shaped by political and social forces that limit their choices and opportunities. The anthropologists borrow Karl Marx’s term lumpen to describe the social position occupied by these communities: They are people who have been left behind by a shifting economy—people whose limited economic utility leads the system to treat them as disposable.

In their work, Bourgois and Schonberg make the assumption, which mainstream society treats as radical, that Edgewater residents are rational actors making reasonable decisions based on their situations. The residents’ understanding of the world is shaped by the systems and institutions they know: The deindustrialization of the US economy has deprived them of jobs, gentrification has driven them out of stable communities and eliminated affordable housing, and neoliberal policies have privileged the free market over the welfare of marginalized communities. The anthropologists suspend their moral judgment of actions that may be considered immoral in a normative framework—such as stealing or physically harming other people—to understand the worldview and circumstances within which these actions represent reasonable choices.