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Being a Public Anthropologist: An Interview with Philippe Bourgois Eric
Haanstad Abstract: Philippe Bourgois' (San Francisco State U) recent book, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge University Press, 1995), is an engagingly written and candidly honest account of discrimination, education and the underground economy in New York's East Harlem. In addition to an impressive body of work in the venues of academic anthropology, Dr. Bourgois has written articles for The Nation, Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Magazine; and has been featured on the Phil Donahue Show, National Public Radio, Science, People and Fortune Magazine. For information on Dr. Bourgois' current research interests, contact information, and list of awards and publications, please see SFSU's website: http://www.sfsu.edu/~urbins/bios/philippe.htm
Eric Haanstd: I was wondering first, how you became interested in doing anthropology. Philippe Bourgois: Well, I don’t know if it’s typical or not, but it was one of the few things that wasn’t a decision in my life. I stumbled in as a freshman in my first year in college into one of those huge intro to anthropology classes that everyone dislikes and I sat in the front row and loved it. I didn’t actually major in anthropology. I majored in inter-disciplinary social studies, and initially I was resisting going into academic anthropology. I mean I knew right away that I loved anthropology, but I thought I was sure that I didn’t want to be an academic. So when I actually applied to graduate schools I was specifying that I wanted to go into international development issues. I ended up becoming an academic, but I wanted my work and my theoretical approaches to engage with urgent social problems facing the world. EH: So you started out from the beginning wanting to seek out a broader audience than an academic audience? PB: Yeah, I was actually a little bit hostile to academia at that time. I saw it as being too elite and ivory tower. I still think that sometimes, but this was in the late seventies, so there was more of an atmosphere of political engagement in general. So it was something that one discussed with one's fellow students and faculty and it was seen as an option. It wasn't so polarized as it would be now, where basically a lot of elite departments wouldn't admit a student who wrote a statement of purpose saying they didn't want to go into academia. It was a different set of times than it is now. It's unfortunate that it's gotten so polarized and that there is so little dialogue between the elite fast track that specifically trains people not to be engaged, unfortunately, in urgent social problems. EH: So you see that as something that academic departments are still steering away from? PB: I think that's the sad thing right now. I wouldn't even use the word "still," I would say "more than ever" in my experience of it. I then specifically chose to switch from a wannabe ivy-league school, Washington University in St. Louis, to go to a public university, San Francisco State, which is sort of the U.S. equivalent of an Open University. You get above a certain grade-point average and you are allowed in. I did that on purpose to do anthropology in a more democratic working class oriented environment. There was more support there by colleagues and by the dean to do what we called applied anthropology. But at the same time in my writing I began writing more and more for elite theoretical mainstream anthropology - an interesting almost a schizophrenic bifurcation in my own life. So as a result I stayed in intensive contact with colleagues and friends and developing colleagues and friends, who were in the elite departments, which kept me in touch with the fact that, there, applied anthropology was a dirty word in elite departments. It's understood that there is inherent contradiction between interesting clean theory and the prostitution of applied anthropology - that distresses me that there is that lack of dialogue between the two. It doesn't all go one way - it's a complicated problem. It's not as if it's just the fault of the elite institutions. There are real contradictions in what we call applied anthropology because it's dependent on soft money and one gets sucked into the bureaucratic logics that one works for often. One starts doing, often, tragically less interesting and more accommodating work so it's moving away from interesting theoretical issues. I've struggled with that a great deal. I work on issues of inner city poverty, substance abuse and so forth. Before that, I was working on ethnic violence and revolutionary movements in Central America. In the revolutionary context in Central America one didn't feel that contradiction whatsoever. It was a fascinating moment. I was working for the Nicaraguan government for agrarian reform at one point in the early stages of the revolution, around the disaster of the Mosquito Indian policy, right at the beginning of the Contra War. There, the burning issues of ethnicity, nationalism, class, the meaning of violence the relevance of economic policy vs. political policy, racism vs. issues of economic equality, these deep theoretical issues were directly applicable to the burning issues that one was debating in one's, what would be called now, applied work. With the agrarian reform arguing with them that the biggest problem was racism and internal colonialism against the Mosquito rather than what they thought it was which was strictly an economic problem of marketing and setting up economic cooperatives for the Mosquito - with Latino organizers at those co-operatives. What was wonderful there was that everything that one was working on theoretically, at that time it was debates within political economy and Marxism on the relationship between class and ethnicity, between ideology and materialism in terms of motivating political movements. All that stuff was directly applicable and debated in everyday practice. When I came back to the United States, I tried to readdress those same types of issues around the U.S. inner city, the historical structuring of racism and exclusion from the job market. I found that there was no room in applied work in the U.S. for those kinds of debates. I was automatically a kook that was outside the mainstream and I could only be a political critic. I think that's one of the things that's interesting with the category "public anthropology," the way I see it, is it allows for political engagement that's relevant to burning social issues without getting tied into a bureaucratic framework where you're not allowed to debate issues of racism, for example, if you're doing an economic development project in inner-city neighborhood. There just isn't any understanding of how histories of racism and public sector breakdown could be integrated into fashioning a federally funded development project in East Harlem, where I was. I remember when they called me up from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, I got a grant from them, and I said, "Yeah, I have the stuff that's relevant, (it was right at the beginning of the crack epidemic), I have a great advertisement that you could put on inner city radio shows that I think would be absolutely great." It was the people that were trying to develop the anti-drug advertisements from the beginning. I said, "put on every inner city radio show, 'the white man wants you to smoke that crack.'" They thought I was joking and I wasn't! I was trying to do something theoretically engaged - using the issues that I was interested in, the history of racism in the United States - and apply it to an urgent problem: the initial stages of the crack epidemic. But I just got laughed out of this telephone conference call. So that's the challenge in this country is how to address those urgent social issues and be relevant to the debates without getting forced into what I see myself as sometimes doing now: counting toenails in an interstice of the War on Drugs where I'm not even sure which side they think I'm on, in terms of trying to publish stuff and make presentations that are relevant to a progressive engagement with substance abuse in the United States. That's why I think this initiative that you're doing with this newsletter that Rob (Borofsky) has been putting together in terms of seeing if there is another space, it wouldn't be in contradiction with applied anthropology but it would be an applied anthropology that, in some sense, is purposefully political. I think that the models of public intellectuals historically, there are obvious names that come up, especially in Europe where there is more of a tradition of this, do act as models and one wouldn't confuse them with sacrificing any level of intellectual integrity and vigor to the process that making sure that their work is intelligible for the public and relevant to the debates that are going on in the country. Now I'm talking too long. EH: No, you're actually answering most of my questions as we go along. PB: Not to be melodramatic about it, but the French are the ones who developed the idea of the public intellectual par excelance and you think of people like Sartre, Camus, Foucault and Bourdieu today, he's the last living one in that tradition. Bourdieu gives a speech to striking union workers or high school kids in Paris and, even though it's hard to understand the way he writes, he does organize the priority of his theories in ways that engage urgent problems especially in France, but also around universal neo-liberalism. EH: So you see the wider tradition of public intellectuals as being more directly politically involved? PB: That's my understanding of it. What I don't think is true, what I notice in the debates that happen, is there is sort of a bemoaning that anthropology isn't recognized by the general public and I'm not really worried about that. I don't really care that much about anthropology - I love anthropology and I think that specifically it's participant observation methods force people to be political or should force people to be political and have a preferential option for the socially vulnerable and also a strategic access to the nitty gritty of how power relations translate into everyday social suffering. If Margaret Mead is person that everyone likes to mention as the last anthropologist who was a household name. Part of Margaret Mead would be some kind of a model in terms of critiquing sexual repression or something like that, but the later Margaret Mead, where she's mucking around with stopping the AAA from opposing anthropologists from working with the CIA, that's a shame. That's a dark moment in terms of her stature failing as a public intellectual where she could have taken a public intellectual stance and said "No, anthropologists shouldn't work with the U.S. military," and do that unambiguously. That's an interesting question: should a public intellectual have the right to be a right-winger? Actually, I don't even know how to respond to that. By definition, one thinks of public intellectuals as critics of power. EH: Yeah, it seems to one of the things when thinking about doing public work in, say a AAA forum where a group of people are speaking for anthropology as a whole, it becomes dangerous if people aren't doing individual work - certainly with political motivations it's an individual choice… PB: Yeah, when one thinks back, Sartre and Camus were on different sides around strategy with respect to French colonialism in Algeria. It's an interesting case in point: two tremendous public intellectuals that one can admire from all perspectives and they came down very differently on political strategy, and it still today has tremendous implications around the issue of violence in terms of change. Sartre's coming down in favor of violence and Camus is coming down against violence in the colonial struggle against France in Algeria. So, yeah, it's obvious that it would be healthy for the debate and there couldn't be one political line. At the same time, is Cardoso in Brazil is he a public intellectual anymore? He was big in dependency theory way back and does the whole neo-liberal restructuring of Brazil. My definition of public intellectual would draw more from Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual where one's theoretical and intellectual development comes out political struggle and takes on its relevance of political struggle. It think that's what political struggle, commitment and personal experience - he also had a notion of class position in that - so I think there's room for us to argue around what are the responsibilities of a public intellectual. That's why I'd like to make an argument for the importance of Gramsci's understanding of participation in political struggle as being what's necessary. EH: Especially, in you essay in American Anthropologist ["Confronting Anthropology, Education, and Inner-City Apartheid." June, 1996.], when you're talking about ethnography that's particularly risky, emotionally involved and often uncomfortable for academics, what sort of advantages do you see these sort of ethnographies offer in creating something less academically isolated in anthropology? Do you see that as in particular as political motivation…? PB: Yeah, I think there's two things there. One is a developed political agenda that one might have or that might develop out of one's fieldwork, and the other is just on a deeper human level. This is the magic of the centrality of participant observation as the central method in cultural anthropology. As a human being when you are interfacing with people, especially given the subjects that anthropology has historically chosen to study then you're going to be faced with extraordinary burning interactions of power that are brutalizing people. In the old days it was anthropologists doing fieldwork in the context of colonialism and in the United States in the context of the genocide of Native Americans and the ethnocide of cultures and the incredible suffering that goes on now and was going on then on Indian reservations in U.S. Indian policy. So, by definition, as a human, one would have to become involved in that or one would be unethical. What I'm scared of today is that anthropologists are starting to steer away from those topics in order to escape the personal engagement with it. That scares me…that makes me sad, because right now, the traditional topics of anthropology would force one to be political and in a sense they always did. In retrospect it's the bad work that didn't address the politics of it, drawing on Wolf's critique of the exotic other, with anthropologists not talking about colonialism, not talking about the world system, and sort of treating their communities as if they exist in isolated vacuums. What worries me is that new generations will stop going to places where they are going to be confronted face to face with those levels of social suffering that are so spread out in the world.
EH: I'm wondering if part of that is the particular geographic location…do you see a difference between, for example, the public appeal of your international work in Central America and the inner city American research and if you're coming at that in a different way? PB: It actually feels the same to me, to tell you the truth. The Central America work was occurring at the time of the revolution in Central America, specifically in terms of U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1980s. So doing participant observation in my case is actually seeing oppression and seeing people getting killed, as a matter of fact. So that automatically made me get engaged with human rights work or I couldn't have lived with myself as a human being. Anthropologists chose different stances during that period. Guatemala is a great case in point because Guatemala was the traditional site for anthropologists to build their careers studying the Maya. Some became very engaged in the human rights violations and in studying issues of violence and ethnic mobilization and theorizing those issues of ethnicity class, gender, violence and social suffering. Others just dropped the issue like a hot potato or somehow escaped addressing the genocide that was occurring in Guatemala that is now recognized, at least by the United Nations, as a genocide against the Maya. Now, in the U.S. inner city it's different in that I've chosen to try to build the concept of U.S. inner city apartheid to try to make a point about how dramatic the structuring of exclusion is around race and class in the United States, and to make a parallel with South Africa. Otherwise, what happens here, of course, the politics of inequality in the United States get depoliticized very easily. Here, it's actually trying to make there be a discussion in the United States about this phenomenon of the U.S. inner city so that people don't just escape to the suburbs and ignore it, or just treat it as a bunch of social pathologies that are the problems of individuals making bad decisions. It's a more complicated political engagement because the first part of it is to even get people to recognize that there is a politics of race in the United States. EH: I'm wondering too, obviously in In Search of Respect there's a more reflexive and a more personal nature to it than a lot of writing. Do you see that as offering a particular appeal for more public audiences? PB: The sort of change in my writing that occurred from my first book on Central America on the United Fruit Company to my second book, In Search of Respect, where I addressed the politics of representation and my positionality in it. I was influenced by postmodernism, by the critique of ethnography especially in Writing Culture. There, I was very much influenced by mainstream anthropology, an elite anthropology specifically because it's a very elite volume, and I'm thankful for that. I was mostly invisible in my first book. Every now and then I squeezed a peek in there, but we were taught to hide ourselves. That's what I was thinking of primarily. I agree with critique of the omniscient ethnographer so that's why I wanted to position myself in it. And as a white man writing about the inner city and about gendered violence, the politics of representation also required a positionality. Just from a positivist point of view, the data collection had to be explained given the ethnicity, gender etc. of the ethnographer and who is being written about. In terms of more popular writing, it's interesting…what you say is interesting that it also appeals to a more popular audience that the writer be present. It makes it more honest and engaging, or it can also make it more narcissistic or more Indiana Jones-like. Obviously, it's a double-edged sword, but there's no contradiction between the theoretical and the political imperative of having the anthropologist present in his or her writing and also making the writing easier and more engaging to read for the public. EH: Also, when you're talking about the change in your books becoming more reflexive, your topical interest seems to have changed focus from wider global processes, but then you start focusing more on drug economies. Is that a good characterization? PB: To tell you the truth, I resisted the whole drug moniker, because I don't want to get trapped in the drug war - that's exactly what misses the point of social suffering and relationships of racism in the United States when it becomes a substance abuse problem. At the same time, the fact of the matter is, there's funding if you do drug research in the United States and that's where I get my funding. Also, when I'm trying to write in a way that's going to have an immediate impact there's forums where I can I engage. I can go to the National Institute of Health…one can't quite argue about the decriminalization of drugs, but one can argue around the decriminalization of drugs. One can argue about methadone and the medical prescription of opiates and bring one's research to bear on that. Or even, very concretely, with the treatment community, one can argue about the need for there to be job training, housing and community-based follow-up after the treatment - that it isn't just the psychological magic switch that's going to take place in someone's brain. There needs to be a political economy of addiction before and after that has nothing to do with the neural-biology or psychology of the cravings that the treatment community would traditionally treat it as. So there's room to try to bring in issues of job placement in treatment, and that's where I found myself, now in the needle-exchange debates. They are only in a little tiny corner of anthropology, but they're a huge part of public health debates. The tragedy in the United States, of course, is that the National Institute of Health came out, despite all it's data, against needle exchange unlike all parts of Europe and all the rest of the industrialized world, virtually. In a sense, those of us working there have failed in that debate. We haven't been able to carve out a common sense for harm reduction within the larger public. I think anthropologists have done great work in the drug debates compared to the rest of the public health fields. In large part, not accidentally, because of the participant observation methodology, you have to accompany people in their experience with drugs and you see the human suffering of it and the logics for harm reduction become more instantly obvious. Also, the contradiction of harm reduction as well - it’s not a simple slogan. I think anthropology has had a lot to offer there, but that part of anthropology has not had much impact on anthropology though. That dialogue has been going on exclusively in the public health and treatment fields and primarily with epidemiologists, trying to get them to take qualitative methods seriously, and recognizing the whole human rather than just the isolated variable of injector, risk taker etc. That's a place where there's room for an active debate and anthropologists have generally taken more risks in pushing that debate in progressive directions in the United States. It's kind of nice because, surprisingly, the sociologists haven't been as active within drug research - in bringing in a new perspective to it from the traditional public health one of counting variables and never seeing a human being. EH: What aspect of your work to you find is most rewarding: the academic, the activist - consultancy work, or the public-oriented work with doing interviews and features in mainstream publications? PB: I had to come to terms with this, at one point in my life, is that I actually love writing. I love reading also, so in that sense, the academic part of me that obsessively writes and reads is a part I had to realize, that's who I am that is what I love to do and I shouldn't fight it out of political correctness. I shouldn't try to repress the fact that I am a hardcore, egghead, square academic. I love to read and write. I like even to read the horribly written stuff that most anthropology is. I write that language myself, and I enjoy the precision of the wretched language of hyper-academia. I have to enjoy that and I like the level of engagement that can have. At the same time, what I want to try and do is push the boundaries of that as well. In my writing, what I find most enjoyable is working with the words of the people that I'm researching. It's working with tape recordings that I found the most exciting part of writing. EH: Providing a representation? PB: It's not just providing a representation, when you look at the transcribed tape recordings really closely it's discovering that language and the culture and the humanity of that language and trying to bring it out into an academic mainstream. I think it makes for more interesting reading as well - that actually makes it more accessible to the more general public. People that aren't majors in anthropology will actually read it because it's edited words of drug dealers or whoever. They speak more beautifully than we write so of course one has to edit it so that it's comprehensible in that format because the oral presentation of it is very different from how it ends up technically on the page. For me that's the thing I most enjoy is working with the transcriptions and trying to translate them into a format that makes it accessible so that people can read it whether they're in their ivory towers or on a bus going to work or something. EH: Obviously, it seems like although that's the academic component of it, that's had public appeal and has provided a mechanism for change as well. PB: Although to be totally honest with you, I feel like I've failed in terms of really getting out to the public. I can't tell you how many magazine articles I've tried to write and only one or two were ever successful: a New York Times one, a Harper's one and the Nation one. But the rest of the time the editors just literally laugh at me, because I write like, you know, a goddamn academic. I put footnotes in - I can't stop myself from putting in footnotes and references! I use words like "macrostructural." A human being in America doesn't use the word "macrostructural." Only an egghead academic would ever think of writing that word. And so, I have to face the fact that I'm a hardcore academic in that sense. Obviously, I want to push those boundaries, but I do have to accept the fact that I do love the language of academia at the same time. I do find it useful for precision, but I think we can push it to make it more accessible.
Eric Haanstad is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison who specializes in Thailand. He is currently the President-elect of the National Association of Student Anthropologists. He is living in Thailand this year for preliminary dissertation work on Thai police and security groups. |
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