Abstract
For criminologists who are book lovers, this co-authored work of ethnography and art is a must read. The reader senses the book’s uniqueness the moment she takes it into her hands. Made of smooth quality paperboard imprinted with a black and white photograph, a crouching white man with a beard and longish hair who may have been handsome once-upon-a-time shakes up our assumptions about city space. In a wooded clearing, he leans against the outside straightaway of a low highway wall, stabilizing his body as he concentrates on shooting heroin, apparently into the base of his thumb. On the other side of the wall, a car blurs into the curve, its driver, a metaphor of the relatively privileged majority, is completely unaware of ‘The Hole’ and the Righteous Dopefiend within it. Opening the book, the reader enters 10 full pages of photographs depicting San Francisco’s edge: the deeply deviant, beautiful, excessive, expressive impoverishment of home-made encampments outside/inside the urban midst. The imageric entrée then enters into conversation with the ethnographic narrative in a multidimensional dialogue that persists throughout. Pulling together Foucault’s biopower, Bourdieu’s habitus, Marx’s lumpen (the residual, but not worthless; the tragic but not joyless; the subjected but not without subjectivity), the introductory chapters entitled ‘Theory of abuse’ and ‘Intimate apartheid’ provide a succinct intellectual framework for understanding the larger, forces shaping the moral economy of homeless heroin addicts. Reflexive and collaborative, this photo-ethnography uses voice and story to pull the reader into the profound ethical ambiguities of habitus in the ‘gray zone’ where stealing to help your friend avoid a dope-withdrawal-sickness is a righteous act.
Caught in the trough between waves of deindustrialization and the dot.com boom, the mixed-race, mostly male cohort, came of age in Hunters Point-Bayview just as the neighborhood started dying. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the dot.com booms and busts zoomed right past these folk; too old to make it, they were trapped by poor decisions and the effects of illegal drug dependencies. The inhabitants had become addicted to shooting heroin in the 1970s and now they were homeless and ageing. By the time the team’s fieldwork starts in the 1990s, the only thing left of the navy base, shipyards, and steel mills is an intensely toxic coastal environment, the remnants of once vibrant communities struggling to stay afloat economically; social memories of better times also struggle to live. Working with a dynamically shifting cohort over the years Bourgeois and Schonberg grew to understand the social (dis)organization of addiction and survival. The central chapters focus on the subgroup of characters that the authors knew best which take readers through the basic criminological subjects of the drug war, audit culture, and public nuisance policing. Written reflexively through the respectful yet open eyes of the ethnographers, the central chapters, ‘Falling in love’, ‘A community of addicted bodies’, ‘Childhoods’, ‘Making money’, ‘Parenting’, ‘Male love’, ‘Everyday addicts’, and ‘Treatment’, explore dimensions of human experience rarely accessible to the published criminological gaze. Uniquely, this is not a series of interviews, static in their collection and representation. Twelve years of experience doing close participant observation by the authors and other members of their team illuminate social interaction in formation even as it concentrates attention on ethnographic quandaries of data collection, writing and representation.
The writing and photos take us close enough to allow us to understand how folk transition in and out of homelessness and, if treated for addiction at all, how they face multiple relapses. By the end of the book, central characters die and readers know—and more importantly can feel—how and why. Even when the characters fail to correctly identify the causes of their own downfall and pain, blaming themselves and each other (often along racist and misogynist lines), the authors will not let the reader succumb to misrecognition: the authors persuasively demand that the reader understand the larger forces, the impossible pressures, and indeed, the self-righteous ignorance that prevents the larger society from engaging in meaningful policy changes and social change more broadly.
I have twice taught Righteous Dopefiend in my 300-level lecture class on Deviant Images/Deviant Acts. From the moment the students see the first photographic series, they start assessing, judging. Students respond with mixed emotions, studied indifference, or outright disgust to the scenes of marginalization and drug injection in unsterile situations. The tension is sustained as the class moves further into the elegantly crafted dialogic counterpoint of image, story, and analysis and between action on the ground and the subsequent interpretative work. Despite student resistance to any form of identification with the lumpen, the abject objects of stereotype and stigma are nevertheless transformed into human subjects with names, personalities, style, hygiene habits, life history, and for some, especially the African Americans, a rich connection to inter-generational social memory.
The ever changing encampments are constructed of and filled with found and stolen materials, degraded by strewn garbage and human waste, and periodically devastated by raids instigated by police and Caltran highway agents. Despite their inherent despair, the encampments also produce a palpable sense of belonging, of home, though tenuous in the extreme. It is in the encampments that moments of drug-induced ecstasy, satisfaction of shared struggle, and occasions for laughter and celebration mediate the tawdry necessities of copping dope and shooting it into hideous abscesses and hardened veins. Jeff Schonberg’s photographs not only bring these scenes to life for the reader, but does so in a poignant and unusual manner that also teaches scholars about how to give back; his photographs enter into these scenes as gifts. The book includes photos and text showing how Schonberg’s photos become meaningfully incorporated as family photos, how they ritually transcend their documentary value and tie an aesthetic chord between subjects and students.
This photographic chord, tying subject, photo-ethnographers, and readers provide entry points into important discussions. Together with the narrative, the photographs can take students to places where classes don’t often go. Many good books in criminology, sociology and anthropology reverse ways of seeing stereotype and stigma through critical analysis. This book goes farther by throwing into question the very basis of social categories. Through intimacy over time, readers see the characters working to inhabit the social categories within their reach: Righteous Dopefiend, Vietnam Vet, Addict-in-Treatment, Hospital Patient, Outlaw Gangsta, Lover, Sibling, Parent, Child. Students or professors have a much different range of social categories available to them and approach them with different sensibilities and skills, and yet, we all have to work to inhabit our social categories, even when taken for granted and accomplished unconsciously. This lesson provides the ground from which to approach how ethnographic understanding informs the diverse particularities and universalities of human lives and livelihoods. At the same time, it connects this fundamental understanding to the hard political and design questions posed by policy and intervention initiatives aimed at homelessness and addiction.