Confronting Anthropology, Education, and the Inner-city Apartheid
Author(s)
Bourgois, Philippe
Abstract
Ethnographies of inner-city street life often succumb to ethnic and class apartheid and avoid confronting the politics of social misery on U.S. city streets. In this essay, the author uses ethnographic dialogues with street-level crack dealers in East Harlem to question the relationship between anthropology, education, and the analysis of extreme social suffering. The resistance and self-destruction of inner-city street culture is contextualized within childhoods lived at the intersections of institutional, personal, and gendered violence in school and family settings as well as on the street.
