Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg University of California Press, 2009, PB, 420pp, £21.99, 978-0520254985
In Righteous Dopefiend, the anthropologists Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg present their findings from over 10 years of ethnographic research within the Edgewater community, a group of homeless heroin addicts living at the margins of San Francisco. Following the lives of almost a dozen main characters, or the ‘lumpen’ as the author terms them in a revival of Marxist terminology, we witness the symbolic and structural violence that they experience on a …