Read: Bourgois, In Search of Respect

1. What does Bourgois mean by "inner-city street culture"? What are the behaviors and practices associated with it? Where do they come from? What are their effects?

2. What does Bourgois mean by the statement, "Through cultural practices of opposition, individuals shape the oppression that larger forces impose upon them" (17)? How do specific examples from the book illustrate this dynamic? In what ways do structure and agency shape street culture?

3. In his introduction, Bourgois writes of his concern that his book will be interpreted as falling prey to "an ethnography of violence, or a racist voyeurism" (18). Does it? How would you navigate this dilemma?

4. What are racial and gender relations like in the "inner-city street culture" which Bourgois describes? What factors produce these relations, and what are their effects?

5. How, according to Bourgois, does focusing on the extreme elements of a group give insight into the broader issues faced by the group? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this method?

Journal Entry #3: Structure and Individual Choices (due in class on February 5 and by email to aleshkow[at]holycross.edu). A major goal of our FYP courses this year is to try to understand other people's behavior and the broader contexts that have shaped that behavior. Bourgois argues that structural factors (poverty, racism, class hierarchy, colonial oppression, migration, gender relations) help to explain the attitudes and actions of the drug dealers that he studied. At the same time, he argues that a focus on structures should not prevent us from seeing that individuals are making their own choices and are "active agents of their own history" (17). Pick an episode from the book and explain why the character has behaved the way he or she has with particular reference to those factors that are structural and those that are individual. How does considering these two levels of analysis help us to understand behavior that is criminal or destructive of one's self or others?

For more information, contact: aleshkow@holycross.edu