Lumpen Abuse: The Human Cost of Righteous Neoliberalism

Abstract

I thank the Society for Urban Anthropology for the Anthony Leeds Book Prize. The award gives me special pleasure because I think of myself primarily as an urban anthropologist. I was trained in "peasant studies" as a student of Eric Wolf's in the late 1970s and early 1980s eager to conduct participant-observation fieldwork on the revolutionary movements taking place in Central America in those decades. It was a hopeful - even inspiring - moment in history at my doctoral fieldwork theme/sites: the agrarian reform in the Amerindian Moskitia territory of Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-80, 1984), guerrilla warfare in an FMLN-controlled territory in El Salvador (1981), and farmworker organizing on a United Fruit Company plantation enclave spanning the Costa Rica/Panama Caribbean border (1982-1984). During these exciting years of fieldwork, however, I found myself longing to return to my hometown to conduct ethnography on the same themes that I was witnessing in the countryside of Central America: the political mobilization/demobilization of class struggle in the context of racialized ethnicity and extreme social inequality. Consequently, while writing up my dissertation (Bourgois 1989), I moved to East Harlem two dozen blocks from where I had grown up in New York City to document what I came to call "US inner-city apartheid." That was in March of 1985 and ever since, my work has been primarily dedicated to understanding urban social inequality.