In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, by Phillipe Bourgois (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 392 pp., $24.95 (cloth). In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, an ethnographic study of sellers of crack cocaine, adds to a growing recent ethnographic literature on urban crime. This study is distinguished by the exceptional detail of the observations reported, by the excruciating honesty with which the author explores his personal reactions to the oftentimes horrifying events he witnessed, and by the author's efforts to wrest a theoretical account from his experiences that preserves the humanity of the crack dealers he befriended without scanting the destructive effects of their activities. The fieldwork is unequaled in the recent literature for depth and detail of reportage. The accounts of the author's emotional struggles while conducting the study are moving. The efforts to provide a theoretically satisfying analysis of the material, however, frequently run afoul of the contradictions inherent in trying to apply the traditional ethnographic principle of suspension of judgment to an intimate portrait of crack dealers. Most of the fieldwork was conducted between 1985 and 1990 in New York City. During this period, crack cocaine became highly popular in poor neighborhoods, spawning a public health epidemic of drug use and related high levels of violence occasioned by the highly profitable nature of traffic in the drug. The author lived in the neighborhood of East Harlem where he conducted his study. Though he himself had grown up in the wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood just a few blocks to the south, he and his wife began married life in the high-poverty area to the north where their son was born, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and spent the first few years of his life. Observations and reflections on the interactions of his family with the people he was studying are an ongoing part of the author's narrative. Discussions of his own family are used as a kind of moral bedrock against which to assess the often chaotic family situations of those studied. The theoretical objectives set out in the introduction are cast in terms of recent writings, mainly in anthropology, about the roles of ethnographers and the units of analysis of ethnographic studies. The tendencies of older ethnographic writings to assume the unproblematic objectivity of the observer and the object-status of the observed are called sharply into question. The author notes the need for reflexivity on the part of the observer and then provides it in the form of continuous self-criticism about his own values and attitudes as he describes those of his subjects. He notes the pitfalls of assuming that poor people are free to make the same choices as those who are not poor and the danger of treating poor neighborhoods as autonomous social systems rather than as parts of larger social units in which constraints on individual choice emanate from higher levels of power. While these are all admirable goals, some of the caveats involved can appear to contradict one another. On the one hand, the author states his aim of restoring the of culture. In other words, he does not want to portray people as merely helpless victims. On the other hand, he insists on placing the neighborhood in the context of a larger political economy so that constraints from the larger society and economy are not excluded from the analysis. These are extremely important problems for the ethnographic study of poor people, and the author states them cogently. The problems, however, do not disappear merely because they are stated. A slight change of emphasis in the description of any particular event can easily make the difference between imputing too much agency to a relatively powerless person, on the one hand, or falling back into treating that person as merely a hapless victim of circumstances, on the other. Although these theoretical problems pertain to any social study, they are particularly acute in studies of poor people, given the tendency of governments and societies to exploit or patronize the poor. …