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Philippe Bourgois is a Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as founding Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco from 1998 through 2003. A student of Eric Wolf and influenced by the work of French social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, he is considered an important proponent of neo-Marxist theory and of critical medical anthropology. His most recent book Righteous Dopefiend was co-authored with Jeff Schonberg and was published in June, 2009 by the University of California Press in their “Public Anthropology†series. It is based on 12 years of participant-observation research with a social network of homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers surviving on the streets of San Francisco six blocks from his home. The book won the 2010 Anthony Leeds Prize for Urban Anthropology and is a 'photo-ethnography' interweaving over 60 black-and-white photographs with transcribed dialogue, fieldwork notes and critical anthropological theory and analysis. Bourgois' previous book was based on five years living with his family next to a crack house in East Harlem during the mid-1980s through the early 1990s: In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. It won the 1996 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1997 Margaret Mead Award among others. He has also conducted research in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation which was based on two years of living in the workers' barracks of a Chiquita Brands banana plantation spanning the borders of Costa Rica and Panama.
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