In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Philippe Bourgois

In Search of Respect, Philippe Bourgois's now-classic, ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim after it was first published in 1995 and in 1997 was awarded the Margaret Mead Award. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods in the United States - East Harlem. This edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics in America that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the six years since the first edition. Bourgois, in a new epilogue, brings up to date the stories of the people - Primo, Caesar, Luis, Tony, Candy - who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner-city drug trade.

Society & CultureSociety & Culture · medium confidenceSociety & Culture81 signalsLlm Classifier: Society & Culture -> Society & CultureKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: Business & Economics -> Business & EconomicsHousing, Cities & Urban LifeMoney, Markets & Economic PolicyRegional & Local History
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Primo40%
    • Caesar36%
  2. 02 Central places

    • East Harlem75%
  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    70 / 100 academic

    Academic

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 68%.