Interview with › PHILIPPE BOURGOIS
Richard Perry University Professor

Philippe Bourgois, a world renowned medical anthropologist, came to Penn in January 2007 as one of six Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professors. He holds appointments in the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Family Practice and Community Medicine in the School of Medicine. Dr. Bourgois is the author of the award-winning book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio.

Q. What are the advantages to you, to our undergraduates, and ultimately to society in your being able to hold appointments in two different schools at Penn at the same time?

President Amy Gutmann's initiative to promote dialogue and collaborations between schools is exciting. Just recently the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) mandated that all medical students in the United States be trained in cultural competence. I see this as an incredible opportunity to train future MD/Ph.D.s to be both high-tech medical doctors and also humanistic social scientists. Medical students go through an intensive socialization process that tends to limit their understanding of illness to biological and technical factors. Medical professionals who are trained in cultural relativism and social science theory bring brand new perspectives to health and healing. The reverse is true, too. Anthropologists need to understand embodied biological processes and theorize them in new ways. Penn already has a great Health and Societies program at the undergraduate level that attracts excellent students into this growing field of social and cultural medicine.

Q. Can you tell us what you mean by some of your areas of specialization — for example "urban anthropology," "medical anthropology," "cultural production," and "political economy?"

“President Amy Gutmann's initiative to promote dialogue and collaborations between schools is exciting ... Medical professionals who are trained in cultural relativism and social science theory bring brand new perspectives to health and healing. The reverse is true, too. ”

Urban anthropology is the study of cities and the phenomenon of humans living in such concentrated quarters. It is fun to remind ourselves that it is only very recently (the past couple hundred years) that significant numbers of humans have started living in cities. Just last year the scales tipped so that now more than half of the people on earth live in large urban centers. Medical anthropology refers to the social and cultural dimensions of health and illness. Substance abuse, violence, and poverty, for instance, have drastically detrimental effects on the body and psyche. Political economy is my favorite theoretical concept. In simple terms it means paying attention to how money and power make the world go round and how material and political forces shape how we think about everything. The term cultural production warns us to pay attention to the power of culture and social relationships in that interface between power and money that creates so much meaning and shapes so much of history's outcomes.

Q. Before coming to Penn, you devoted much of your research to the prevalence of violence and disease among homeless drug abusers in San Francisco. Are you currently studying any specific populations in Philadelphia?

I am particularly interested in understanding how the drug scene fits in with the patterns of poverty that are so visibly inscribed on Philadelphia's landscape. In the poor, segregated inner city neighborhoods of Philly, kids are selling drugs literally in the shadow of the abandoned factory buildings where their parents and grandparents formerly worked. It's sad! A hundred years ago Philadelphia was a wealthy and dynamic factory town. With globalization, companies have moved their factories abroad in search of cheap labor. The resulting displacement of unemployed families in cities like Philadelphia has opened the door to the economy of drugs. We need to understand the lives of the youth dealing drugs. What are their family stories, their relationship to violence, their sense of ethics and morality, their place in the economy? How can some of that be changed so that they regain a more productive role in the larger society — one not so destructive to themselves and their communities? This is one of the most urgent social problems of our time.

Q. How do you help engage your students in their studies beyond the classroom?

In many ways. For example, just two months ago it was a student who introduced me to my current fieldwork site here in Philadelphia by inviting me to come see her inner city health outreach program. Currently three students are working with me on three different ethnographic projects looking at the tragedy of why poor people are still dying of HIV/AIDS despite the existence of medication that can keep them alive and despite the existence of fully subsidized clinics for treating AIDS. They are working out of HIV treatment clinics talking to patients about non-adherence to medications and exploring the larger context of the lives of those patients.

Q. In your search for health strategies and interventions to help the most vulnerable populations, are you optimistic about the possibility of profound change in our own society and around the world?

Philadelphia is one of the country's most dynamic and strategically located cities (half way between New York and Washington DC), and it has a unique concentration of education, medical technology and high-tech research in its economy. Penn recognizes that the city needs its students, researchers, and faculty to address its city's challenges and develop its potential. I get the sense that fantastic transformation will be happening here in the coming years.

----
Return to Red & Blue Online