Righteous Dopefiend

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain discussions of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence and child abuse, racism, and anti-gay bias.

“The central goal of this photo ethnography of indigent poverty, social exclusion, and drug use is to clarify the relationships between large-scale power forces and intimate ways of being in order to explain why the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, has emerged as a pressure cooker for producing destitute addicts embroiled in everyday violence. Our challenge is to portray the full details of the agony and ecstasy of surviving on the street as a heroin injector without beautifying or making a spectacle of the individuals involved, and without reifying the larger forces enveloping them.”

The central goals of photo-ethnography conflict with the challenges that this research methodology poses. The researchers are well-educated white men of means, which poses a serious power imbalance between them and the population they are hoping to help through their research. Given the marginalized status of the Edgewater population, photographs could easily feed into a morbid curiosity about the “other,” particularly since the subjects of those pictures do not have enough cultural capital or power to speak for themselves to policymakers, informers, and enforcers. In their introduction, the anthropologists state that they do not want to perpetuate the Politically and Institutionally Structured Violence that has such negative effects on the lives of their interlocutors.

“Our approach […] is premised on anthropology’s tenet of cultural relativism, which strategically suspends moral judgment in order to understand and appreciate the diverse logics of social and cultural practices that, at first sight, often evoke righteous responses and prevent analytical self-reflection.”

One of the key foundations of anthropology is the concept of cultural relativism: that one’s concepts of morality hold no bearing outside of one’s cultural context. The Introduction explains why this is important for readers unfamiliar with anthropology, particularly as they read about the actions that interlocutors take and the decisions they make within a socio-cultural context that is likely very different from their own. The book prepares readers to exercise non-judgment by calling on them to practice critical self-reflection while considering the mindset of the book’s subjects.