Yale AIDS Colloquium Series (YACS) - Philippe Bourgois
"Cultivating Rage in the US Inner City: Hyper-Incarceration, Subsidized Pathology and the Moral Economy of Violence After Welfare" For the past four years, our drug sales block in the Puerto Rican corner of inner-city Philadelphia has been subject to a routinized whirlwind of shootings, stabbings and assaults. The narcotics industry filled the void left by deindustrialization turning the city #39;s former factory district into an open-air narcotics supermarket staffed at the entry level by young Puerto Ricans serving primarily poor white injectors. A dynamic of embodied primitive accumulation kills, maims, disables or incarcerates most of this industry #39;s entry-level employees and customers. Artificially high profit margins depend on coercion: 1) An inelastic demand for addictive products; 2) The scarcity effects of zero-tolerance policing; and 3) the brutality of wannabe monopoly drug lords in the absence of state-sanctioned legal recourse. With the end of welfare entitlements, social services attempts to subsidize vulnerable individuals by diagnosing scarred bodies and brains as proof of permanent cognitive disability in need of heavy pharmaceutical medications. An overdetermined habitus/subjectivity of rage carries material, social and psycho-dynamic valences. It insures success in the drug economy, social solidarity within shattered families and minimal income for the no-longer-worthy poor. It also propels hyper-incarceration, expands psychiatric diagnoses and opens ...From:YaleUniversityViews:4 1ratingsTime:40:17More inEducation
Read more:
Yale AIDS Colloquium Series (YACS) - Philippe Bourgois - Video