Colonialism and globalization- Social Anthropology

The book In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio ' by Philippe Bourgois is an in-depth look of the working community and family lives of inner-city Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem and gives important answers to many of the difficult questions facing policy-makers , social scientist , journalists and lay people concerned about the polarization of American society and the hopelessness , despair and deteriorating facing our inner cities . Bourgois lived with his wife and child in the neighborhood he was studying which was a crumbling tenement barrio . Throughout the five years

of his participant-observation research , he created relationships with approximately two dozen crack house traffickers and their families . He brought to the study a political structural look into the plight of the underclass in the modern urban economy . He gave a look into the intimate everyday life answers about the way his friends and subjects saw this world and organized their lives within it . The author notes the street patterns of attitudes and behaviors and gives the reader individualistic explanations to the structural , cultural , economic and family trends emerging in contemporary urban America

The book gives a look at the young men 's cultural role expectations of being sole breadwinners of traditional patriarchal families that were very close against a reconstructed economy . Inner city unionized factory jobs that supported their masculine identities have been replaced with service sector jobs that devastated their sense of power position and respect . Their dreams of attaining secure lives in a new country were a clash with the reality that they had to ultimately have to accept serving in economically and socially marginalized roles . This came through their disheartening experiences when seeking jobs in traditionally masculine work arenas such as construction , where they were racially discriminated against , to their failures in the newer feminized occupational realm of the service sector where employment was dominated by women , submissiveness and the upper middle class white culture which they could never understand or master . They are caught in a semi-assimilated world where they no longer fit within the Puerto Rican culture they only to find little place in the legitimate New York economy

These men and women wrestled with global changes in gender roles . The women moved into positions of greater economic responsibility and independence , gradually freeing themselves from the tyrannical dominance of violent men , only to find themselves trapped by their cultural gender role expectations of romantic love , status and fulfillment wedded to having a boyfriend , and intimacy attained through childbearing . Women wrestled uneasily with their movement out of confined domestic situations into roles in the underground economy , only to find themselves denied access to the more lucrative illicit employment opportunities , and torn between their and society 's expectations that they sacrifice themselves to raise their children . Bourgois 's analysis is painfully accurately made not only in the masculine economic realm but in the more hidden feminine realm , where the answers he found led him . He looks into the first large scale entry of women into...