Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.
A student of Eric Wolf and influenced by the work of French social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, he is considered an important proponent of neo-Marxist theory and of critical medical anthropology.
[citation needed] His most recent book, Righteous Dopefiend, was co-authored with Jeff Schonberg and was published in June 2009 by the University of California Press in their “Public Anthropology” series.
In graduate school he worked for the Agrarian Reform ministry in Nicaragua (1980) during the Sandinista revolution and was a human rights activist on Capitol Hill advocating against military aid to the government of El Salvador in 1982.
[3] Bourgois' ethnographic research of the crack dealers and their families revealed the structural barriers that marginalized the minority group of Puerto Ricans, and how their violent street culture further isolated them from mainstream society.