Special guests of Central today, anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer and ethnographer Jeff Schonberg provided a deeper look into the Museum of Culture and Environment’s most recent exhibit, Righteous Dopefiend.

The authoring duo met when Schonberg was struggling to find a thesis project for his master’s and Bourgois was a professor of anthropology.

Tonight at 5:30 p.m. Bourgois gave a lecture in Dean on his field work experience that culminated to create the project that is Righteous Dopefiend, following up Schonberg’s noon-hour round table about poverty and the politics of representation.

This project entailed befriending, studying, and recording the lives of select heroin addicts of the San Francisco homeless community.

Bourgois discussed the variation of mentalities among the addicts he had met, some self-proclaimed “righteous dopefiends” who had yet to come down from the high and drug-induced feeling of invincibility.

After a while, Bourgois said, the people they had befriended starting referring to Schonberg as “my photographer” and to him as “my anthropologist.”

“We can’t help empathizing with their blood, sweat, and tears,” Bourgois said.

Since the project most of the people the duo had remained in contact with have passed away. The one living member of the group that they’re aware of has since gotten clean and was told to cut all ties with “that” life; this included Bourgois and Schonberg.

The project took Bourgois twelve years to complete, all with the help of Schonberg who aided in recording the stories of these people with field notes, voice recordings, and striking black and white photography. The world of addiction may not be black and white, but this aspect of Schonberg’s work only adds to the impact of the exhibit.

“It’s the luxury of the public intellectual to be able to step back and reflect and try to figure out ways that can sort out the forest from the trees of the everyday emergency,” Bourgois said.

Overall it appeared that Bourgois’ lecture could all come back to these few words on one of his slides: “Cultural Relativism: No culture is good or bad, all have logic.”