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The cultural and political-economic valences of psychoactive drugs in the Global South offer critical insights on local and international fault lines of social inequality and profiteering. Historically, in a classic primitive accumulation process the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful. The complex flows of capital generated both by illegal addiction markets and also by the mobilisation of licit public funds to manage their mayhem, however, suggest the contemporary utility of the concept of 'predatory accumulation'. The Enlightenmentera concept of 'primitive accumulation' usefully highlighted state violence and forcible dispossession in the consolidation of European capitalism. A contemporary reframing of these processes as predatory accumulation, however, highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed. It sets these patterns of destructive profiteering in the context of our moment in history.

I thank the Society for Urban Anthropology for the Anthony Leeds Book Prize. The award gives me special pleasure because I think of myself primarily as an urban anthropologist. I was trained in "peasant studies" as a student of Eric Wolf's in the late 1970s and early 1980s eager to conduct participant-observation fieldwork on the revolutionary movements taking place in Central America in those decades. It was a hopeful - even inspiring - moment in history at my doctoral fieldwork theme/sites: the agrarian reform in the Amerindian Moskitia territory of Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-80, 1984), guerrilla warfare in an FMLN-controlled territory in El Salvador (1981), and farmworker organizing on a United Fruit Company plantation enclave spanning the Costa Rica/Panama Caribbean border (1982-1984). During these exciting years of fieldwork, however, I found myself longing to return to my hometown to conduct ethnography on the same themes that I was witnessing in the countryside of Central America: the political mobilization/demobilization of class struggle in the context of racialized ethnicity and extreme social inequality. Consequently, while writing up my dissertation (Bourgois 1989), I moved to East Harlem two dozen blocks from where I had grown up in New York City to document what I came to call "US inner-city apartheid." That was in March of 1985 and ever since, my work has been primarily dedicated to understanding urban social inequality.

The Cold War sanitized the author's analysis of political violence among revolutionary peasants in El Salvador during the 1980s. A 20 year retrospective analysis of his fieldwork documents the ways political terror and repression become embedded in daily interactions that normalize interpersonal brutality in a dynamic of everyday violence. Furthermore, the structural, symbolic and interpersonal violence that accompanies both revolutionary mobilization and also labor migration to the U.S. inner city follows gendered fault lines. The snares of symbolic violence in counterinsurgency war spawn mutual recrimination and shame, obfuscating the role of an oppressive power structure. Similarly, everyday violence in a neo-liberal version of peacetime facilitates the administration of the subordination of the poor who blame themselves for character failings. Ethnography's challenge is to elucidate the causal chains and gendered linkages in the continuum of violence that buttresses inequality in the post-Cold War era.

Draws on personal experience living in the neighborhood to describe the lives of Puerto Rican crack dealers & their families in a housing project in New York City's Spanish Harlem. Life stories point out gendered violence & social suffering, as well as the importance & joy of family life. They paint a poignant picture of parents involved in the preparation, distribution, & use of crack cocaine along with teenagers working as dealers because they cannot find employment in the legal job market. The history of Puerto Rican immigration & the restructuring of New York City's economy are examined as a contextual framework for the violence, terror, & family erosion common in East Harlem. The special plight of children is explored, along with teen pregnancy as the most attractive alternative to female adulthood on the street. The mainstream media's demonization of mothers who use crack is discussed, arguing that the problem will not be solved until these mothers are understood as women searching for meaning in their lives & protesting against the nearly impossible task of raising healthy children in their neighborhood. 31 References. J. Lindroth

Resistance and self-destruction in apartheid America.
The American debate on inner-city poverty has veered towards personal value judgements loaded with racial connotations and suffused with puritan thinking. Reacting to the accusatory-style of discourses justifying the persistence of urban poverty by holding the victim responsible, liberal intellectuals commit the opposite error of glorifying the poor with the status of "spotless victim". This type of analysis consequently glosses over the destructive power of American-style apartheid, ignoring the mecha-nisms that generate and reproduce the daily suffering of inner-city dwellers. Analyzing data gathered over four years of participant observation in an East-Harlem Puertorican community of crack-dealers, the author sets out the details of everyclay violence as well as the humiliating experiences of those seeking to participate in the legal job market. The dealers, drug-addicts and criminals frequented by the author manifest their opposition and resistance to exploitation and social exclusion by celebrating "Street culture", thereby becoming the direct agents of their own and their community's destruction. The underground economy and drug-dealing thus offer an economic and cultural alternative to those excluded from the "American dream". The author focuses his analysis on violence connected with the dynamics of class, race and gender relations in a context marked by a shrinking public sector and a restructuring of industrial capital. An approach which looks at the problem of relations between individual actions, and historical, political and economic structural constraints reveals that urban apartheid in the United States reproduces the logic of the American dream.