Penn grad and prof team up for drug culture research

When George Karandinos moved above a Kensington diner a few blocks from the city’s most dangerous drug trade, he was almost certain he’d be robbed.

Karandinos, a 2010 College graduate who has lived in a North Philadelphia row house for the past 18 months, described his old front door as made up of an unhinged metal fence, hedgelocked with chains and leading to back-alley steps above a rotten dumpster.

Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street, a notorious drug corner, is the site Karandinos has been collecting field notes on for two years. With Anthropology and School of Medicine professor Philippe Bourgois, his project is a joint effort to study the latest effects of drug wars on poverty in Philadelphia.

Kensington is “an open-air drug market with … a different liveliness” from that of Penn’s campus, said Karandinos, 23, who lives in an undisclosed apartment with Bourgois, 53.

Karandinos documents the day-by-day activities of drug dealers, collects their life histories and pays an occasional visit to an inmate on state row. For Karandinos, it’s all part of the job.

Bourgois, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor — whose previous book Righteous Dopefiend has an exhibit at the Penn Musuem — has turned a critical eye to studying inner-city fringes since arriving at Penn in 2007.

The microneighborhood of Kensington, according to Bourgois, is an ethnographer’s ideal laboratory to study abuse, AIDS and the effects of poverty. While Karandinos has called the North Philadelphia base his ‘home’ for the better part of his undergraduate career, Bourgois travels to North Philadelphia two to three nights a week, watching drug deals take place and coding the notes for analysis for a future book, currently known as “The Kensington Project.”

“I saw two people get shot during the first summer I was here,” Karandinos said. “For the first 10 months, I hung out at a pizzeria for four to five hours a day. I would loiter with kids who waited on the corner and sometimes sold drugs.”

The Kensington Project’s goal is to “integrate social justice in medical practice” in a social-anthropological study that situates drug dealers in a post-industrial setting.

According to Bourgois, doing ethnography as a team allows the advantage of multiple perspectives. “We’re able to relate to people [since George and I] cover generational spans.”

One surprising aspect of the North Philadelphia research is the level of enthusiasm of drug dealers when they learn of the ethnographers’ book project.

“People get to know you around here,” Karandinos said, watching two police cars arrest dealers in a home near Front Street on Jan. 16. “People are excited to see you’re writing a book — they yell across the street to greet me … to be honest, it really is one of the friendliest neighborhoods.”

At Penn, where mentor-student collaboration is a self-selective process, Karandinos regards his academic partnership as rather fortuitous.

“Most people in college, I think, would not give up frat parties for life in one of the poorest neighborhoods, overrun with drug dealing and bursts of violence,” he said.

But working in Kensington with Bourgois has shown Karandinos what is possible in the field of ethnography. “His work and my work aim at getting at experiences that are hidden — the life of drug dealers and of the community.”

Before coming to Penn, the idea had already taken root when Karandinos read a copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains and saw anthropologist Paul Farmer’s brand of medical anthropology readily applied by Bourgois.

In spring of his junior year, after working several months at a health clinic in Greece, Karandinos re-enrolled at Penn to take anthropology courses while commuting nightly to North Philadelphia to study inner-city problems.

Bourgois explained that lifestyle immersion — a standard methodology in the field of anthropology — is not a sacrifice but an “extraordinarily fun and exciting” commitment.

“You live in a natural environment of people you are studying and make friends with research subjects to learn what life is like from the inside,” he said.

The Kensington Project aims to move from a field-note phase of research to the coding and writing of a project in coming months.

Having graduated from Penn, Karandinos still travels dimly-lit streets by night.

“Before, while in school, I was shuttling back and forth, and some nights I couldn’t do field work because I had to study for biochem,” he said. “I can work constantly now. I have absolutely nothing distracting me.”

Karandinos has no regrets about living in North Philadelphia, away from campus. “You go to college to learn,” he said. “Penn has provided me a good education by supporting the fieldwork.”

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