Luke Bergmann, and what practicing anthropology and social work really looks like

I can't begin to say how proud I am of my colleagues, how incredible I think their achievements are and how grateful I am to share an intellectual space with them. Luke Bergmann is an exemplar of what we do best, and what I aspire to achieve. He's an inspiration to me of how knowledge from anthropology and social work can fuse into something quite new and remarkable, a radical way of approaching the world to understand the experiences of other people, their beliefs and challenges, and to address their suffering in powerful and uniquely sensitive ways. Luke continues to live and work in Detroit to help improve the conditions in the city where he spent three years living and studying the lives of drug dealers for his doctoral dissertation.

Luke's dissertation-turned-book, Getting Ghost, circulates and receives rave reviews. He's going on a book tour this month that includes the Bay Area, Portland, Chicago, and Ann Arbor.

Below I'm pasting the event description for the Berkeley event. If he's coming to your town, I highly recommend going to check out the event.

Wednesday, January 28, 7:30 PM at First Congregational Church of Berkeley

LUKE BERGMANN

Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for

the Soul of an American City

While some American cities like New York have recovered from the depths of their urban decay in the 1970s and 80s, Detroit is admittedly not one of them. A city pockmarked with ever more abandoned neighborhoods, empty lots, and vacant factories, Detroit is where sociologist Luke Bergmann connected in a juvenile detention facility with Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps -- two teenage petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures. Following Dude and Rodney, Bergmann spent three years embedded on the streets of northwest Detroit, living side by side with its residents, and from these experiences comes Getting Ghost, an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.

A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Sudhir Vankatesh's Off the Books, Getting Ghost chronicles Dude's and Rodney's lives, tracking their attempts to get by however they can in a city betrayed by broken promises of urban revitalization, where the drug trade is so ubiquitous that entire families are involved. Bergmann portrays the lives and work of young African American drug hustlers not as the product of some exotic inner city jungle that we can't possibly relate to, but rather as an often seamless part of the everyday reality of the larger African American community.

Luke Bergmann was a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an associate research scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley. He is now a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and a faculty associate of the University of Michigan. He lives on the East Side of Detroit.

Summertime, and the living is easy . . .

Hmm, nothing like reading the small town papers for the hippest events to attend. Laura Moehrle of The Courant raves about the "touch of Germany" you can enjoy at end-of-the-month Saturday summer picnics at German Park in Ann Arbor. Mmm, spaetzle and lederhosen? I think I'm there.

Other local summer fun includes, of course, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, with the frustratingly out-of-reach ticket prices (no student rates) for main events and the Top of the Park, with free concerts and movies in front of the Rackham Graduate School building on East Washington St.

Naturally, even though it's more than a month away, those of us living in the area can all undoubtedly feel Art Fair coming, like a runaway train.

Why I moved to the country?

People in Ann Arbor, who know me as a full-time doctoral student -- or perhaps as their Anthropology instructor -- are often bewildered when I announce that I live in the country. I can tell by the blank looks or even by the curious responses. Why did you decide to move, they want to know. How can I begin to articulate the meaning of the transformation I have undertaken in my life recently? It is so much greater than I could possibly convey in a casual conversation. The explanations for me, besides, seem to be captured in the senses far more readily than in words. In fact, the departure is about the distance from language. (Words, words, words. . .)

It's captured, for instance, in the smell and concentrated pulse of heat and the ambient glow from the wood fire in the fire place . . .



And my fingers rediscovering dough. . .
. . . and the smell of homemade quiche baking in the oven.
. . . for instance.

Alice's birthday celebration.

Tonight we celebrated Alice's birthday with a small gathering at Leopold's. Actually, I drove down from Pinckney and met her for dinner first, and I drove us both over after. I had my first meal at Argerio's, which was so decidedly mediocre, I almost wish it had remained a pleasant thought. Alice's bruschette more closely resembled english muffin pizzas than any bruschetta I'd seen before. Ah, well. Ann Arbor.

If I didn't have plans to meet Jess for a martini at Cafe Felix tomorrow, I'd probably meet up with Alice and the crew again for a real birthday dinner (since tomorrow is the real day). But this is the first time I'll ever meet Jess to visit, so I'm excited and don't want to try to reschedule, which inevitably turns into "Let's meet for a coffee sometime" in the lives of grad students, it seems. At least this one, anyway. My failure to meet Jenay and Katie despite a handful of emails back and forth is a fine case in point. We're just too damned busy.

This whole blogging thing feels a bit unnatural. It's one thing if it's a really specific thing, like a food blog or a political blog or a travel blog. But just an everyday chat about being a graduate student blog? We'll see how it goes.