e book is now a best-selling classic of urban anthropology that covers issues of inner city life, kinship ties, ethnic relations, and work in the informal economy.
             Like pioneering Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Bourgois's method of ethnographic research is that of participant observation, which he believes to be "better suited than exclusively quantitative methodologies for documenting the lives of people who live on the margins of a society that is hostile to them." (Bourgois: 1995; 13) His research is a continuation of Malinowski's groundbreaking work in the field of economic anthropology as well as newer fields like political economy. His aim is to veer away from "ethnographic presentations of social marginalization...guaranteed to be misread by the general public through a conservative, unforgiving lens." (Bourgois: 1995; 15) Instead he means to build an alternative and critical understanding of the socially marginalized that does not tend to place the blame on the
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