Luke Bergmann's Getting Ghost
Getting Ghost – Culture and Ethnographic Essay
The book Getting Ghost, by Luke Bergmann, recounts the stories of two adolescent African-American males, Dude Freeman, and Rodney Phelps, attending a juvenile detention facility in the city of Detroit, USA. Detroit, one of the poorest cities in the United States has one third of its residents living in poverty. Its crime rates are high, and illegal drugs are available in many poor areas. In the western and eastern suburbs the ethnic majority is African-American, these suburbs are low income, and as a result drug dealing on the streets is carried out by the adolescent African-American males (Getting Ghost Background Sheet 2015:1). This African-American culture within Detroit shapes and gives meaning to the lives of Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps. The overarching cultural element of African-American culture within Detroit affecting the two main interlocutors is the street drug trade. The culture of the street drug trade can be thought of as having three overarching effects on the adolescents which shape and give meaning to their lives, economic effects, kinship effects, and political effects.
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A primary reason which provoked Dude to get involved in drug trading was the ludicrous amount of money he could make from such a young age. At age fourteen Dude was selling dope, making $1500 a week, this led to irresponsible and hedonistic spending. This hedonistic spending gave meaning to Dude’s life, pleasures such as food, females, and the mall, were all major focuses of his life. Dude recalls spending $400 a week on overpriced rent and $50 on food even when he wasn’t hungry (Bergmann 2008:109); this impulsive spending may suggest a shaping of an unstable and turbulent economic life and poor financial responsibility for Dude in future
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