Gangs

In every society, young people form loose or organized groups or networks around myriads of intertwining and competing interests and practices: It is a normal form of sociality based on generation. Members and outsiders, however, often see and label these formations in different, sometimes contradictory ways. And political institutions may define and public imaginaries understand these groups in ways that determine and justify interventions and programs that help to shape a group's public institutional status and their stake in the overall political process. If formations of groups, networks, or other forms of sociality are normal activities, and if this process is common across historical time and cultural space, then through what epistemological processes should some of them be labeled “gangs,” with all that that implies. What is this modern link between the biopolitics of identity and the construction of sociopolitical groupings such that the notion of the gang makes sense? This is the challenge facing social sciences, anthropology included, for there exists an ideological predicament underlying the category “gang” and the phenomenon it purportedly refers to that threatens to subvert its epistemological status. Indeed, gangs as discussed in literature and official reports appear to be a production of the United States's social fabric that is becoming global. It is not surprising that the bulk of the anthropological discussion on gangs uses the materials from and takes place in the United States, and that this commentary is then projected outward into a compressing global space that this commentary is partly responsible for creating.

Though the term was part of the popular sociological vocabulary in Europe by the 18th century, it was not until the 19th century, when the cities of Britain and the United States were reconfigured by mass migrations and the Industrial Revolution, that the term became an established part of the urban lexicon. At this point, the term gang was used to identify outcasts, thieves, and other displaced groups considered highly dangerous for order and progress in society. Indeed, by the time Frederic Thrasher, Emory Bogardus, and Herbert Asbury sought to appropriate the term to analytically designate a wide array of delinquent behaviors associated with groups of marginalized youths living primarily in the Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City ghettos, it had already become deeply engraved in law enforcement vocabularies and the popular imagination. Like gangs themselves, the term has tended to occupy an interstitial space, simultaneously suggesting popular, quasilegal, and analytical theoretical referents.

Thrasher laid down the first systematic work on the phenomenon by providing a cultural ecological framework that defines gangs in terms of the members' potential for criminality and deviance, and explains gang emergence in terms of socioracial marginalization, social disorganization, and shifting populations in poor, isolated neighborhoods. Gangs, he observed, consist primarily of “interstitial groups” of boys “originally formed spontaneously,” then integrated through conflict,“more especially in corporate action, in hunting, capture, conflict, flight, and escape.” In his view, conflict constitutes a central principle underlying the group dynamics of gangs and their oppositional interactions with larger state/societal institutions. According to Thrasher, fighting with other gangs and the world around them furnishes the occasion to find excitement and thrill that members could not find in mainstream society. Thrasher characterized gangs in cultural terms, with their peculiar language, rules, collective behaviors, symbols, and signs. These cultural but contained worlds are further alienated by their shared conditions and their geographic isolation.

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