Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World

Afterword: The Inevitable Gang

281 Afterword The Inevitable Gang Sudhir Venkatesh Rodgers and Hazen sum up the motivating spirit behind Global Gangs succinctly when they write that this volume highlights the “socially embedded nature of all gangs, regardless of their location, and how different environments can affect their origins and their transformation.” In the area of gang studies, this is no small accomplishment. Gangs perplex us. All manner of explanation—­biological, genetic, psychological , environmental—­continues to proliferate in our attempts to answer the question, Why do gangs exist? Collections of research findings often have difficulty sorting through the muck to deliver a tight, polished thesis. This volume breaks that mold. So successful is this global tour of gang life that Global Gangs motivates this reader to ask an entirely separate question: Why shouldn’t gangs exist? From the Siliwangi Boys of Indonesia to the West Side Boys of Sierra Leone to Russia’s Khadi-­ Taktash, the richly detailed studies of youth in this volume show repeatedly that gangs are a logical and inevitable expression of local social structure. Rather than focusing on the gang as an exception, perhaps we should be accounting for the diversity of factors that bring them about—­with the assumption that it is our job to investigate those social conditions leading to such diversity. In fact, in many of the contributions to Global Gangs, the through line illuminates this very point: the gang is as much lens as social problem; it is both an object to be explained by societal factors and a means by which to see those dynamics unfold. After leaving this volume, one is hard-­ pressed to see the gang as a 282    sudhir venkatesh marginal social group. This status seems more an artifact of the intellectual historical habitus that assigns gang studies to the branch of criminology, which has always been viewed as a tier below its sisters in the social sciences. This should not be the case, because so many of the foundational works in social science have stemmed from a study of deviance. And yet, that is precisely where we sit. The marginalization of gang studies is partly an outgrowth of its founder Frederick Thrasher, in whose shadow gang scholars still labor. Thrasher (1927) repeatedly juxtaposed the wildness of the gang to the civilizing project of managing the industrial American metropolis. To Thrasher’s contemporaries, the gang was a weed. It disturbed the natural ecological equilibrium of urbs en hortus. It required attention as a misfit in the family requires care and, at times, quarantine for the household to remain functional. The gang fascinated, but the fascination was short-­lived. Legitimating the study of gangs via the odd and sometimes disturbing qualities of their members was not without consequence. Those in Thrasher’s wake, operating primarily within a “social disorganization” perspective in criminology, would fix the gang in time and space as a black sheep. The analytic value that the gang held for the sociologist was as violation of macrosocietal values. The gang became the place to study societal difference—­ not social relation. Cohen’s (1955) use of subculture and Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) focus on illegitimate opportunity structure are two examples. If one configures an object of study as being marginal within society , one cannot then rightfully enforce the claim that the knowledge produced holds general applicability. Criminology began losing the battle for relevance. Robert Merton’s writings notwithstanding, the field became deeply atheoretical and anti-­ intellectual in the decades following the Second World War. It was quickly overwhelmed by a programmatic, social-­ work focus on recovering lost youth. At least, this was the American story. In the United Kingdom, as the cultural studies movement took hold, social scientists would eventually pick up a study of gangs, as they might a study of revolution, to understand society broadly. That work has been nearly completely ignored by the mainstream of U.S. criminology and gang research. At long last, this momentum has changed. The essays in Global Gangs bring a sharpness of theory and a commitment to transcending afterword    283 the social problems framework. Across the world, the youth gang is a means to grapple with the tensions at the core of a social body. The essays make clear that youth gangs must be considered very much at the center of the transformations taking place in society. These are not insignificant achievements. This volume must be appreciated not simply for the...