The transmission of crime as work in Turkey: Identification and strategic mutuality

Abstract

Bourdieusian criminology has produced useful concepts such as the street-criminal field, capital and habitus. In employing these concepts, this article demonstrates the importance of the criminal role model-image, such as the respected career criminal, as an ego-ideal among lower class youths who identify with these role models, acquiring bodily and mental criminal dispositions using the results of ethnographic research conducted in a run-down district in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Focusing on a non-Western context with an original theoretical articulation, this article further suggests that the affective relationship between these disadvantaged lower class youths and respected older criminals lubricates the youths’ formation of criminal habitus and likewise constitutes a ‘strategic mutuality’ flowing through certain practices in the street-criminal fields. The original finding lies in revealing a strategic affinity transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques and skills across generations, and further making crime as work a reliable source of income for disadvantaged youths.

Keywords

Affect identification strategic mutuality street-criminal culture

Introduction

Bourdieusian criminology has sought to understand and explain street-criminal subculture by yielding useful concepts such as ‘street culture’ (Bourgois, 2003), ‘street capital’ (Harding, 2014; Sandberg, 2008), ‘criminal capital’ (Mercan, 2019), ‘street habitus’ (Fraser, 2013), ‘street social capital’ (Ilan, 2013) and ‘street field’ (Shammas and Sandberg, 2016). Despite their enriching criminological conceptualisations, the affective dimension of street habitus is rarely discussed (Fraser and Matthews, 2019). Bourdieu’s philosophical anthropology, however, points out the importance of ‘the search of recognition’ as an ontological outset of the subject’s whole social drama: Bourdieu’s one of the last oeuvres, Pascalian Meditations (2000), towards the end of his life, reveals an explicit predilection for psychoanalytical categories and themes as mentioning ‘a narcissistic organisation of the libido’ and ‘an object of desire’ to explicate the formative conditions of agency in social fields (Bourdieu, 2000: 166; see also Wacquant, 2007, 2016). Conceptualised as ‘the quantum of libidinal energy’ by psychoanalytically inflected discourse theorists (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 268), affect thus not only partakes in Bourdieu’s thought as a source of ‘investment’ in social fields but also appears as a distinct analytic in criminology to which the researchers should pay attention (Mercan, 2020a).

Drawing on Bourdieu’s late psychosocial elucidation, this article places a premium on the affective role of a significant Other as an ego-ideal among lower class youths for acquiring bodily and mental criminal dispositions, precipitating the formation of a local criminal subculture and the cultural transmission of crime as work. In other words, the article casts light on the affective moment of criminal habitus formation through the search of recognition, symbolic identification and the transformation into an agent of criminal fields. In so doing, it focuses on a group of lower class youth offenders in the non-Western context of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, with specific emphasis on the psychoanalytical category identification in shaping criminal habitus. In two previous articles, I discussed the process of becoming a professional criminal through the exploration of ‘conative’ and ‘cognitive’ constructs of criminal habitus, whereby the subject acquires bodily and mental criminal dispositions (Mercan, 2020c), drawing attention to the importance of the affective component of criminal habitus and symbolic identification with the model-image of criminal social types in Turkey (Mercan, 2020b). However, these papers examined the life experiences of a group of ex-offenders who had ended their criminal careers before 15 years. The psychosocial narratives provided by these retired offenders indicated a symbolic identification with the Turkish subcultural model-image of the kabadayı [strongman] social type, generating physical gratification from the ethos of gayrimeşru [illegitimate] cultural consumerism, the respect of peers and the interest of women.

Detailing the findings of ethnographic research conducted in 2014, this article focuses on the discourse of active youth offenders as opposed to retired ones, involved in burglaries and the drug business, and residing in Keçiören, a recently declined, lower class district of Ankara. The evidence suggests that in similarity to the discourse of the offenders who retired before 15 years, youth offenders continue to identify with the model-image of the infamous criminal or older brother teaching them criminal cultural codes and techniques, thereby communicating a culture of crime as work. This piece’s original finding regards the affective relationship between these parts, easing the youths’ formation of criminal habitus and, moreover, forging the strategic criminal enterprise-partnership running throughout certain repertoires, which I term ‘strategic mutuality’ in the street-criminal field. Before I discuss the nature of this mutuality, I will explain the psychosocial moment as determined by Bourdieusian criminology, before discussing the research site and methods used in this article.

The psychosocial dimension of Bourdieusian criminology

Bourdieusian criminology demonstrates that the street is a field where a ‘realistic prospect of success’ lies in crime, such as burglary, robbery and drug dealing (Sandberg, 2008: 158). Street-criminal cultural fields appear in many crime ethnographies as an antagonistic social space whose nomos is to achieve certain prestige and prizes depending on the potential of criminogenic skilful action, which ultimately culminates in the transformation of the subject into an agent with all prospects to exit as well as constraints to lock in the field (Shammas and Sandberg, 2016: 209).

Narrative criminology draws our attention to the significance of storytelling in generating street-criminal dispositions (habitus) and field as well as subjectivities (Fleetwood, 2016). The transcendental materialist approach in criminology also stresses the import of narrating violence for the working-class men in coping with humiliation and degradation as part of street-criminal ‘visceral habitus’ to compensate their redundant identity and fragile masculinity in the post-industrial period of Britain (Hall, 2002; Hall et al., 2008; Winlow and Hall, 2009). More attuned to the British object relations tradition, psychosocial criminology resonates with Bourdieu’s (2000: 232–233) register of the working-class habitus as ‘a defence mechanism against necessity’ when the authors argue that violence and crime, even in most seemingly rational forms, occur as the subject’s defensiveness against an uncertain and hostile social milieu to avoid possible inner damages of external pressures (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007: 125–145). Setting out this psychoanalytical observation, psychosocial criminology has thus far become an important take in grasping youth violence and crime as a result of mental disorder (Jones, 2008) or as defence against traumatic event (Walsh, 2020) and marginalisation and resentment (Treadwell and Garland, 2011) and the repercussions of neoliberalism upon the local context and identities in Britain (Ellis, 2019).

Affective turn in Bourdieusian criminology

The ‘linguistic’ and ‘affective’ turns together have laid out the import of affects in the constitution of the subject as discursively meaningful yet lacking (Glynos et al., 2009; Howarth, 2013). In a similar fashion, narrative criminology implies the street-criminal self-presentations as lacking projects to be completed in various performative stories such as crime business, violence, drug and hard life through infinite ways of articulations inflected according to the agents’ emotive situation and desires (Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017). To understand the role of emotions and desires at the moment of habitus formation or crisis, some researchers draw our attention to Bourdieu’s late reception of psychoanalytical concepts such as object and libido, as well as ‘projection’, ‘identification’, ‘transference’ and ‘sublimation’ (Fourny, 2000: 110). More than a mere nominal use of the concepts, clinical categories affect and desire apparently work out in the late Bourdieu’s thought as a sort of theoretical point de capiton that actually turns the theory of social practice into ‘socioanalysis’ (see Steinmetz, 2014): In Pascalian Meditations (2000), Bourdieu (2000) underlines the role of ‘affective transactions’ in the formation of habitus (p. 141). These bodily affective transactions are out of the conscious control for the subject in an endless, mostly unconscious interaction with and reception from the extant milieu – in our case, street-criminal milieu.

However, the affective transaction is by no means without direction. Desire here is the key to understanding the direction and effort of the subject’s such unconscious endeavour (Bourdieu, 2000: 150). What is most favourable and desirable for the subject, ultimately intending for happiness, is strictly under the constraints of extant milieu embedded in the complex matrix of race, gender and social space determinants, and also depends on the intrinsic rules and characteristics of every social field. Almost all urban crime ethnographies reveal that masculinity, prowess, promiscuity, street wisdom and the desire for fast cash and culture of consumerism appear as the iconic codes and embodiment of street-criminal cultural dispositions almost universally in every inner-city and slum areas – that is, from New York (Bourgois, 2003) through Frankfurt (Bucerius, 2014) to Ankara (Mercan, 2020c). So long as the disadvantaged youths come to grip with the street-criminal cultural ethos and consumerism, not only their body but also their desire comes to be socialised. What is at stake here is the ‘socialised desire’ where there is, thus, a proximate relation between libidinal investments and the illusio of street-criminal fields that motivates youths to make such an investment (Aarseth, 2016). Socialised subjectivity emerges as part of socialised desire and affective investments in generating various capacities of action in social fields. These desires and affective investments signify the moment of entry into social fields, as Bourdieu explicitly puts it:

The initial form of illusio is investment in the domestic space, the site of a complex process of socialisation of the sexual and sexualisation of the social. And sociology and psychology should combine their efforts (but this would require them to overcome their mutual suspicion) to analyse the genesis of investment in a field of social relations, thus constituted as an object of interests and preoccupation, in which the child is increasingly implicated and which constitutes the paradigm and also the principle of investment in the social game. (Bourdieu, 2000: 166)

In arguing that a child learns to play a social game, resulting in her or his desire shifting from herself or himself to another object of investment, Bourdieu employs a useful psychoanalytical account for ‘the transformation of originally symbiotic subjects into agents equipped with the desire to compete in social field’ (Steinmetz, 2006: 453). The search of recognition thus comes to be not only a basis for his agonistic vision of society (Wacquant, 2007: 218) but also triggering the psychic process of symbolic identification which culminates in the formation of dispositions – qua habitus. In Bourdieu’s terms, becoming an agent in a field corresponds to the transition understood in Lacanian psychoanalysis, though Bourdieu never mentioning his name, as a move from the Imaginary to the Symbolic level, reinforcing the prevailing society, language and culture (Steinmetz, 2006). Depicted by Lacan as the mirror phase, this transition is registered through an irretrievable loss of fullness and the emergence of an ontological deficiency, later shaping the subject’s entire psychic adventure (Lacan, 2006: 75–82). Here, identification is a fundamental psychoanalytical category for understanding the psychic structure of the subject, constituting one of a series of multiple identifications constructing the origin of the ego (Stavrakakis, 1999: 17). In psychoanalysis, identification is generally defined as ‘the process whereby an individual takes in attributes of the people with whom she or he is in contact, and is transformed as a consequence’ (Frosh, 2002: 57). However, in Lacanian thought, identification is triggered by the imaginary promise of recapturing lost/impossible fullness, with the subject identifying with empty signifiers/nodal points functioning as an object-cause of desire for mobilising the subject’s affects in a certain direction (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 261–262). Similarly, a distinction is made between imaginary and symbolic identifications. The imaginary refers to the ‘identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves’, whereas the symbolic identification denotes the identification ‘with the very place . . . from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable’ (Žižek, 1989: 116).

Symbolic or imaginary identification is tightly bound with the objects, persons and things through which the subject satiates their lack of fullness. Social roles, types and any commodity can, therefore, be sources of identification (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 260–261); logically, criminal social types are just one of many in the street. As long as they become the source of identification, they might open up a new path for a ‘secondary habitus formation’ (Wacquant, 2016: 68) – à la street-criminal habitus. In short, the ontological search of recognition triggers the process of symbolic identification navigating the subject towards the social order symbolic level (street, culture, codes, etc.), which prepares the conditions of possibility for habitus formation or clivé. The latter particularly makes much of Bourdieu’s affinity with psychoanalysis more intimately with a Lacanian perspective.

However, detecting an abstract clinical category identification in offenders’ discourse, if said in more methodological terms, may well emerge as a problematic aspect of criminological research. This is mostly to do with the meta-theoretical abstract features of clinical categories. Glynos and Stavrakakis (2008), however, present us a methodological guidance that in a sense reconceptualises identificatory acts as a mobilisation of affects in certain discursive directions, be it images, objects, persons and so on. In operationalising and detecting identification as an affective investment, we bear in mind that affects can become representable/detectable, however impossible, in discourse as invested in signifiers-emotions. Put another way, emotions correspond to the symbolic containment of affects, depending on how the subject puts affects into word (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008: 268). Consequently, stories of offenders about their life and themselves are not something to be taken for granted; instead, emotional expressions cannot be only hermeneutically interpreted but need to be placed within a psychoanalytically informed interpretation (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007; see also Mercan, 2020a).

Methods and data

The data within this article were unintentionally collected in Ankara between February and September 2014 for 8 months, in the process of conducting a doctoral research project on professional criminality. While regularly visiting a drug enterprise in a slum neighbourhood in the Altındağ district of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, I would accompany my gatekeeper who resided in another district, Keçiören. Currently, Keçiören is the most populated district of Ankara (Özkan, 2014: 97), consisting of lower class inhabitants who are stigmatised by the middle classes as shameful and dangerous (Erkip, 2010: 101–102). My ethnographic research was performed in one of those seemingly ‘dangerous’ streets within the Etlik neighbourhood of Keçiören.

While walking with my gatekeeper, himself a participant of my research, I spent a reasonable amount of time in his neighbourhood during his periods away from the location of the drug business. Due to the risk of narcotics raids and violent conflict, I restricted the duration of my visits to the drug enterprise. My gatekeeper Juba was a career criminal who operated as a drug wholesaler alongside leading a burglary crew, featuring members from among the lower class youths of Etlik. As a consequence, I began spending considerable time in his residential area socialising with the youths around him, particularly his crew members and their other peers. For the remainder of my drug research, approximately for 4 months from around mid-April to the second week of August, I decided to continue organising unstructured interviews with the Etlik youths, making participant observations and recording field notes about their resident neighbourhood, here conferred the pseudonym of the Walkway.

Having grown up in the area myself, the gatekeeper was a friend of mine from childhood. This research was rendered possible by this acquaintance and the trust within our relationship, helping me establish a good rapport with his recent crew members, Yıldo, Ero, Rüzgar and Cafu (all pseudonyms). All five were men and indigenous to the Walkway. At the time, Juba was 33, with the rest aged between 20 and 25 years. Juba, Ero and Cafu were Kurdish; Yıldo was a Lazi from the Black Sea; and Rüzgar was a Turk from Central Anatolia. All possessed criminal records, had experienced time in prison at least once and used cannabis and chemical substances like ecstasy and cocaine. Their criminal records were mainly the product of burglary and theft, with only Juba and Turan arrested as a result of their activities in the drug trade. I was able to conduct interviews with Juba, Yıldo, Ero and Rüzgar a number of times, but only once with Cafu. The length of these interviews varied from 0.5 to 3.5 hours and took place in the recreational area of the Walkway where local youths spent considerable time. Furthermore, towards the end of the fieldwork, I took the opportunity to conduct a kind of focus group discussion, allowing for their deliberations and collective self-reflexivity on matters relating to crime and criminality. Similarly, they permitted me to record conversations that were later transcribed verbatim into Turkish, with the transcripts coded and translated into English where necessary. I have selected the following supporting data extracts and fieldnotes because they are representative of the wider data set.

The street-criminal cultural space of the Walkway

It is a long pathway, coming out from behind the mosque up into the inside of Etlik, cutting through the clusters of apartment buildings. In between successive decrepit grey multi-storey buildings, there is a recreational area containing green grass, a playground, and several benches. Throughout the day, this area is crowded with all ages, but primarily by the neighbourhood youth who vary in age between twelve and their early twenties, and group around the park benches . . . It appears from their clothing that a large number of the boys are lower-lower-class or middle-lower-class, reminiscent of a popular stereotype termed ‘apaçi’ which derogatorily labels lower-class boys imitating upper-class consumerism, particularly through clothing apparel and by buying counterfeit products. Some of the older Walkway boys wear colourful trainers, skinny jeans, and stylish t-shirts. The benches in the middle of the footpath bustle with their boisterous horseplay. The air is full of the sound of swearing and the cracking of sunflower seeds, as they drink alcohol in broad daylight. All of these activities accord with the common archetypes of street culture, in addition to these boys all wishing to acquire a reputation and be recognised as a respected gayrimeşhur. Their bodies broadcast this message. Adopting ominous tones, with lowered shoulders, stern looks, scars on their faces and arms, and counting beads [tespih çekmek], their gatherings at the corners of the park are all concluded by a session of smoking joints and consuming an assortment of other illicit drugs. [. . .] (Fieldnotes, 3 August 2014)

The primary habitus of the Walkway youth is largely constructed from their rural-migrant and working-class origins. At the corners of the Walkway, disadvantaged youths understand Turkish street culture by taking early steps into what they call gayrimeşru alem, literally translated as the illegitimate realm, referring to Turkish criminal subculture. In an ‘affective atmosphere’ where prowess, daring and illegitimate gains are praiseworthy, they desire to be astute agents within these fields, exhibiting enthusiasm to possess any of the traits that might help this along (see Fraser and Matthews, 2019). In the Walkway, an outsider will meet with constant reminders that he will be in trouble if he stares, says or does something wrong. The Walkway boys are on constant alert against anyone encroaching on their turf, measuring up passers-by with curious eyes and ready to accost anyone presenting a challenge. The social order between the Walkway boys retains a history of incidents (fights, stabbings, shootings, theft, burglary, drug dealing and prison experiences) inscribed in the body and language of each boy as an embodied form of ‘transformative’ dispositions (Shammas and Sandberg, 2016). Street cultural capital allows the boys to rank themselves hierarchically, adding a positively orientated subjectivity to an otherwise lower class, marginalised, negative perception of the self (Sandberg, 2008; Winlow and Hall, 2009). In this respect, the Walkway represents a socio-spatial localised manifestation of criminal street subculture operating as a heterodox field.

Code of entering the field: Violence and crime

A tendency towards violence forms the point of entry for a disadvantaged youth intending to enter the field and possess criminal fame and fortune. The greater the reputation and criminal history a younger boy holds, the more criminal opportunities he can leverage from his interactions with the older generations, the gayrimeşhur abis, or infamous older criminals. However, an intimate connection with older generations is not an easy process in street-criminal fields; instead, it requires passing through several stages from involving fights to showing dexterity in various crimes. Now occupying a higher rank, Yıldo was one of these boys who spent all of his time in the Walkway streets, started off with petty theft at very early ages and involved in serious brawls, then stood out as a result of his reputation among other peers and was thus capable of forming higher connections. In the neighbourhood, the top of his higher connections was Juba 10 years older than him. Yıldo’s personal trajectory perfectly exemplifies the street cultural mood of his cohort emulating those who have stood in the park before them. The younger generation identifies this precedent as their predecessors did before them: the affective search of the older peer’s recognition sets up the connection between generations.

Yıldo is back then 23 years old, from the Black Sea region and of a lower class background. Trainers, ripped jeans and a low V-neck t-shirt revealing the scratches and cuts on his chest complement his gayrimeşru argot. His physical gestures and slow and deep voice speak for themselves: he straddles the top of the younger local pecking order. Driving his own car, he speeds in and out of the park with a crowd of younger boys around him. He explains the importance of violence:

When unacceptable wrongs happen to take place, then you must literally chop [kıymak] him [the person] doing that mistake! When you have chopped him, this would echo! You must be [a] chopper [kıyıcı] at some point. I don’t mean two slaps and a punch. You need to chop . . . if you get sick of bleeding and blood, don’t get in[to] these things! (Yıldo)

The discursive connection between violence and reputation has always been emphasised within street culture literature (Fleetwood, 2016; Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017). Similarly, in a non-Western criminal subculture, violence becomes a device for disadvantaged youths who desire to spread their reputation through illegitimate circles (Bourgois, 2003; Sandberg and Pedersen, 2009), with the ultimate aim of meeting the abis, meaning older respected criminal ‘big brothers’:

You must shoot three to four people down . . . or open gunfire on two to three places. You are strong and ‘going to work’ [yoluna bakıyorsun], you’re fast . . . After one or two attacks, your name is spread around. People will talk about you. Your friends will start speaking of you going to shoot this or that man. You’re daring [gözü kara] and a chopper [kıyıcı]. You’re challenging those who wear the trousers in the neighbourhood, then shooting them. Your name would spread around . . . bigshots then would take you onboard and say ‘stand by me’ because you’re daring. (Juba)

Daring and defiance are the necessary traits of a youth who is determined to walk the illegitimate path. In resonance with much of the ‘gangster discourse’ (Sandberg and Pedersen, 2009: 44–46) and ‘violence stories’ (Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017: 372–375), the discourse of violence and cruelty works for sifting past instances, injuring the sense of self, thereby damaging the fragile masculine ego, through fantasmatic narratives which help the subject draw out a sort of imaginary omnipotence while transforming into an apt agent of the street field (Mercan, 2020a: 345; see Winlow and Hall, 2009: 290). However, as discourse refers to an ontological horizon where physical objects and past instances gain their meaning and become meaningful stories (Glynos et al., 2009: 9), there is at least a material physicality in and of which some actions come to be signified as challenge, fight, beat-up, prowess and so on. Similarly, Juba made of his reputation in the past with so many serious physical challenges and blows, ending up with stabbing or shooting, all of which become meaningful within street cultural discourse (Mercan, 2020b, 2020c) Yıldo was also walking the same pathway through fights and violent instances, striving to put up an image, strong and daring. Gossip channels spontaneously lead the way, carrying the details of the most aggressive fights from one area to another, from one person to the next: ‘Stories of violence establish and maintain hierarchies through reputation, signal participation in the field, convey values and confirm or challenge the borders of the field’ (Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017: 376). Peer talk and park conversation circulate names and actions in such a way as to create fantasmatic imageries of winners and losers.

Affective trigger: Identification with the available criminal social type

Both physically and discursively, violence comprises the primary presentation of their self-promotion, thereby entering the realm of the significant Other, the gayrimeşhur abis. This observation concurs with Simon Harding’s (2014) field analysis of London gangs, as similarly the youths aim to gain the trust of more mature and advanced players in the field in order to reach their social networks, alongside procuring their street knowledge and skills.

However, the purpose of acquiring these purported street assets is not an outcome of rational calculation relying on their eventual conversion into economic capital (Harding, 2014: 54–61). In stark contrast to Harding’s utilitarian notion of field relations reducing the acquisition of gang members to mere casino chips, the objectives of the Walkway boys appear on the surface far from rational or strategic. Rather, the boys are driven towards a relationship once they have procured the desired favour of a gayrimeşhur big brother (abi). These big brothers are model-images of identification and fill a symbolic deficiency as an ego-ideal who is supposedly unbeatable. In the eyes of the Walkway youth, these perceived gayrimeşhur big brothers play a vital role through symbolic identification processes in forging their street-criminal habitus. This modern criminal social type presents the youth with a seductive model-image inspiring them to exist in a like manner.

By example, Juba is a role model for many boys in the Walkway. The gaze of the significant Other, which is what Juba represents to the youths, becomes a pivotal object through which the boys discursively establish their identity and skills and negotiate their status. Often, Juba’s return home created a spectacle, attracting neighbourhood youths eager to exchange with him greetings or brief words. Juba’s cool car, latest iPhone and flashy clothes are signs of affluence, bolstering him with ‘street cool’ (Ilan, 2015) in its Turkish form, gayrimeşhur, manifested through tattoos and razor scars on his forearms. Juba’s attractive image and visibly conspicuous style of consumerism do not merely constitute an abstract higher status in the eyes of the boys, but a concrete possibility, encouraging their fantasies that one day they could similarly become so. The illusio of the wider area then manifests on the figure of Juba. Moreover, his benevolence wins him much regard. He is liked by the neighbourhood youths as he tends to protect and help them, furthering the degree of intimacy between them, even to the point of becoming a criminal partnership. Yıldo has gone some way in his criminal career by identifying with Juba’s image:

Well, there is emulation [özentilik]. That happens at an earlier age, I mean, emulation. For example, we were once little and running around with a nappy on our ass and saw Juba abi and Justo abi, here. We often encountered them at the park, I mean we stuck around the neighbourhood and took the park hostage in those days. The park was ours and we didn’t leave it. We would see Juba abi. Then he comes up and asks, ‘hey bros, do you have cigarettes?’ Good God, do we have a cigarette? No. We’re all destitute. No money. How can you buy it? [Juba] buys everyone a packet of cigarettes; they are hanging around so rich, they have a name, they ride cool cars. Then slowly you start imitating that. For instance, you have a big brother and he smokes the cigarette right here, then you say let’s smoke the cigarette here, too. (Yıldo)

As the quote bluntly describes, Juba provides the youths with a strong image to associate with in otherwise extremely deprived conditions, perfectly fulfilling an ego-ideal and erecting a viable subjective position. This refers to the affective, ontological side of the relationship. However, in the street, the ontological survival of the Walkway boys reveals itself to be a constant competition between disadvantaged youths as they deploy various performances to capture Juba’s attention. Involving serious violence, theft and burglary, we can understand these in both affective and street-capital-acquisitive terms. The seductiveness of an abi’s lifestyle draws young men towards a career in crime, while their primary class-habitus, accumulated over years of intense poverty and deprivation, provide them with the material capacity and motivation to become the criminals they want to be. Instead, Juba’s generosity towards the neighbourhood boys bridges fantasies and strategies between both parties while conveying the potential of crime as work from the older to younger brothers. In turn, the boys produce counter-favours supporting Juba in numerous ways and forcing a strategic mutual affinity between each partner.

The repertories of the illegitimate realm: Doing a favour

Affective contact between generations triggers a series of strategic relations, turning agents into partners striving for symbolic and material gains from the field. To maintain his advantaged position, Juba does favours for the boys to gain their trust. These tend to take the form of bestowing a gift and demonstrating ‘giving without taking’, for instance, buying the boys a packet of cigarettes, treating them generously and frequently asking whether they need anything from him. Such a potluck works as a code of the street and allows for a trusting relationship to build over time. The figure of the protector, like Robin Hood, inspires the poor boys to desire to become one who likewise defends the interests of his associates. The source of the wealth bestowing these favours does not concern the youth. Indeed, the illegitimate aspect of this income supply becomes attractive and enhances its prestige. More importantly, doing favours [güzellik yapmak] can set the status of some abis against others, differentiating between who the boys see as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Juba sets out one of his conscious strategies for functioning within the illegitimate domain, emphasising the importance of a ‘good relationship’ with the youth:

The older gayrimeşhurs must withdraw as the new generation grows up. Always! Because the new always bites the elder’s head off! You must know yourself, see them as your own brothers, and respect them just as you were respected in your time. Never offend them! If you do, then you bring yourself down! They come back at you finally! Because there is a limit [that the boys can endure] as they are young, daring, and taking a shine to [illegitimate things]. If they call out to you ‘abi!’ then you need to know your position. If not, they might fuck that abi up! This is very important. You must get yourself appreciated in every realm so that you can go smoothly. If not, you’re nothing! (Juba)

Juba’s strategy of ‘getting on well with the youth’ and ‘being appreciated’ embodies the tactical attitudes that are the product of his conditioning and affective cultivation: speaking politely, helping generously with monetary issues if needed, but also being tough when deemed necessary. The subtleties in adjusting his attitude between softness and toughness worked to control the youth. Cafu, a Kurdish boy in his early 20s, who was arrested while running Juba’s drug business, describes the strength of this attitude while in conversation with Yıldo:

Yıldo:

You need to be loved, abi. You really must be loved, if not, you can’t get ahead.

Cafu:

You will never get anywhere! You would always run alone otherwise. Of course, while trying to make yourself ‘beloved’, you should never get yourself oppressed. But when you’re decent and honest, then you always have a place anywhere. This is very important. When you lack something you need, then you can easily go to that person [gayrimeşhur abi]. That thing you need could be nothing to him but mean a lot for you. Your impression is quite significant to that person.

As Cafu clearly reveals, maximising your networks, and therefore economic gains, by getting oneself appreciated by the neighbourhood youth is an established strategy operated through honesty and personal integrity. By themselves, favours [güzellik] do not function as a means for acquiring social capital in the illegitimate fields but require support via personal decency and integrity. As in conventional economic life, integrity and honesty have long been celebrated as the characteristics of a good criminal (i.e. Hobbs, 1997; Letkemann, 1973; Shover, 1996). Here, being of decent character should not be considered as those valid in formal-legitimate fields; instead, it refers to honesty exhibited to the extant milieu – business stakeholders, which entails fulfilling one’s promises, truthfulness with partners, and being fair in conflicts and in the distribution of shares. Both the younger and older generations have absorbed the cultural code that it is important to be honest – but this is a product of both affective connection and habits solidified over years of illicit living.

This custom of performing favours [güzellik yapmak] is reproduced across the generations, structuring a hierarchy among juveniles. For example, Juba did Yıldo a favour by helping him acquire credit when decorating his new flat. Similarly, once Yıldo made money, he allegedly conducted some favours for some needy youths. Yıldo uses his money strategically:

Well, I can dispense one thousand [″1,000 ($456 in 2014)] to my beloved people without blinking an eye instead of burning that one thousand in a nightclub . . . I’ve got extra money in my pocket . . . I have some nephews [people around me] liking me. They don’t have money. No coal in his home. No money for shopping. No footwear. Well, he likes me, calls me Yıldo abi [big brother], respects me. He calls me ‘abi!’ and no other word! That guy doesn’t say anything [about his deprivation] but I suddenly come to take him and say, ‘come on!’ I will take him to the shopping centre and get him dressed from top to bottom. Good luck then! (Yıldo)

Favours are directed towards those who are not only in need but who view the abis as occupying respectable positions. At first sight, this appears to be unidirectional support and help offered by the older, stronger partner in the relationship. However, it works to build a hierarchic, strategic exchange reinforcing the position of the abi:

You might have to hold a person on your side . . . How? That friend, for example, may well like cars, let me say. You do know that! You then struggle to buy him a car. Well, I’m talking about little things. You measure these things in your head and understand people at some point. Well, you’ve become cunning at some point and see people! You have to take hold of the people beside you. To hold them at your side, people have to grasp you in one way. They have to call you ‘abi’ and respect you. In order for those people to respect you, you must appear in a way they want to see you! (Yıldo)

Yıldo identifies with the power of money and the importance of gaining people’s loyalty and confidence. The strategic aspect of these favours lies in his intention to elevate his influence over the younger generation of disadvantaged youths. Therefore, güzellik yapmak becomes an extension of the street and criminal networks of community and support, in turn raising capital. These strategic favours are dependent on an anticipated response from the younger party. The responses from the younger brothers can be categorised according to one of the following three types:

Symbolic: proliferating and reinforcing the reputation of an abi by speaking about him favourably, specifically ‘He is a cool guy [Delikanlı adamdır! Şekli vardır! Güzel bir abimizdir!]’.

Social: resolving a problem through a friend or acquaintance, and preventing a quarrel or fight, if any, between a pair of recognised abis by mediation.

Physical: support in fights, hitting or assaulting someone on behalf of the abi, joining the crew for an important job, such as safecracking, or selling the abi’s drugs on the corner.

These responses are enabled at various levels by an existing street-criminal proficiency and capital. As such, recognising a young person’s desire to be identified as suitable for sponsorship requires the necessary material and dispositional factors to be in position. Given the fact that the favouring of a young person by the abis is predicated on what they may gain from it, a heightened dispositional capacity towards criminality is directly associated with the likelihood of attracting a suitable sponsor. The service(s) offered by ‘young brothers’ may be temporary or permanent. A temporary alliance may consist of short-term work on one specific job, whereas a permanent position only occurs upon a young man’s proper enlistment into a crew.

The transmission of crime as work

As they prove themselves worthy in the eyes of their ‘big brother’, the youths strategically seek out his knowledge, capacity and cooperation in teaching them the subtleties of how to burgle houses (and thus increase their criminal cultural capital), and therefore allowing them to open a local drug enterprise (becoming a member of a network enriching them and boosting their criminal social capital). The successful performance of these actions requires the development of the conative dimension of criminal habitus: jimmying doors, prying open window frames and looking out during burglary operations are all the skills being trained and honed in time through endless repetitions of the same performance (Mercan, 2020c: 100–103). Similarly, exposing oneself more and more to criminal practices (burglary or dealing), internalising the language and code of the street, and long schooling in prison in a way as to absorb the signification schemata of underworld all smoothly shape up the cognitive dimension of criminal habitus (Mercan, 2020c: 104–106).

Affectively and then strategically constructed relationships between younger and older brothers make the way for the development of conative and cognitive parts of the younger partners’ criminal habitus, which helps transmit the knowledge of criminal work and specific techniques from the older generation to the younger in the field. Rüzgar is a notable example of this: he is from a Central Anatolian migrant family, 24 years old, 181 cm tall, white-skinned, with stylishly cut short, dark hair and tattoos on his arms. Having been a crucial member of Juba’s crew for 5 months until his arrest in June 2014, Rüzgar stresses the importance of an older gayrimeşhur’s experience and knowledge:

If you’re doing work, it has to be planned and projected. You shouldn’t disobey his [Juba’s] word but do whatever he says. You won’t get up if he tells you not to. I mean, he knows things better than us. That is why when he tells you something . . . well, he is the one who takes the lead. For, in the end, he knows the job better than us. He knows what happens there better than us . . . We must follow his orders. Trouble kicks in when we don’t. (Rüzgar)

Although Rüzgar is a relatively experienced burglar before joining Juba’s crew, he still acts regarding Juba’s directions when they are at work. Where to break in, which way to creep, how to climb up and what techniques to be used are instructed by the crew leader despite Rüzgar’s key role in breaking and entering. Rüzgar is very athletic and can climb to the upper floors of buildings, even higher than the third, yet he needs Juba to stay coordinated and learn new techniques. Learning through the instruction of the nuances of the work eventually becomes conatively and cognitively permanent dispositions (and subsequently criminal capital) in the youngsters under their leader’s guidance: Rüzgar, Yıldo and Cafu, the younger members of his crew, have learnt Juba’s new burglary technique. The most talented member of Juba’s latest crew, Yıldo, corroborates this learning process:

That is a matter of generations. The older generation has seen something and developed it over time. For example, there is a door we couldn’t break into. Well, we know lots of things but can’t open it anyway . . . Now we’ve seen from Juba abi; [he says] look ‘this is done like that!’, then you see the job. Well, who do you see it from? From the older generation. Well, we won’t continue like that for years, one day Juba abi breaks apart the partnership or something happens to us. Then, new people come to us, well, we will show our acolytes how to do that when they don’t know it. What we’ve seen from him [we] will pass on to them. (Yıldo)

Expressed in an ironic manner, Yıldo’s logic emphasises how criminal techniques and skills are passed from one person to another, as he mentioned that previously with his own crew he used to take one of the ‘rookies’ of the neighbourhood to the burglary operations in provinces. Reminding Dick Hobbs’ (1997) criminal craftsmanship, in these affectively triggered strategic collaborations, new techniques and the knowledge of how to contend with security measures transfer between experienced criminals to their younger counterparts. Similarly, the younger generation would transmit their expertise in property crime to those that follow them:

A boy whose name is X. He said such as, ‘include me in your crew, then I can take all the guilt!’ I was carrying the boy with me for the sake of that. That is, the boy said to me ‘teach me the job, give me bread and butter’ and ‘just take me on board and the crime would be mine in case of any trouble!’ I said, ‘OK brother come [on] one [job] with me!’ (Yıldo)

This demonstrates the doxa of the field, whereby if someone wishes to rise, he must acquire the necessary knowledge to develop it into criminal capital that in due course can generate material and symbolic rewards. Crew membership itself can be a symbol of attained capital.

Do you think you are really experienced in the work?

If I’m not, I can’t go around with that person [Juba]. Because there are lots of people wanting to hang out with that person. (Rüzgar)

However, the precise affective dimension of this process should be always borne in mind. The excerpt above demonstrates the heated competition among youths to be trained in the ways of criminal work, and via their fantasmatic framing, progressing some way to becoming a proper gayrımeşhur. The illusio of the field lies in the fantasmatic idea that poverty and deprivation can be resolved through material and symbolic gains earned within illegitimate fields. For an active agent in the field, emancipation will come from within it:

One day, I will find it! It is waiting for me somewhere. I will find it! (Yıldo)

What is your dream right now, generally?

What is my dream, you know? To find a beautiful [stash of] money and get the fuck [out] of Ankara and go somewhere no one knows [me]. (Rüzgar)

These statements share common features with the emancipation fantasies of professional burglars (Shover, 1996: 104). In this fantasmatic logic, the knowledge or information of a specific crime becomes capital for the youth to be acquired from the older generation who are currently the experts in their fields. This transmission of criminal knowledge forges the criminal habitus of the younger boys, transforming it into capital for further burglary operations. Similarly, it structures the criminal fantasies and fortifies the notion of crime as work across the generations in the fluid form of partnerships. What is at stake in this fantasmatic filter is that the disadvantaged youths’ strategic actions and their mode of engagement with social reality are still affectively constituted within fantasies.

Conclusion

Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and, more recently, the dispositional theory of action have expanded our capacity to explain street-criminal culture. Inspired by Bourdieu, urban crime ethnographies have produced useful concepts such as the street-criminal field, capital and habitus (i.e. Fraser, 2013; Ilan, 2013; Sandberg and Fleetwood, 2017; Shammas and Sandberg, 2016). However, these studies pay insufficient attention to the affective dimension of Bourdieu’s philosophical anthropology (the search of recognition) and the importance of psychoanalytical categories (affect and desire) when unravelling criminogenic social practice. This article has attempted to contribute to this literature by expanding Bourdieu’s late predilection for psychoanalytical themes and categories in understanding the making of capable agents in social fields. Put another way, this article has emphasised the importance of the psychoanalytically inflected psychosocial dimension of Bourdieusian criminology for understanding criminal subculture in a non-Western context (i.e. Fraser, 2013; Hall et al., 2008; Winlow and Hall, 2009). Presenting the life trajectories and discourse of lower class disadvantaged youths in a run-down neighbourhood in the Turkish capital, the article has demonstrated that strategic relations between the lower and upper tiers of the street-criminal field are constructed affectively. In bringing together psychosocial understanding of violence and crime with the theory of social practice, our focus has been on the affective moment of the disadvantaged youths’ criminal habitus formation. It is for the first time from a non-Western context that the evidence of ethnographic research has suggested that symbolic identification with a criminal model-image becomes a primary instrument for assimilating bodily and mental dispositions, turning a youth into an agent of criminal fields wherein those dispositions function as an asset-capital. This affectively constructed strategic mutuality results in a series of reciprocal benefits between the older and younger generations. Certain repertoires are used by both sides for maximising their economic and symbolic gains. The strategic aim of experienced, older criminals – abis – appears to take control of and support younger boys, whereas younger boys strategically aim to obtain the abi’s knowledge of criminal work and business. The evidence suggests that this strategic affinity not only transmits expertise in criminal techniques and skills across the generations but further presents a criminal career as a reliable source of income.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Boran Ali Mercan

Author biography

Boran Ali Mercan completed his PhD in Sociology from the University of Kent at Canterbury. Currently, he is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University. His interest covers theories of crime and deviance, psychosocial and cultural criminology, and police and policing.

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