Theoretical Criminology

This article will offer a thumbnail sketch of some of the key theoretical antecedents that have underscored the cultural analysis of crime and criminality in both the United States and Britain. It traces the origins of the ‘cultural tradition’, from its beginnings in turn of the 20th-century American sociology to the flowering of radical British criminology with the National Deviancy conferences of the 1960s. It will then move on to consider the contemporary resurgence of cultural criminology and its attempts to once again prioritize the experiences of everyday life within the processes of crime and criminality. It will be argued that this approach offers a more viable and effective account of crime than that currently offered by the dominant discourse of administrative criminology as favoured by Blair’s New Labour approach to bureaucratic Britain.

Under the dehumanizing conditions of modernism, boredom has come to pervade the experience of everyday life. This collective boredom has spawned not only moments of illicit excitement—that is, ephemeral crimes committed against boredom itself—but larger efflorescences of political and cultural rebellion. In the same way, the machinery of modern criminology has organized a vast collectivity of boredom buttressed by rationalized methodologies and analytic abstraction. Against this institutionalized boredom, cultural criminology offers a rebellion of its own, and with it the possibility of intellectual excitement by way of methodological innovation, momentary insight and human engagement.

This essay is about (a) the dilemmas of doing cultural criminology and (b) the importance of reading criminology through culture. Drawing from the author’s research, it presents three tropes of culture-work on crime (village, city street and media), attending to the implications of the observer’s documentary presence. While describing rules, logics and practices that compose the bundle of habits and inventions we call methods, I highlight the ways in which methods are differentially situated within hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination. I argue that as we become participant observers and analysts in and of these contexts, we commonly transform the narratives we collect into data by linking them to maps in our logistics, epistemologies and rhetoric.

This article critically examines the concept of apocalyptic violence. Drawing on a wide range of methods, the study examines the social histories of some 40 neo-Nazi males. The network of knowledge that gives meaning to terrorist subcultures is examined in two case studies, showing a great diversity in the human conditions that adapt people to the subcultural products that makes terrorism possible. Yet the outcome is the same: terrorists use their products to reach for the same star that has attracted American terrorists since Jesse James and John Wilkes Booth—celebrity.

This article uses as data for cultural criminology an album of photographs taken by German soldiers and policemen involved in the Holocaust. The author labels these actions ‘genocidal tourism’. He then asks what impact they have on the exclusionary tactics at work in mainstream criminology that, typically, define genocidal killings as outside the scope of the criminological enterprise. Many of the photographs discussed played an important part in the debate occasioned by the work of Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning. Goldhagen advanced a ‘cultural’ argument for the Holocaust (eliminationist anti-Semitism), pointing out the ‘readiness’ of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to participate in the atrocities. In Goldhagen’s hands the Holocaust cannot provide material for criminology, as it is a unique historical event that belongs entirely to an interaction between ‘ordinary Germans’ and Jews. This article argues that this can be partly explained by differences in the rhetoric of Goldhagen and Browning’s texts and their respective use of photography. By comparing photography from the case of the genocidal massacres in the Rape of Nanking, the author counters Goldhagen’s argument and points to the possibility of the development of a situational criminology.

This article responds to the call by cultural criminologists for a ‘criminology of the skin’ that attends to the embodied pleasures and emotions generated by certain forms of criminal behavior. Drawing on the ‘edgework’ model of voluntary risk taking and a modified version of Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, I theorize risk taking in criminal endeavors as an activity linked to the embodied social practices of the life-world. Conceptualized in this way, illicit risk taking can be seen to play an important role in crystallizing the ‘criminal erotics’ involved in some types of crime. Standing in opposition to the disembodied system imperatives of late capitalism, criminal edgework represents a form of escape and resistance to the prevailing structures of political and economic power.