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. Key Words carnival of crime • cultural criminology • everyday life • transgression The antecedents of cultural criminology lie within the longstanding recognition of the importance of cultural ethnographies and artifacts in understanding human social behaviour. This ongoing tradition acknowledges that what is important is the analysis of the way in which humankind 275 Theoretical Criminology © 2004 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. www.sagepublications.com Vol. 8(3): 275–285; 1362–4806 DOI: 10.1177/1362480604044609 makes sense of and, at times resists, existing and developing social structures. Such privileging of ‘culture’ enables cultural theorists to view behaviour as dynamic rather than determined and opens up the possibility of other ways of ‘seeing’ transgressive and therefore criminal behaviour. Bringing theories and understandings of culture to bear on the phenomenon of crime is nothing new, but there is always a need to acknowledge the historical legacy of a century of cultural criminological writing and research that has been ‘given’ to us to build upon and struggle creatively with. There are writers in this edition of Theoretical Criminology who have played an important part in this legacy and who, alongside others, continue to lend weight to the debate, carrying this particular intellectual struggle forward into a new millennium. My task in this article, then, is to present a brief historical and conceptual sketch of some of the key themes and concerns that have challenged ‘cultural’ criminologists, both ‘then’ and now. It is always necessary to state and restate that crime is, if nothing else, a human activity, a human thing, cultural in nature and the product of the social order in which we live at any particular historical moment. In other words it involves the everyday lived experiences and practices of all members of society. In this sense, crime is fundamentally a social behaviour (see Sumner (2004) for a recent statement on this point). It is the product of unequal power relations and takes place as a social reaction to the activities of others, finding expression within the culture of everyday life. It cannot be any other way. It is here, in the ‘everyday’ that the criminologist ought to reside—analytical yet passionate about how the ‘crime’ question affects us all. Cultural criminology’s particular response has been to develop a creative, caring criminology that is concerned for both victim and perpetrator alike. In sharp contrast, the last two decades have also witnessed the growth of a very different form of criminological knowledge, a body of work that has become known as ‘administrative criminology’. Here the preoccupation is with the creation and excavation of so-called ‘sociological facts’. Administrative criminology roundly rejects and denies the importance of culture and lived experience in the commission of crime, preferring instead to concentrate on a pseudo-scientific analysis of criminal behaviour. The Home Office Research Unit, the engine room of British administrative criminology, has become little more than a ‘fact factory’, producing statistics on a daily basis that are taken by many as some sort of measurement of the social health of Britain. Their political masters have demanded and devoured these ‘social facts’ as fast as Home Office social scientists could make them. These ‘social facts’ stand as ‘description’ devoid of explanation and theory. They tell us as little about crime and criminality as do explanations and theories devoid of description. In short, administrative criminology has produced an overdetermined descriptive criminology, deprived of any social/human dimension. It is an antisociological methodology in ‘denial’. Cultural criminology on the other 276 Theoretical Criminology 8(3)
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