Gangs

Louis Herns Marcelin

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? ...

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