The long road: Hope, violence, and ethical register in London street culture

Abstract

Street cultures remain a challenging topic for anthropological analysis, reflecting broader disciplinary tensions. Approaches that focus on structure and power tend to provide overly deterministic accounts of action, especially regarding violence, while attempts to trace ethical striving have tended to characterize street cultures as domains of ethical failure or as defined by the pursuit of short-term pleasures. Navigating between these approaches, I draw on ethnographic accounts from “the Caldwell,” a deprived London social housing estate, to argue that ethical registers are an important locus of ethical life. Youth strive to build worthwhile lives not simply by adopting particular ethical stances, but by pushing on the limits of available stances by weaving these together into a broader ethical register. For many young people involved with the Caldwell's street culture, ethical striving is inextricable from, and may even primarily entail, efforts to cultivate collective registers, which entangle criminal and noncriminal horizons. [street culture, gangs, violence, ethics, inequality, exclusion, hip-hop, stance, register, London].