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

Street cultures remain a challenging topic for anthropologicalanalysis, reflecting broader disciplinary tensions. Approaches thatfocus on structure and power tend to provide overly deterministicaccounts of action, especially regarding violence, while attempts totrace ethical striving have tended to characterize street cultures asdomains of ethical failure or as defined by the pursuit of short-termpleasures. Navigating between these approaches, I draw onethnographic accounts from “the Caldwell,” a deprived London socialhousing estate, to argue that ethical registers are an important locusof ethical life. Youth strive to build worthwhile lives not simply byadopting particular ethical stances, but by pushing on the limits ofavailable stances by weaving these together into a broader ethicalregister. For many young people involved with the Caldwell’s streetculture, ethical striving is inextricable from, and may even primarilyentail, efforts to cultivate collective registers, which entanglecriminal and noncriminal horizons. [street culture,gangs,violence,ethics,inequality,exclusion,hip-hop,stance,register,London

Convivality and its others: for a plural politics of living with difference

Over the past 15 years, a range of scholarship exploring how people live with difference in their everyday lives has come to mark a multi-disciplinary ‘convivial turn’. This article suggests that while such work has been generative, there has been a prevalent tendency to imagine the capacity to live with difference in relatively singular terms. This article begins by unpacking two ‘major’ themes within the convivial turn: the negotiated deconstruction of bounded identities, and the cultivation of public civilities. It suggests that despite important differences, both approaches imagine the capacity to live with difference in terms of general orientations towards a generic other. The article draws out the limits of these approaches by interweaving an ethnographic exploration of relations at a community café in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn with a review of various ‘minor’ themes within the convivial turn: boundedness, care and joint commitment, opacity, and interweaving. The article argues that each of these themes, major and minor, characterises a distinctive mode of relating, each marked by its own possibilities and limits. In doing so it argues for a more plural understanding of difference and forms of togetherness, connected to a more expansive politics

Power in a minor key: Rethinking anthropological accounts of power alongside London’s community organisers

Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power and attention to grounded perspectives in opposition. In this article I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK, to trace an alternative approach to this tension. For Citizens UK organisers this tension becomes a way of driving change by enrolling diverse actors in collective projects and by displacing heg- emonic understandings from within. Good theories, for Citizens UK organisers, are characterised by the practical ability to mediate between contending positions and, in doing so, transform them. To make sense of this mode of theorisation I take up queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘low theory’, geographer Cindi Katz’s notion of ‘minor theory’, and I draw on the linguistic anthropology notion of ‘register’. This allows me to unpack how organisers use theory to act, but also to trouble established anthropological understandings of what theory is and what it ought to do

Tracing Convivality: Identifying Questions, Tensions and Tools in the Study of Living with Difference

The concept of ‘convivality’ has come to dominate studies of everyday life in diverse places. This article starts from an understanding that our concepts inescapably direct our empirical gaze in particular ways. Surveying a diverse literature, I look at the different ways in which convivality has been conceptualised, and trace tensions between these different approaches. I show how this diversity of approaches and these tensions direct attention in particular ways and so lead to a number of lingering questions or empirical blind spots in the existing literature. Drawing on my own ethnography, in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn, I illustrate some of these challenges and outline methodological approaches which might help overcome them. In particular I unpack approaches which might support a deeper engagement with questions of structure and social change, care and incommensurability, and categorisation, cognition and context, which have received insufficient attention in the literature on everyday diversity, to date. Rather than making a case for or against the utility of the concept of ‘convivality’, I argue that the necessary first step is to extend our empirical understanding to better cover these blind spots, and then to weigh our conceptual apparatus up accordingly

House and home

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close association between house and home has long marked anthropological literature. And yet, when we imagine home, it is often not the structures themselves but the feelings, practices, and relationships within familiar spaces which give home a powerful sense of belonging. Home may be the scent of a grandmother’s cooking, the familiar fuzz of a worn cushion, the seemingly defiant thrill of hanging posters on the wall as a teenager, or the knot of tension in the stomach of a child listening to an argument in the adjoining room. Recent anthropological studies have hence looked beyond physical structures to understand home in terms of a diverse array of practices, meaningful and imaginative forms, and feelings which surround a sense of groundedness within the world. Understood in such terms, home becomes something much less solid than a structure of stone or wood. It tends to be contestable and fragile, a domain not only of belonging but also of potential alienation when attempts to make home fail or are subverted. This flourishing literature increasingly suggests that while physical shelter may be a basic existential need, it is houses and homes, wrapped up in the desire and struggle for belonging, which underpin human sociality