5. Cultural Criminology Part Two: Ethnography, Carnival and the Need for Critique

This chapter continues the exploration of key texts in cultural criminology. Specifically, it compares and contrasts two pairs of texts, one of each pair from outside cultural criminology and the other by one of cultural criminology’s founding figures. The first pair are ethnographies, since ethnography is a key methodology of cultural criminology; the second pair are focused on a core concept within cultural criminology, that of ‘carnival’. The general idea is to explore how well each text succeeds in its own terms, how compatible each is with conjunctural analysis, and whether the cultural criminology examples have managed to break new ground. The traditional ethnography used as the comparator for Jeff Ferrell’s cultural criminology offering Tearing Down the Streets (2001) is Carl Nightingale’s On the Edge (1993), chosen because it is much admired and widely cited by the cultural criminologists under investigation. Fortuitously, both the texts focused on carnival use Bakhtin as their theoretical starting point, thus enabling a direct comparison between a conjuncturally-focused text, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression by Stallybrass and White (1986), and one adopting a cultural criminology approach, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime by Presdee (2000). In both instances, in the ethnography and the carnival comparison, the cultural criminology texts fare less well than their comparator texts, partly because, like with both Hayward and Young in Chapter 4, theory and not the specificity of the particular is in command. There is also an unwillingness to start by critiquing existing approaches as a basis for building better explanations, which means that an unprincipled theoretical eclecticism holds sway. In the next chapter, Hall’s very different approach to theorising is the focus.