Symbolic capital and linguistic practice in street culture

Abstract

This dissertation is based upon two ethnographic fieldwork projects that were conducted onthe streets of Oslo, Norway. The most important data are qualitative interviews with citydwellers and street drug dealers. The first fieldwork was conducted at an ‘open drug scene’setting and the second in a more dispersed street drug market. The most important researchparticipants were young ethnic minority men. Themes discussed include recruitment todrug use and drug dealing, violence, processes of marginalization, and narrativepresentations of self in street culture. One important argument is that marginalized peopleare in a continual ‘search for respect’, through both symbolic capital accumulation andcreative linguistic practice.Conceptualizing a street subculture has been important in studies of youth,delinquency, deviance and crime. The present dissertation contributes two new concepts tothis tradition. The first is street capital, which is understood as knowledge, competence,skills, and objects given value in a street culture. This concept is used to capture theaccumulation of symbolic capital in a violent street culture. It can be used when studyingpractical rationality, embodied dispositions or habitus, and the complex relationshipsbetween socio-economic constraints and human agency in street culture. The secondconcept introduced is gangster discourse. This concept is understood as a collection ofpersonal narratives primarily describing the toughness, smartness and sexual attractivenessof its speakers. This concept is used to capture subcultural linguistic practice emergingfrom a violent and masculine street culture.The two concepts are related, and the dissertation proposes a synthesis in whichgangster discourse is the ‘linguistic capital’ and most important ‘linguistic practice’ of aviolent street subculture where street capital is the dominant symbolic capital. Gangsterdiscourse is both constitutive of and constituted by street culture. Street culture is notyoung male offenders’ only cultural influence however, and the dissertation will reveal amultitude of cultural influences by describing their creative, complex and ambivalentlanguage use. Influences include mainstream society and concrete meetings with welfareorganizations. This interdiscursivity challenges previous categorizations of offenders into‘street’ or ‘decent’ and ‘conventionally’ or ‘unconventionally’ attached, and thus also ahomogenous understanding subculture.