i

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Tough Crowd:

An Ethnographic Study of the

Social Organization of Fighting

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in Sociology

by

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs

2009

© Copyright by

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs

2009

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v Chapter 1 “The Wrong Walter” 1 Chapter 2 “Cultures of Youth Violence” 19 Chapter 3 “Finding Violence” 39 Chapter 4 “Becoming a Fighter in Adolescence” 58 Chapter 5 “Notes on the Meaning of Fights” 84 Chapter 6 “Remaining Open to Fighting in Late Youth” 117 Chapter 7 “Looking for Trouble” 151 Chapter 8 “Solidarity in Question” 186 Chapter 9 “The Practical Guide to Constructing Physical Fights” 201 Chapter 10 “The Open-Ended Careers of Youthful Fighters” 237 Chapter 11 “Conclusion: Affluent Fighters and the Professional Ideology of the Sociology of Violence” 276 REFERENCES 302

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LIST OF FIGURES

Table 2.1 Thirty-Five “Core” Members and Number of Fights Recorded in Data 20 Figure 2.1 Image of Dataset Word Processing Document 26 Figure 2.2 Curtis, Before Surgery (December 26, 1999) 27 Figure 2.3 Curtis, Back in the Orange “Ethnography Vest” (December 27, 1999) 28 Table 2.2 Summary Characteristics of “Core Sample”— Education & Parent Status 33 Table 2.3 Summary Characteristics of “Core Sample”— Violence & Troubles 35 Table 3.1 Three Types of Institutions that Produce Violent Peer Cultures: Variations on Five Common Qualities 51 Figure 3.1 One of the “Stoners,” Age 16, Punk Rock Style (1995) 61 Table 4.1 Cases Exemplifying Combinations of Moral and Technical Outcome 108 Figure 5.1 Curtis and Sample Members, Ages 22-24, in San Francisco (2001) 119

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In addition to the support I received from the members of my dissertation

committee, Robert Emerson, Jack Katz, Mark Klaiman, and Calvin Morrill, I benefitted

from comments on related presentations and pieces of writing from numerous

individuals, including: Randall Collins, Jonathan Courtney, Robert Garot, Keith

Hayward, Sally Jackson, Scott Jacobs, Elizabeth Joniak, Jooyoung Lee, “Steve,” “Rick,”

and many of the graduate students in UCLA Sociology, especially those participating in

the “Social Control Working Group.” For their contribution to this research, I owe a

special debt to all those who volunteered for membership in the sample.

I received financial support to write this dissertation from a 2005-2006 Doctoral

Fellowship awarded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and payment of fees

and tuition in the form of a 2005-2006 Dissertation Year Fellowship from the UCLA

Graduate Division. I received support while conducting research in the form of a 2000

Summer Research Mentorship Award and a 2001-2002 Research Mentorship Award

from the UCLA Graduate Division.

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VITA

November 8, 1978 Born, Champaign, Illinois 1998 B.S., Sociology, “Concentration

in Analysis and Research” Program University of Wisconsin, Madison

1999-2000 Graduate Division Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2000 Graduate Division Summer Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles 2000-2001 Teaching Assistant Department of Sociology University of California, Los Angeles 2001 Staff Research Associate

Department of Sociology University of California, Los Angeles 2001 Graduate Division Summer Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles 2001-2002 Graduate Division Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles 2002 Teaching Assistant Writing Programs/English Composition University of California, Los Angeles 2002 M.A., Sociology University of California, Los Angeles 2002-2004 Teaching Associate,

Department of Sociology University of California, Los Angeles 2005-2006 Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles

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2005-2006 Doctoral Fellowship Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation 2006-2007 Assistant Professor Department of Sociology Northern Illinois University DeKalb, Illinois 2008- Staff Research Associate

Department of Sociology University of California, Los Angeles

PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS

Jackson-Jacobs, Curtis. 2001. “Refining Rock: Practical and Social Features of Self-Control among a Group of College-Student Crack Users.” Contemporary Drug Problems 28 (4): 597-624. ——. 2002. “Arousal and Awareness: Social and Practical Aspects of Self-Control during Physical Fights.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association: Chicago, IL. ——. 2003. “Persisting in and Desisting from Physical Fighting.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association: Pasadena, CA. ——. 2003. “The Thrill of the Fight: Bodily Risk as an Element of Leisure.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction: Atlanta, GA. ——. 2004. “Hard Drugs in a Soft Context: Managing Trouble and Crack Use on Campus.” The Sociological Quarterly 25 (4): 835-856. ——. 2004. “Taking a Beating: The Narrative Gratifications of Fighting as an Underdog.” Pp. 231-244 in Hayward, K. J., Ferrell, Jeff, Morrison, Wayne and Presdee, Mike, eds. Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: Glasshouse Press. ——. 2005. Review of Hooked on Heroin: Drugs and Drifters in a Globalized World by Philip Lalander. American Journal of Sociology 110 (5): 1515-1516.

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——. 2005. “Six Routine Moments in the Process of Brawling.” Paper presented at the University of Pennsylvania Ethnography Workshop: Philadelphia, PA. ——. 2005. “Tough Crowd: An Ethnographic Study of Physical Fighting.” Presentation at the Department of Sociology, Northern Illinois University: DeKalb, IL. Jackson-Jacobs, Curtis and Garot, Robert. 2003. “‘Whatchu Lookin’ At?’ and ‘Where You From?’: Youth Fights in a Suburb and an Inner-City.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association: Atlanta, GA. Katz, Jack, and Jackson-Jacobs, Curtis. 2003. “The Criminologists’ Gang.” Paper Presented at the International Cultural Criminology Conference: London, UK. Katz, Jack, and Jackson-Jacobs, Curtis. 2003. “The Criminologists’ Gang.” Pp. 91-124 in Sumner, Colin, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Criminology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Tough Crowd: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Organization of Fighting

by

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs

Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology

University of California, Los Angeles, 2009

Professor Jack Katz, Chair

Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tucson, Arizona and a

dataset of 191 violent interactions (and 50 near-violent), this research develops (1)

an interaction-level analysis of how physical fights unfold and (2) a career-level

analysis of violence in a novel sample of affluent, suburban youth, most of them

white. As the sample members saw it, a fight is a stretch of emotionally serious,

competitive, hand-to-hand violence. They understood fighting through the

metaphor of the “fight-as-athletic contest” and as a form of exciting “action”

(Goffman 1967). Much of the thrill of fighting was to establish solidarity and

membership in the local violent elite and to reveal one’s strong character. A

further motivation was narrative: to make good stories. I distinguish three phases

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in the typical “fight career”: (1) becoming a fighter in adolescence, (2) remaining

open to fighting in late youth, and (3) avoiding fights as an adult. They started

their careers in fighting at times when they aspired to membership in rebellious

high school cliques and upon discovering gratifying new selves in fighting. After

high school their experiences with violence were largely organized around leisure

situations. During this period of “late youth” they found prestige in balancing

attachments to conventional lifestyles (e.g., as universtity students) and “looking

for trouble” in a mischevious, youthful spirit. Their positions in the life-course

and the American class system made noncommital dabbling in trouble practical,

without necessarily jeopardizing future options—at least for a time. The meaning

of fighting in their culture took several ironic turns as they grew up. During

adolescence, it was a way to claim the rights of adulthood. Then, after high

school, to reclaim the spirit of youth. However, as they aged, the social networks

to which they aspired no longer consisted of receptive, appreciative audiences for

their “street-wise” identities and stories of carousing. They became more

committed to what they viewed as adult relationships—as neighbors, professional

employees, and “family men.” Finally, on the brink of “full adulthood,” they

reframed fighting as childish and an obstacle to full membership in the moral and

social world of responsible adulthood.

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Chapter 1. The Wrong Walter

Walter Block’s shredded lips reminded me of hot dogs that had been cooked in

the microwave too long, taut skin bursting open to release swollen squiggles of fatty

tissue.1 It was a Monday afternoon in June 1994, and we were both fifteen years old. We

sat in the desert-landscaped patio behind his father’s spacious adobe brick house,

elegantly placed high in the lush hills rising above the flat basin of dusty urban Tucson.

As Walter explained it to me then, the thing that saved his life was the sheer bulk

of his massive skull. Our friends used to joke half-seriously that his head was so big no

one would ever knock him out. Of course, we weren’t anticipating the kind of violence

that had befallen him two nights earlier, on Saturday. Walter wore a size-eight fitted

Yankees baseball cap, twenty-five inches in circumference, so large it was off the charts

for most manufacturers. Underneath he would wear a disposable-razor-shorn scalp, head

shining like a great big round polished helmet. Yet he only stood a stout five-foot-eight,

albeit with powerful, broad shoulders, a wide waste, and thick, meaty hands. Our high

school’s junior varsity football coach successfully recruited him to play for one season.

On the school bus one neighborhood friend would call him Mr. Block, making fun of his

mature appearance. Walter and I met on that bus in 1992. We would take turns throwing

food out of the windows at the cars whizzing by. Our co-passengers would cheer us on

and we would laugh uproariously as cupcakes, sandwiches, and milk cartons splatted

across windshields.

1 To protect confidentiality, I have used pseudonyms to identify the people I describe and changed some minor biographical details that might reveal identity. I also fictionalized names for and minor details about many places, institutions, and businesses.

2

Walter was the adopted, dark skinned, Native American and Mexican son of a

successful white attorney, Roger Block. Like many of the youth whose lives I recount,

not to mention much of the rest of Tucson’s population, Walter’s family was a recent

transplant to New West. The elder Mr. Block had worked his way up to the North Side

from a humble childhood Back East. Walter’s peers got the sense—given our self-

consciously patrician, upper-middle-class, white-bread suburban neighborhood—that he

was virtually predestined for a notorious local reputation. His ambiguously non-white

appearance, his intimidating physique, and his carefully cultivated mean attitude—all

affirmed that Walter was truly and undeniably scary.

Walter turned to the side and drew a line several inches long down the back of his

head, showing me the course of a fracture. Along the way his fingertip bounced over a

series of staples that the doctors had punched through the skin into his cranium. They

looked just like ordinary office staples, maybe a bit thicker. If he had taken another blow

there or if his skull had been slightly smaller, he said, the injury would have been fatal.

Walter spoke between puffs of marijuana. The first hit off the small metal pipe

caused him to wince from the pain in his plump, split-sausage lips. After a minute,

though, he loosened up, laughing and talking proudly. He showed me several Polaroid

photographs of his injuries taken in a drab, institution-gray hospital room. A series of

close-up snapshots documented purple shoe-print bruises all over his body. I could

discern Nike and Adidas soles, among others—just like we wore. At one point he went

back inside the house, returning after a minute holding up high—like a trophy—a plain

white t-shirt that was torn open down the front, splattered all over with an alarming

3

quantity of brown, dried blood, and dusted with black gravel. Walter boasted that he

intended to frame the bloody thing (although his father eventually threw it away).

Soon he would be telling and retelling the story for crowds of other admiring

teenagers at parties and “get-togethers.” So would two of his friends, Chad and Steve,

whose stories I tell throughout the following chapters. They had witnessed the violent

event but stayed out of the action. On occasion they can still be heard to recount the

story. When I came back to Tucson for fieldwork more than five years later, they

described the gory details and the lasting trauma of Walter’s beating. In June 1994 our

network of peers immediately recognized that something profound had happened on

Saturday. It was the stuff of legends. When I sat with him in his backyard on Monday

afternoon Walter was proud of what he had done, proud of what he had withstood two

nights earlier, and proud to know that everyone knew about it.

My stomach initially sank in horror when I heard the story. Even so, once the

initial shock wore off, my heart rose. I was proud, too: proud to be with him the day he

got out of the hospital, proud to be the first one to hear him tell the story, proud to be

friends with someone who had been through something like that.

I grew up along with most of the people I am writing about in one of the affluent,

picturesque neighborhoods located in the hills surrounding Tucson, a couple miles

outside of and elevated about 1,000 feet above the municipality. The city limits of Tucson

contain a rapidly growing population just over 500,000. The population of Pima County,

which includes surrounding neighborhoods like the North Side, is just over 900,000 (in

1994 their populations were closer to 450,000 and 700,000). Four mountain ranges frame

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Tucson, anchoring a permanent, if rough, compass: the Santa Catalinas to the north, the

Tucson Mountains to the west, the Rincons to the east, and the Santa Ritas to the south.

Many Tucsonans view the mountains as a moral compass as well. The Catalinas rise

abruptly just north of the Rillito River—a dry, sandy wash that draws the border between

working class Tucson below, and the prestigious, sometimes snooty, North Tucson Hill-

District neighborhood above. The mountains south and west of Tucson are lower than the

Catalinas and those to the east are farther from the city, neither as dramatic nor as

imposing. From north to south Tucson’s demography gradually shifts from

predominantly middle- and upper-class whites to working-class Mexican-Americans. The

North Side, a strip about four miles tall from south to north and ten miles wide from west

to east, has the highest local property values, the most pretentious reputation, and one of

the wealthiest school disticts. That summer Walter was between his sophomore and

junior years at our district’s public high school, although he would drop out shortly

thereafter.

Walter’s backyard, like many of the community’s lavish properties, had both the

much sought after scenic mountain- and aristocratic city-views. Protective of its

panoramic beauty and status as the “astronomy capital of the world,” Tucson has had a

nationally renowned ordinance to limit nighttime light pollution since 1972. The sparse

smattering of homes and absence of pedestrians make it feasible to strictly limit street-

lighting in elevated neighborhoods like the North Side. Although technically suburban in

terms of population size and density, parts of the hills around Tucson seem emptier than

most American suburbs. The terrain is rustic, traversed by winding two-lane asphalt roads

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(and a few dirt ones), free of sidewalks, manicured with understated natural desert

landscaping (called “xeriscaping”), and dotted with one-story houses set back from the

roads, many of them subtly concealed by the rolling hills, Saguaro cacti, and Palo Verde

trees. Some residents intentionally leave out piles of fruit or vegetables for the packs of

pig-like javelinas that run through the desert.

Thus the North Side has the peculiar circumstance of appearing more rural than

suburban, while at the same time being spatially closer to the city than most big city

suburbs and exurbs. One of its major thoroughfares is Desert Vista Drive. It runs in two

and four lanes across the community from east to west. Dimly lit at night by just a few

traffic signals, scattered subdivisions, and strip-malls (though it has become considerably

more developed since then), Desert Vista became a popular strip to cruise along while

looking down on Tucson’s warm, yellow city lights.

Walter was still too young to drive, so it was a daily chore to find a ride to “where

the action was” (see Goffman 1967). On the fateful Saturday night, like most weekend

nights at the time, Chad was near the center of attention. Two days before I sat with

Walter in his backyard—before he needed to have his head stapled back together—his

father drove him one mile north from their house to Desert Vista Drive, then five miles

east to Chad’s apartment. Within walking distance there were two moderately priced no-

frills plaster apartment complexes, three neon strip-malls surrounding the neighborhood’s

busiest intersection, and the high school that Walter and I still attended and that Chad and

Steve had just dropped out of. In 1994 there was an Urban Gourmand—an upscale,

independent grocery store—in the strip-mall on the southwest corner of the intersection,

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catering to the tastes of local gourmets. On the northwest corner there was a

Homefoods—a national-chain grocery store. Walter’s big moment was about to happen

outside the latter.

Around Chad one got the sense that anything could happen. The first time I spoke

with him he was a freshman. With an air of false modesty he was telling a group of

spellbound students that he kept getting into fights with seniors from other schools,

though he claimed the reasons were a mystery to him. He was one year older than Walter

but they were in the same grade. When Chad moved to Tucson in the eighth grade he

wooed his pubescent peers with his charismatic sense of humor and irreverent antics,

combined with a tough guy image. He was suspended on his first day of school in

Tucson. He had dropped his pants down to his ankles in front of an amused, popular girl

in his class, showing off his boxer shorts with a trout pattern and making silly fish-out-of-

water noises while hopping around. Chad was happiest when his peers paid attention to

him, and as a teenager plenty of them did. Toward the end of the ninth grade he was one

of the first in his class to get a driver’s license. He started cruising around in a great big

noisy orange Chevelle Super-Sport muscle car, which he would use to caravan friends

from party to party where they would drink beer and sometimes get into fights with

young men from other high schools.

In about 1992 grunge rock and punk rock started coming into fashion. Chad was a

guitar player, so grunge bands like Nirvana and lesser-known punk bands like NOFX

appealed to him more than the gangsta’ rap he and his peers had been into before. Over

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the course of a few months they changed their style, growing their hair long and wearing

old thrift store-bought plaid flannel shirts—in spite of the heat.

Chad’s mother, a nurse, and his stepfather, a military physician, divorced at the

beginning of his sophomore year. His mother moved a hundred miles north to Phoenix,

but Chad refused to go. Instead he convinced his mom to help him stay in Tucson on his

own—but with his friends’ support—at which point he began apprenticing full-time as a

plumber and occasionally attending night school. Although he had already dropped out

by then, Chad moved into an apartment right next to the high school, making it easy for

students to visit him at home. His roommate was an athletically built, hard partying,

twenty-one year old. Since his roommate was “of age” Chad and his friends rarely had to

go without beer, making his apartment a coveted party spot.

Two details about Chad’s roommate were important for what happened to Walter

Block on that Saturday night: he was reputed to be a former Navy SEAL (improbable as

that would be at his age) and, coincidentally, his first name was also Walter.

Chad’s best friend Steve was always considered something of a puzzle by his

friends, blessed with the marks of distinction admired by his peers but uncomfortable

with their attention. He first became friends with Chad in the eighth grade. One day at

school Steve happened upon three bullies beating up Chad’s diminutive friend Dewey.

Like Chad and Walter, Steve was also an early developer and had an unflinching attitude.

Even then he had a lean and powerful equine build, arms wrapped in rope-like muscles,

shiny long straight black hair, stunningly handsome sharp facial features, and a prominent

wide jawbone. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for organized sports, Steve’s friends

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believed him to be the most naturally athletic person they knew. Steve stepped into the

abusive episode, throwing and chasing the three bullies around, threatening and

challenging them to fight. They declined, bolstering his reputation as a “tough guy.”

After school Steve met Chad at Dewey’s house. They would describe their

friendship as love at first sight. Both played guitar, hated school officials and the “jocks,”

and considered themselves rebels. To cement the relationship, Chad shaved Steve’s hair

into a Mohawk. With Chad’s constant companionship, Steve became immensely popular

with girls and boys at their school.

Even after dropping out, though, neither of them really disappeared from the high

school social scene. They always seemed to be hanging around somewhere near campus

and they were still friends with and admired by students. And, naturally, dropping out

only inflated their local prestige. Members of their nascent crew—that is, people they

referred to as “good friends,” including Walter Block—looked up to and regarded Chad

and Steve as leaders, both in fighting and in social life more generally.

Despite the attention he got, however, Steve became really close with just a few

friends. Others tended to know wild myths about him—myths he has, mysteriously,

always tried to discourage—better than his personality. No one noticed for another six or

seven years until he became a straight-A engineering major in college, but Steve always

had a quiet, focused intellect. He preferred get-togethers—hanging out with a few close

friends—to big house parties. At times, though, he would ride around in Chad’s noisy

orange Chevelle, drinking beer and carousing, and that is when they would get into most

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of their brawls. On rare occasions one could coax from Steve apologetic memories of

those violent performances, most of them considered spectacular by his peers.

That Saturday night, when Walter’s father dropped him off at Chad’s apartment,

there was a small get-together in progress. Chad’s roommate Navy SEAL-Walter had

borrowed the big orange Chevelle, leaving them with no ride. As was customary, Bob,

Will, Powel—all to be introduced in more detail in later chapters—Steve, Walter Block,

and a few young women had all called Chad earlier in the day to find out if anything was

happening. Chad told them all to come over. They made their way over on foot or with

rides from their parents. The usual routine for that time was to sit around with the

television on while simultaneously listening to some new punk rock CD, unconcerned

that the loud, late-night clamor might bother some grownup neighbor (i.e. over age 25).

Steve and Chad would sit with guitars in their laps, playing along quietly, trying to learn

the new songs. The others would tell loud stories, joke around, and flirt shamelessly with

almost anyone of the opposite sex. Some lucky souls might even try to “get it on” in the

bathroom, at least until the beer swollen bladders outside became impatient and someone

started screaming at the door.

All the young men would have open cans of cheap American beer in front of them

at all times. Once enough people showed up they would become protective of the beer

supply, each going to the refrigerator, retrieving his cardboard twelve-pack, and then

sitting with the box between his feet.

This Saturday night happened to be one of the first times that Walter had used

cocaine. The day before he had acquired a small amount of it wrapped in the cellophane

10

from a cigarette pack. It was a “gift” from another young man from his neighborhood,

Denny, whose impending next meeting with Walter would have a distinctly less generous

tone.

Like most weekend nights, the men were hoping that something interesting would

develop. The point of partying, after all, was to make something happen. If possible, there

would be some excitement and “action,” preferably sex, violence, a drug binge, some

encounter with the police—some intense bonding experience or some adventure to brag

about on Monday. A large keg-party would have been ideal, offering grander possibilities

for being at the center of a large audience’s attention should something exciting take

place. As usual, they were calling around looking for one. People like Chad, the ones

who routinely animated the carousing excitement, achieved an almost spiritual order of

distinction in the stratified world of teenagers, a distinction they called Being Popular.

The Popular young men always seemed to be involved in remarkable, exciting, action-

packed events. Their peers would tell stories about them with admiration. They had

prima facie evidence for seeing themselves as the kind of people who are noteworthy,

people who are worth talking about—people who matter. They considered themselves

virtual celebrities.

In recent months Walter had been on a campaign to achieve such neighborhood

notoriety (cf. Anderson’s [1999] concept of “campaigning for respect”). Outside of a

previous get-together he had accepted a challenge to fight from three older boys who

attended Westin High, a high status (for Tucson) private school. In hindsight, the

similarities were eerie between that encounter and the one about to happen this Saturday

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night. In the first, Walter was standing alone near the street smoking a cigarette when the

Westin group pulled beside him in their car. They were looking for one of Walter’s

friends, whom they knew only by name. Walter claimed to be the target of their search.

They exited the vehicle and “jumped” him—that is, attacked him as a group. Walter was

lucky that time. He claimed to have returned a few punches, his opponents numbered

only three, and it sounds like they were not especially skilled practitioners of violence

(such lack of skill is common even among violent actors; see Collins [2008]). Walter

walked away with only a few scrapes and bruises, which paled in comparison to the

inflated ego he acquired boasting about it to his friends.

So far, at 11 PM on Saturday night at Chad’s, nothing very memorable was going

on. Some of the young women would be going home soon to make curfew. The young

men waited and drank and joked around. About then the phone rang. Steve answered. It

was for twenty-one year old Navy SEAL-Walter, who was still out with the big orange

Chevelle, but Steve didn’t realize that at first. Steve mistakenly thought it was for fifteen

year-old Walter Block who, after all, was sitting right there on the couch and had been

paging friends-of-friends all night long, looking for a party. Steve recognized the caller as

Becker, an eighteen year-old from another neighborhood, whom he knew as a distant

acquaintance—a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-, that is, someone who might have a lead on a

larger, more exciting party across town. Steve handed the phone to Walter Block.

When the caller asked if this was Walter, he replied that it was. Soon the two were

quarrelling. As it turned out, Becker had a dispute to settle with Navy SEAL-Walter, one

that Steve now supposes to have been drug-related since both were involved in that sort

12

of thing. Walter Block soon recognized the case of mistaken identity but seized on the

opportunity to start trouble anyway. They continued to argue and soon started

challenging each other to do battle—“talking shit,” as they call it in this culture. Steve

remembers hearing Walter say, “Fuck you. Meet me at Homefoods.”2 By that time the

initial reasons for the argument no longer mattered. Walter Block had now issued insults

and agreed to do battle. Chad was the only one at the apartment over sixteen years old.

But since twenty one year-old Navy SEAL-Walter still had the big orange Chevelle,

Walter Block had to choose a meeting place within walking distance. Homefoods was

three blocks away.

At that age the young men placed much emphasis on how much “backup” they

could muster for a fight. On this particular night, though, Walter was not very successful

at inspiring a crowd to follow him. Steve remembers Walter asking everyone to go. Bob,

Powel, and Will stayed behind. They didn’t really want to because they didn’t think

anything was “really going to happen.” But Steve and Chad went anyway, “just in case

he needed help.” Walter carried an aluminum baseball bat as they walked along the dirt

and gravel path that served as a sidewalk on the south side of Desert Vista. Walter had

reason to believe he was in good company with Chad and Steve. At ages sixteen and

fifteen both were reputed to be tougher than the average bear. But even their fighting

talents were no comparison to those they ascribed to twenty-one year old Navy SEAL-

Walter, who was unfortunately missing in action with the Chevelle. Several miles away it

2 As I wrote in my jottings and then my fieldnotes of a March 2000 interview, from which all of Steve’s quotes in this chapter are drawn. As I explain below, I try to minimize direct quotations except when I have a transcript of an audio recording.

13

seems almost certain that Becker was charged up for a fight, along with about two dozen

friends—a force strong enough to take on even the legendary, supposedly-invincible

Navy SEAL-Walter. Walter Block was unwittingly walking into the unhappy situation of

grossly underestimating opponents who were grossly overestimating him.

Once they had walked through the empty Homefoods parking lot Walter stood in

front of the closed Dairy Delights ice cream store next door and waited with the baseball

bat on his shoulder. Expecting to be stood up by Becker, Steve and Chad walked about

twenty yards away to a nearby hill where they sat down to watch and wait. They told

Walter they would be around the corner, “just in case,” still misjudging how much help

he would actually need.

After a few minutes Walter’s opposition did arrive—and in impressive fashion.

This was backup. Steve recalled the parade—the celebration of young bravado, the series

of slick cars “pounding bass” (i.e. playing loud gangsta rap).

“There were eight cars total—I actually counted them,” Steve told me. He figured

they were aged about seventeen and eighteen, an age difference of only one or two years,

but one that is meaningful to teenagers. There was still plenty of time to retreat. Steve

descended the hill before Walter’s opponents dismounted their vehicles. Walter stood in

place, however, unmoved by the caravan. Steve couldn’t believe Walter’s show of

bluster, he explained.

He ran up to Walter. “Come on, let’s go,” Steve urged. “This is absolutely

absurd.”

14

Bouncing around inside Walter Block’s huge hairless head must have been all the

frantic thoughts and wild emotions that all fighters know. Years of tough talk, violent

teenage daydreams, grandiose ambitions of glorious violence—they were all coming

down to this one moment of truth, this one grand fantasy come true.

Becker’s friends were getting out of their cars. Escape routes were starting to

disappear.

Walter was closing in on that familiar moment of personal revelation: the point of

no return, the point of no escape, the point at which—all regrets aside—you suddenly

have no choice left but to do whatever you can to survive. All fighters wonder sooner or

later: Will I have what it takes to hold fast, to abandon the safety of my usual comfortable

existence, to put myself to that great primal challenge, that great test of my true

character? Will I stand and take my beating like a—not like a man, but a superman—a

hero—a legendary epic warrior? Or will I reveal the fundamental cowardice in my soul

by backing down at the last second?

Six years later Steve’s dismay remained heavy: “But he wouldn’t go. He just

stood there with this bat on his shoulder.” Steve insisted, “I mean, I really tried to get him

to go but he wouldn’t do it.”

Despite the absurdity of Walter’s last stand, Steve spoke apologetically about

what happened next. Steve returned to the hill where Chad still sat. He confessed his fear

like it was something shameful that needed excusing, as if he needed absolution for

hanging Walter out to dry. “I didn’t want to get jumped. I have this horrible fear of

getting jumped and beat like that.” As if anyone doesn’t.

15

Whatever fear Walter must have been feeling, he managed to contain it even as

his antagonists crowded around him. By all accounts (including the stories I heard from

members of the opposing coalition) about two dozen men formed a semicircle around

Walter, who backed up against the Dairy Delights storefront window to keep their

advance at least partially contained. Although drunk and high on coke, Walter recalled

later that he sobered up fast when confronted by the mob.

One of the men was Denny, the neighborhood acquaintance who had given

Walter the same cocaine that was now helping him to stand firm. Steve also recognized

two other young men from their school, both of whom were friends with Steve, Chad,

Walter, and the rest of their crew. It was news to them that those three hung out with this

other crowd. Surely Becker’s group now knew that this was a case of mistaken identity.

For a moment Steve and Chad wondered and hoped: Won’t Denny and the other two

come to Walter’s defense? But they didn’t.

Walter’s opponents started aggressively belting out the often-used generic shit-

talking challenge: “What’s up?” “What’s up, Walter?” For a few moments there was a

standoff. Walter had the baseball bat while his numerous opponents were unarmed—at

least for the moment. That Monday Walter told me he realized what he was in for and

dramatically challenged his opponents to “rush me” and get it over with. Steve doesn’t

recall hearing Walter say anything, but he couldn’t say for sure one way or the other.

The group of young men had mobilized for violence, undoubtedly pumping

themselves up on the drive over. They were prepared to do battle with the older,

legendary Navy SEAL-Walter. Then Walter Block, even if he was the wrong Walter, had

16

dared to challenge them. He had refused to back down and even threatened them with an

aluminum baseball bat—a potentially lethal weapon, as it would soon be clear. One way

or another, from their perspective, Walter was asking for it. And they were thrilled to

comply. After all, it wasn’t really Navy SEAL-Walter that they were after. It was the

beating itself—or rather, the ritual, the thrill, the solidarity of group violence.

One of them charged in from the side. Walter tried to swing the bat once but it

was too late. Steve and Chad watched from the hill. In a flash Walter lost his weapon and

was overrun by a flurry of fists and feet. He stayed upright for a few frantic seconds and

may have even gotten back up once or twice to flail blindly at the faceless heads. From

the seething swarm rang the chilling sound of aluminum reverberating off bone—twice.

Ching.

Ching.

Walter was knocked to the ground by the impact of the bat striking the back of his

head. When he fell down unconscious, though, his beating was just beginning. Only a

few of his opponents had so far gotten to strike him. Now they were surging forward in a

pack so dense that they had to struggle with each other for the chance to hit Walter. Steve

watched in utter horror from atop the hill, helpless to stop the “circle of people kicking”

him.

They kept kicking.

It had to be at least twenty to twenty-five guys surrounding him, Steve told me,

calling it a “mad frenzied rush.” “They just jumped all over him.” Adding further insult,

Steve saw Denny and the other two neighborhood acquaintances pushing their way into

17

the crowd. He couldn’t tell whether or not “they actually landed any blows,” he said, “but

they were definitely a part of it.”

They kept kicking.

And stomping.

The beating continued for longer than Steve could believe, though it may have

lasted only a few agonizing moments. In flurries of violence the meaning of a moment

changes dramatically. Steve was losing hope that Walter might still be alive under the

heap of stomping boots and sneakers.

They were still kicking. And stomping.

Then, just as quickly as they had burst forward, they all lost their exuberance at

once. Suddenly they struck Steve as “kind of scared that maybe they’d killed him.

Because they were all like, ‘Come on! Come on! Let’s get out of here quick!’” As they

ran away Steve see could see Walter lying “on the ground with blood everywhere.”

Steve’s own sense of dread was evident in the scene he described to me.

Approaching Walter he saw “blood coming out of his eyes, his ears, his nose, his

mouth—every orifice in his face had blood oozing out.” Steve recalled that he truly

thought that Walter was dead at that moment. He called 9-1-1 from a payphone, just feet

away. When the ambulance took Walter away—about ten minutes later by Steve’s

estimation—he was still unconscious. Walter’s attackers were long gone when the Pima

County Sheriff’s deputies arrived. Neither Steve nor Chad admitted to knowing their

identities.

18

When Walter woke up in the hospital he pointed the deputies in the wrong

direction, falsely claiming that the young men were students from Westin High (where,

recall, his previous attackers had gone to school). Although Walter and his friends made

big plans for retribution they never actually carried them out—not even against Denny or

the other two from their high school, any of whom would have been easy targets. Within

a few days Walter seemed content to bask in the attention he was getting (at least he

seemed that way publicly), so everyone let their revenge fantasies dwindle.

Years later the memory still haunts Steve. He has since witnessed or been

involved in countless other acts of violence, many of them quite brutal. “But never like

that time Walter got beat up,” he comments sadly.

19

Chapter 2. Finding Violence

In the following chapters the names of a few individuals, members of what I call

the “core” sample, appear most often. They are a network of friends (and some girlfriends

or, eventually, wives) who knew each other for years and were likely to show up at the

same parties, bars, and nightclubs throughout their teens and early twenties.

The 35 core sample members, listed in Table 2.1, contributed heavily to my

dataset on fight-interactions and careers in fighting (see also Table 2.2 for biographical

tabulations). I should not give the impression that this was a closed network or that the

friendship group had any fixed boundaries. All of these men and women led very active

social lives in their teens and twenties, organized around “partying.” As far as I could tell,

they all maintained what one might call a single primary friendship group as well as one

or more secondary friendship groups—corresponding roughly to Epstein’s (1969) idea of

“effective networks” and “extended networks,” those consisting of stronger and weaker

ties (Granovetter 1973). As I explain in later chapters, secondary, weakly-tied groups

were often essential for creating group identities and organizing fights, especially group

fights.

Primary groups included between a few and several dozen friends upon whom

one could call almost any time for company. An individual’s relationships to secondary

groups, with the exception of perhaps one or two friends, would not be as close.

Nonetheless, they would all spend considerable amounts of time with secondary

friendship groups, usually at least a few weekend nights per month. Most of the 35

friends listed below would have recognized each other as forming a single, primary group

20

of friends for some period of time, although a few drifted in and out at different times, or

considered a few of the others only secondary friends.

TABLE 2.1. Thirty-Five “Core” Members and Number of Fights Recorded in Data Pseudonym Sex and Race Fights3 Pseudonym Sex and Race Fights Aaron

Male White 5 Karen

Female White 0

Andy

Male White 1 Kate

Female White, Latino 2

Bob

Male White 7 Keith

Male White 0

Brad Male White, Latino 1 Kenny

Male White 1

Caroline

Female White 2 Lauren

Female White 2

Chad

Male White 14 Linda

Female White 1

Chuck

Male White 3 Luke

Male White 1

Dewey

Male White 1 Nathan

Male White 0

Freddie

Male White 3 Powel

Male White 7

Harry

Male White 1 Raj

Male Asian 7

Hernandez

Male White, Latino 5 Rick

Male White 10

James

Male White, Asian 0 Snoddy

Male White 1

Jennifer

Female White 2 Steve

Male White 7

Jerry

Male White 3 TJ

Male White 5

Joe

Male White 3 Toby

Male White 0

Juan

Male White, Latino 4 Tray

Male White 1

Justin

Male White 5 Walter

Male Latino, Indian 3

3 This number indicates only how many fights I documented for this research, not all of their fights.

21

Within the core sample, at times, I focus even more heavily on a few individuals’

life stories that I found to be the most revealing and richest sources of evidence (Chad’s

and Steve’s, in particular; see Katz [2001, 2002] on the uses of such “luminous”

description).

As I explain, I also gathered data from dozens of other men and women to

broaden the base of evidence. However, I chose to focus most of my time, energy, and

writing on this smaller number of sample members for two reasons. First, I had

convenient access to this novel, strategic sample, mainly because I had known most of

them, either as friends or classmates, as a teenager myself.

Second, I felt it important to include a strong focus on a single, coherent network

of friends. Ethnographers of youth involved in violence and other troubles have focused

particularly on the role of neighborhoods and work in the evolution of careers in violence

and delinquency (e.g. Sullivan 1989). Outside of gang studies, an important missing

element in the literature is the quality of informal friendship groups and peer

communities, especially as they develop over time. Not only do friendship groups

collectively define symbols around which they fight, but their violence is also an

important element in creating the meaning and history of their peer community (see also

Liebow 1967: 161-207). All violent youth cultures and groups (e.g. informal groups like

this one, skinheads, youth street gangs, or football hooligans) have their own distinctive

symbols and histories. But having distinctive symbols and histories are themselves

general features shared by all such groups.

22

The idea for this project grew out of a combination of my personal experience and

classroom study in criminology and sociology. Over the seven years before beginning

graduate school at UCLA (in September 1999) I had witnessed several dozen physical

fights and other violent interactions at parties, at local hangouts, and on the periphery of

my high school campus in Tucson. As a high school student I knew many teenagers who

regularly got into fights, most of them from upper-middle-class suburban backgrounds.

While attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison I met other young men who got

into fights, often around fraternity and campus party scenes. Additionally, between the

ages of six and twenty I had been involved in a number of physical fights and other

violent situations myself. Upon reading sociological studies of crime, violence, and

deviance, I formed the impression that the literature adequately described neither the

fights nor the violent “careers” of the people I knew.

I had two specific goals for this research and accordingly designed a twofold

fieldwork strategy. First, in order to provide a general statement of the range and process

of fights, I gathered detailed, interaction-level accounts of fighting, near-fighting, and

other violence in a variety of settings and over time (from interviews, observations,

conversational storytelling, or recollection; see below). Second, in order to portray the

fighters and explain how fighting was related to their biographies, I conducted participant

observation and life-history interviews, focusing especially on the network of friends

listed in Table 2.1.

I began by taking trips to Tucson and asking people I had known in high school if

I could interview them for a sociological study of fighting. Virtually all were eager to

23

participate and to introduce me to or recommend other contacts. I went out with them to

bars and parties, where I met their friends, and told everyone I could what I was doing.

During weekend trips and breaks in the academic calendar I networked my sample out to

include young men and women who were connected to other, overlapping friendship

circles, though my relationships with many of them were fleeting.

Between December 1999 and June 2004 I gathered and transcribed approximately

thirty hours of tape-recorded interviews and conversations. In addition, I wrote fieldnotes

on fifty-three days and/or nights of participant observation. Together, the transcripts and

fieldnotes are approximately 1,000 double-spaced pages in length. Throughout the

following chapters I use a variety of standard qualitative data-analysis techniques, drawn

from the sociological literatures on comparative and ethnographic methodology (see e.g.

Emerson 1983; Glaser & Straus 1967; Katz 2001a; Ragin 1987).

Sample.

There are multiple ways to quantify the sample size. I directly observed or

interviewed at least 131 people to construct the data for this study (including a set of

retrospective fieldnotes, described below). 4 During the 55-month period of active

fieldwork (i.e. excluding recollections), I recorded data on at least 86 individuals—20

women and 66 men (70 in fieldnotes, 47 in interviews, and 31 in both). The remaining 45

4 In order to write up field-notes and interviews I used 311 unique pseudonyms for different individuals, although many of them were simply named as opponents by my interviewees, meaning I never met them. I used 62 pseudonyms for places or organizations.

24

individuals (i.e. 131 – 86 = 45) only appear in a dataset of retrospective observations—

that is, written recollections of violent events I witnessed prior to my fieldwork.5

Interaction-Level Dataset.

Reaching a grounded definition of a “fight” from the members’ perspective was a

major part of the research process. I accumulated records of 241 situations that

contributed to defining and explaining fights. Rather than use any of the currently

available qualitative data analysis software, I found that a word-processing file could be

formatted for my purposes (using Microsoft Word 1997). For each case in my dataset I

created an auto-numbered record and a descriptive title. As I made coding decisions I

divided the numbered list into “fights,” “near-fights,” and “other/non-fight violence.”

Within those categories I also made sub-divisions and identified themes within the larger

categories, such as “meeting in showdowns” within “fights” or “looking for trouble”

before achieving a full-blown “fight.” For each case I also included several fields for

documenting the number of participants; the number of perspectives recorded and the

method I used to obtain them (retrospective observation, fieldnote observation, tape-

recorded interview, fieldnote interview/conversation); the name of the original computer

file in which the data was recorded; the account date(s); and any background details or

notes that I used, for example, to cross-reference with other related cases or to highlight

5 To increase the sample’s diversity, I included five interviews from men who were not from Tucson or otherwise acquainted with the rest of the sample. They gave me ten accounts of fights, two of near-fights, and two of non-fight violent acts. Two were former participants in my master’s thesis fieldwork, one living in a Cleveland suburb and the other in a Chicago suburb at the time of the interviews. Two others were former university classmates, at the time living in Madison, Wisconsin and Roanoke, Virginia. The fifth lived at a board-and-care facility in my Los Angeles neighborhood. He claimed to be a former gang-banger on parole following six years of incarceration.

25

important themes. Within each record I gave sequential letters to different accounts and

began the entry with the source’s pseudonym. Figure 2.1 (below) represents how the

dataset appeared to me as I used it. The left frame is a list of cases, divided by category

and subcategory codes, to which I could quickly scroll and jump by clicking on their title.

The right frame shows part of one case.

I coded 121 stretches of interaction as “fights.” When there were multiple

exchanges of fighting and numerous fighters in the same continuous situation, I counted

it as a single case of “group fighting.” Approximately 44 of the 121 (36%) fights were

group fights, involving between three and dozens of mutual combatants. Taking account

of the multiple combatants involved, on average slightly more than half of any single

person’s reported fights were group fights (about 52%; see Table 2.3). I categorized

another 50 interactions as “near-fights.” The near-fights proceeded part way through the

process of fighting (especially disputing) but ended without violence. I coded a total of

86 as “non-fight violent interactions”—that is, physical violence other than fighting.

They included several cases of family violence and robberies, including both victim and

attacker perspectives.

An important aspect of my coding scheme was its flexibility. Since the meaning

of a situation is always contingent on what is happening now, I did not assume that a

single label (such as “fight”) should apply to the whole situation from “start” to “end.” I

allowed my coding decisions to reflect the changing meaning of the situation over time,

privileging the present moment and the members’ actions over the end-result. As I

explain, many of the fights I documented (21 of 121, or 16%) turned into other violence,

26

particularly “jumpings” (i.e. group beatings) or shootings. By emphasizing this point I

draw attention to how fights emerge from routine forms of social interaction, how they do

or do not transform into other forms of violence, and how the people involved resume

“ordinary” modes of interaction.

Figure 2.1: Image of Dataset Word Processing Document.

Cases of near-fights and non-fight violence—whether they began as fights or

otherwise—were methodologically indispensable for comparatively discovering the

causal conditions for achieving full-blown fights, halting the process before violence

begins, and making transformations between forms of violence. On Christmas night

1999, a few days into fieldwork, there was an early, instructive instance (see Figures 2.2

and 2.3, below). I had been play-fighting with Justin and his little brother Joe in

someone’s front yard at a get-together. Joe went inside of the house for a few minutes

27

and then, without warning, ran back out and violently jumped on my back, driving me

headfirst into the ground and snapping my right forearm at the middle.

Figure 2.2: Curtis, Before Surgery (December 26, 1999).

At first, in the days that followed, it was unclear to me exactly what to call this

incident. Was it a play-fighting accident, an unprovoked aggressive attack, or something

else? A few minutes after it happened, with the tape-recorder running, Justin tried to take

the blame, claiming he had accidentally tackled me. Witnesses, other sample members,

medical professionals, and a police officer (I refused to name the “suspect”) treated it as

an assault-style attack. Within a few days Joe called to apologize, so I held no grudge (or

not much of one anyway).

I found myself wishing that this had been a “fight” so that I wouldn’t have to be

Joe’s “victim,” but as everyone reiterated, and as I knew in the back of my mind, I could

not reasonably call it a fight if I had not retaliated or even seen my attacker coming.

28

Although costly as a fieldwork strategy, the incident gave me an invaluable lesson on the

cultural meaning, interactional processes, and normative consequences of fighting as a

specific type of violence (see especially Chapter 5).

Figure 2.3: Curtis, Back in the Orange

“Ethnography Vest” (December 27, 1999).6

To be sure, the sample members’ violence was usually less harmful and less

severe than the kinds of youth violence that usually draw public or academic attention.

They usually fought unarmed and inflicted or suffered only minor injuries, if any at all.

Ability and past experience at fighting in particular—not other kinds of violence—were

central to how they defined their own and their peers’ identities. Yet, as I explain in

Chapter 5, there were occasional events that resulted in serious suffering.

6 An indispensable piece of equipment, with pockets for tape-recorder, batteries, tapes, notebook, and pen.

29

I gathered many more interview accounts than direct observations of violent

events. I directly observed 21 of the 121 cases of fighting, 18 before beginning fieldwork

and 3 after. When a case was limited to interview data, I counted it in the interaction-

level dataset only if it included an account of first-hand, active participation and details

about how the event unfolded sequentially.

I recorded the 18 prior cases of fight interactions in a set of retrospective

observations which I created in October 1999 as a sort of pilot project before starting the

Tucson fieldwork. To do this I wrote up details of all the violent interactions I could

recall directly witnessing during the period beginning when I was a high school freshman

and ending when I started graduate school (September 1992 - September 1999). The data

quality varied with the time since the event and my perspective in the situation. Of my

original 38 retrospective observations I later dropped 13 for lack of detail. Of the

remaining 25, I coded 4 as near-fights and 3 as violence other than fighting.

I rely more heavily on interview accounts than direct observations for two main

reasons. First, during fieldwork outings I tried to help break up or head off a number of

fights that I might have otherwise witnessed. Second, interview accounts tended to be of

higher quality than observations for practical, situational reasons. When fights happened

it could be quite difficult for me to keep sustained track of anyone’s participation other

than my own. At times I felt compelled to devote all my energy to restraining combatants

or making sure I was not drawn in myself. Further, most of the time there was either a

crowd partly blocking my view, the fight was well underway before I realized it had

begun, or the participants moved around so frantically that I could not catch any more

30

than glimpses of action. I could not count many of these cases in the final interaction-

level dataset for lack of detail. In this way my own personal experience casts doubt on the

ability of witnesses alone to provide high-quality raw data for this kind of interactional

analysis (Prus [1978] came to the same conclusion after working with a research team to

collect similar data).

My interview procedures presumed a general investigative framework inspired

both by the methodological approaches of interactionist sociology (Becker 1963; Blumer

1969; Emerson et al. 1995; Goffman 1967; Katz 2001a; Weiss 1994) and the substantive

and theoretical claims in the sociology of conflict, violence, and crime (especially Collins

2008; Emerson & Messinger 1977; Katz 1988; Luckenbill 1977). In particular, based on

these sociological perspectives, I expected to find that the outcomes of situations would

be explained at least partly by variation in how the situations unfolded in interaction.

Evaluations of my data’s validity and practical value will rest largely on the

credibility of interview accounts. The greatest limitation is that interview accounts are,

most directly, evidence of the members’ storytelling practices, linguistic codes, and

cultural interpretations of fighting (see Labov 1982; Morrill et al. 2000; Schegloff 1987).

To improve the quality of the data, I gathered multiple accounts of many events from

different actors who were present—including “teammates,” opponents, and audience

members—both to corroborate details and to document how they collectively constructed

fights. The sample members themselves took similar steps to check out each other’s

credibility. They were quick to discredit claims they thought were embellished,

discouraging outright deception. Interviewees knew that in many cases I had either

31

already spoken to or would later speak to people who had witnessed the same events they

recounted, knowledge that provided a disincentive to deceive. However, I did collect

several accounts that I did not find entirely credible. In response I tried to develop a sense

of which interviewees were the least credible and under which circumstances, and then to

steer around such situations. When I thought an account was particularly suspect I

analyzed it only as an instance of interaction between the interviewee and myself rather

than as a factual account of prior events.

I used particular kinds of interview questions to manage the data’s various sources

of vulnerability.7 I asked for detailed, step-by-step descriptions of fights and for

explanations of how interviewees knew what happened. For instance, I asked, “How did

you know what was happening?” (Case #101) and “What was the first thing you saw?”

(Cases #4 and #14). When they resisted providing details I usually dropped the line of

questioning rather than pressure them to answer insincerely. I also disrupted the usual

format of informal fight stories by focusing on the kinds of details that ordinary listeners

disregard and by disregarding the kinds of explanations that ordinary listeners encourage.

I “triangulated” to increase my confidence in the data, comparing my own recollections,

observations, interviews from multiple perspectives, and published data from other

sources (see Webb et al. 1966).

I must emphasize that I did not try to collect a census or a representative sample

of all violent experiences. Instead, I used the logic of sampling the most qualitatively

7 Namely that: interviewees would present themselves inconsistently with how fights unfolded, later storytelling and conversation would impose an artificial structure, and obstacles like intoxication or head injuries would limit their recollections. (See also Weiss 1994.)

32

diverse range of cases possible (see Glaser & Straus 1967). Although some kinds of

stigmatized events are likely numerically underrepresented (e.g. sexual assault or attacks

against friends and intimates), it is unlikely that I would have been completely ignorant

of any major varieties of violent phenomena experienced by the sample members.

Therefore quantitative inferences would be far less reliable than the qualitative inferences

I make. The same principle applies to “external validity,” or “generalizability”. The

distributions of violent acts will vary widely across settings but the range will be roughly

similar. For instance, I recorded a few cases each of robbery, ritualized gang challenges,

domestic beatings, and shootings.8 Exceptions are mutual gun combat and mutual knife

fights, of which I heard rumors but recorded no data.

Career-Level Data.

By comparatively analyzing regularities and variations in many individuals’

biographies, I developed and refined hypotheses about changing career patterns and ways

of fighting (Chapters 4, 6, and 10). In the language of methodologists, my hypotheses are

“inductive” or “exploratory” rather than “deductive” or “confirmatory.” Tables 2.2 and

2.3 (below) summarize descriptive counts on several measures of participation violence

and socioeconomic status for the core sample members.9

8 At the fringe of the group one woman was murdered by criminal defendants trying to prevent her from testifying at their murder trial, though I gathered no data on this case except for news reports and gossip. I also heard about one or two events I might have coded as sexual assaults with better evidence, as well as a few police beatings. 9 A note on missing data: Some of the 14 variables summarized in Tables 2.2 and 2.3 sum to less than 35. In the 490-cell data matrix (35 sample members * 14 variables) summarized in the tables there are a total of 25 cells with missing data (5%). Of the 35 core sample members 15 had at least one missing value, with a

33

Table 2.2: Summary Characteristics of “Core Sample”—

Education & Parent Status. Highest Status

Parental Occupation

Unskilled/ Other

Working-Class/ Lower-White

Collar

Business Owner

Professional

2/26 (8%)10 11/26 (42%) 3/26 (12%) 10/26 (38%) High School

Outcome Dropout Alternative/GED Regular Graduate

11/27 (41%) 2/27 (7%) 14/27 (52%) Attended Any Four-Year

College? No Yes

15/31 (48%) 16/31 (52%)

Although I did not record all of their birthdates, I believe all of them to have been

born between 1976 and 1980, meaning they were aged eighteen to twenty-eight during

my research. In order to include some diversity in the sample I gathered data on at least

four sample members who claimed to have never been in a fight (three male and one

female), and at least seven others who never fought after exiting high school (see Table

2.3 and Chapters 4 and 6).

Despite the ambiguities of social status imposed by contemporary American

youth culture, as a whole they were visibly financially better off than most of their peers

elsewhere in the city. When the core group members were teenagers they lived in one of

mean of 0.43 and a maximum of 3 missing values. For 10 of the 14 variables I was able to assign a value for every core sample member. The 4 variables with missing values were “fighting before high school ended” (4/35 missing), “attended four-year college” (4), “high school outcome” (8), and “highest status parental occupation” (9). 10 One of the two “unskilled” parents was the divorced father and primary caretaker of the sample member. He was reputed to be a career drug dealer, successful enough to live a conspicuously affluent lifestyle, routinely taking his son and friends out to fashionable restaurants and ordering trendy labels of Champagne and furnishing his home with expensive appliances and other durable goods. The other was an unskilled worker in the traditional sense, a single mother who held various low-wage service jobs and lived paycheck to paycheck.

34

the most highly regarded school districts in Southern Arizona, one with a pretentious

reputation according to many Tucsonans. Many of their parents owned houses that were

considered lavish by Tucson standards. About 38% of their parents had professional

careers (10/26 were physicians, dentists, lawyers, engineers; See Table 2.2). A few

parents owned blue-collar businesses (e.g. landscaping, construction) and others could be

considered successful members of the working class or lower-middle-class (e.g. police

dispatcher, realtors).

Some would occasionally describe themselves in ethnic terms—usually as Jewish

or Irish—but most considered themselves “just white,”11 as Steve responded when I

directly asked him whether he considered himself a member of any ethnic group.12 At

least 5 of the core sample members defined themselves as having Latino heritage (1 of

whom also claimed Native American heritage), 1 Asian Indian, and 2 Middle-Eastern.13

During high school almost all of them held low-paying part-time jobs. After high school

most of them worked on and off at better-paying blue- or white-collar jobs. Some led

low-level criminal lifestyles (e.g. drug dealers and bookies). Approximately 41% (11/27)

dropped out of high school without receiving a diploma. Even so, about half of them

11 Fieldnote. 12 In about the eighth grade several of them started a gang called “The Irish Hops” in which “you had to be at least fifty percent Irish,” but, as Powel laughed, “some people lied. Said they were! … Like, your best friend, ‘You’re not allowed in ‘cause you’re not Irish.’ So everyone lied, basically…” The gang beat up some random adolescents, showed off their parents’ guns at school, and stole CDs and liquor. They got arrested together and disbanded quickly, resuming their informal pattern of troublemaking. As I explain in Chapter 3, they briefly dabbled in gangs a few other times, though never again using race/ethnicity as a criterion for exclusion. 13 Among the total sample of 86, at least 1 non-Tucson and 7 Tucson sample members were Latino, and 1 non-Tucsonan and 3 Tucsonans had Asian heritage.

35

(16/31) attended a four-year college. As I explain in Chapter 6, a number of those who

dropped out managed to graduate from the University of Arizona by first working their

way through two-year community colleges that did not require high school diplomas for

enrollment.14

Table 2.3: Summary Characteristics of “Core Sample”—Violence & Troubles. 15

Gender

Male Female 29/35 (83%) 6/35 (17%)

Ever Fought (by sex)?

Yes No Yes No 26/29 (90%) 3/29 (10%) 5/6 (83%) 1/6 (17%)

Total Reported Fights

Total (≥) Mean (≥) Median (≥) Range 116 3.31 2 0-14

One-on-One Fights 55 1.57 1 0-6 Group Fights 61 1.74 1 0-10 Other Violent Acts 32 0.91 0 0-5

Career Fighting: Before * After Exiting High School

After High

School

During High School Yes No Total

Yes 21 1 22 (71%) No 6 3 9 (29%)

Total 27 (87%) 4 (13%) 31 (100%) Selected Personal Troubles

Yes (≥) No (≤) Ever Used Weapon? 9/35 (26%) 26/35 (74%)

Injury Required Medical? 11/35 (31%) 24/35 (69%) Injured Someone Else? 10/35 (29%) 25/35 (71%)

Ever Arrested? 29/35 (83%) 6/35 (17%)

14 I checked out various biographical details. As noted at points in the text, I discovered some details about important events reported in local news media. I looked up one of Steve’s co-authored scientific articles and found Jerry’s name on the masthead of an Ivy League law review at the library. I read Rick’s “outstanding” military service evaluation and spoke to the chief of his division. I used the Arizona Medical Board’s online credential utility to verify that Rick and Jerry’s fathers were practicing physicians. Beyond checking records, I also accompanied members to events like Karen’s university graduation ceremony. 15 As I explain below, I use equal-or-greater/lesser-than symbols for items which I did not attempt to measure exhaustively or to sample probabilistically.

36

The range of the members’ personal styles and occupations was self-consciously

eclectic. During late youth they proudly saw themselves as a motley crew of hip and

tough but sometimes square social types, including current and former college students,

musicians, gang-bangers, “taggers” (graffiti writers), and skinheads (the anti-racist kind

of skinheads who fight against the neo-Nazi kind).

My data document a mean of 3.31 for these 35 sample members, although this

number necessarily indicates a lower limit since I did not document all of their fights.

Though I recorded them fighting 116 times, these are not all different fights, since many

of them fought together, either in the same group fights or as one-on-one opponents. I

coded 78% of their total (116/148) violent actions as “fights” (counting only cases of

actively using violence, excluding cases of passive victimization).

Several of the other figures in Table 2.3 were necessarily lower limits—the

proportions who ever: were injured badly enough to need medical attention; injured

someone else that badly (based on the apparent severity of injuries); attacked someone

with a weapon; and were arrested. Although there was evidence16 that 11/35 (31%) had

received medical attention and 10/35 (29%) had injured someone else, the two groups

overlapped only partially. I coded 6 positively for both sustaining and inflicting injuries

that would typically require medical attention, 5 for having injured someone but not been

injured themselves, and 4 for only having been injured but not having injured someone

else. Notably, at least 83% were arrested at some point in their lives, though rarely for

fighting. The most common arrests were for drinking-related misdemeanors like

16 Either they told me so directly in response to yes/no questions, or it was evident from their descriptions of violent interactions (e.g. of breaking bones, going to hospitals after fights, inflicting traumatic injuries).

37

“disorderly conduct,” “criminal damage of private property,” “driving while intoxicated,”

and “minor in possession of alcohol” (often in groups and while partying, just like

fighting), but also including several more serious charges like “domestic battery,”

“aggravated assault,” “money laundering,” and “discharging a firearm in the direction of

an occupied residential structure” (within a few years of completing fieldwork one was

also arrested for homicide). These numbers should be read only as describing my dataset

on the present sample rather than generalizing to any specifiable population. Some

figures are vulnerable to bias since I may have been more likely to recognize evidence of

“true positives” than to ferret out “true negatives.”

A Note on Quotations

The credibility of ethnography rests largely on how the words of subjects are

recorded by fieldworkers and presented in published texts, so the use of quotation marks

has become a topic of concern within the field. Historically, ethnographers in

anthropology and sociology frequently relied on their fieldnote journals as the standard

recording device and, at times, have even relied entirely on the travelogues of untrained

visitors to exotic lands (Emerson 1983: 2-4). More recently, now that portable tape-

recorders have become cheap and accessible, some experts in the field have criticized

loose practices of quoting research subjects. Some only use quotation marks when the

conversation has been tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim (see Duneier 1999: 339-

340). Others advise using direct quotes only when key phrases were jotted down

immediately after they were said and using only indirect quotation when words were

38

documented later in fieldnotes (see Emerson et al. 1995: 51). Nonetheless, it is still

standard practice among many fieldworkers to use quotation marks very casually and

without comment, often leaving readers without a sense of how the data were collected.17

In what follows I have taken a strategy less strict than advised by Duneier (1999)

or Emerson et al. (1995), but I have tried to write in a similar spirit. At once I both

acknowledge the limitations of fieldnotes but also recognize that the conversations

documented in fieldnotes provide a powerful tool for conveying the quality of life in a

social setting. I often heard people say things in specific ways that were deeply revealing

of how they understood the world but could not have easily tape-recorded them. Thus I

was left with the dilemma of how to represent imperfect notes in the final text.18

My solution is this: When I use quotation marks, unless I indicate otherwise, the

words are excerpted from the transcript of a tape-recording. Whenever I directly quote

talk that I did not tape-record, I indicate in the text what the source was (usually dated

fieldnotes but on a few occasions memory). Moreover, I have tried to limit this form of

quotation as much as possible by paraphrasing my fieldnotes and quoting indirectly. Thus

the reader should never wonder whether any quote is based on a recording or memory,

and will have the opportunity to judge its credibility for him or herself.

17 This is also common in much journalism and other nonfiction writing. 18 Much of my data take the form of transcripts of tape-recorded interviews. But much of it also takes the form of fieldnotes, most of which contain both directly and indirectly quoted stretches of conversation. Many times, especially during unrecorded interviews, I furiously jotted down phrases and quotes to be elaborated hours or days later in full fieldnotes. But much of the time I did not take jottings, especially when the occasion was an hours-long afternoon or night out.

39

Chapter 3. Cultures of Youth Violence

When Americans imagine youth violence they rarely think of neighborhoods like

Tucson’s North Side. In the contemporary American imagination the potent icon of The

Ghetto provides both spatial and moral boundaries for locating the presumably

uncivilized forces that give rise to violence (see Wacquant 1997; Bourdieu 1999). The

Ghetto’s symbolism serves a remarkable range of political, academic, and rhetorical

purposes in American culture. From an empirical perspective, however, it is an

unsatisfying device for demarcating either the territory or the source of violence.

There are indeed strong quantitative associations between some kinds of violence

(most notably homicide and robbery) and measures such as race, neighborhood, poverty,

level of education, and employment. According to the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide

Reports, the risks for homicide arrest and victimization have been 6-10 times higher for

black than white youth over the past 30 years (Blumstein et al. 2000). Family violence,

whether the measure is victim surveys or police reports, also shows a consistent

association with poverty and unemployment (Gelles & Strauss 1988). Certain styles of

violence appear to be distinctive to the cultures and careers of poor and minority youth,

particularly drive-by shootings, other gang violence, and ostensibly financially-motivated

violent acts, such as robbery and drug-related violence (see Decker & Van Winkle 1996;

Garot 2007; Hutson et al. 1994; Levitt & Venkatesh 2000; Sanders 1994; Sullivan 1989).

However, the poor have never been the sole provenance of interpersonal violence

in any place nor at any historical moment.

40

A fairly new but growing body of survey research is remarkable for what it does

not find. In stark contrast to popular perceptions, researchers find only small differences

between the proportions of youth who report fighting, hitting, or bullying across racial,

class, and geographic boundaries. In recent years about one third of high school students

have reported being in a fight and up to one half of male adolescents have reported some

violence during the past year (Centers for Disease Control 2004; Cheng et al. 2003;

Espelage et al. 2003; Paschall et al. 1996; Saner & Ellickson 1996). The survey research

is limited by sample selection problems—often focusing on students to the exclusion of

dropouts—and definitional problems due to the inherent ambiguity of non-lethal

violence.19 Proportions tell us next-to-nothing about the frequency and severity of these

violent acts, but the evidence should make us question the prevailing attitude that non-

minority, non-poor youth have no substantial experience with violence.

Though physical fighting receives little attention relative to more sensational

forms of youth violence—such as rampage school shootings or gang violence—its social

costs are considerable. It may be the most common form of interpersonal violence among

American youth.20 Medical professionals and public health researchers widely recognize

that “fight-related injuries among youths...constitute a major public health problem” and

19 It is quite possible, for instance, that poor youth “set the bar higher” for applying the labels “fight” or “violence.” Does a rough play fight count? What if it gets out of hand and turns serious, but no one is hurt? Is there violence or a fight if one party shoves, but never strikes, another? Different people may answer differently, a fact often considered a hindrance to survey researchers, but one I consider worth investigating. (Durkheim [1895/1966] used this phenomenon to illustrate one of the earliest statements on Rules of Sociological Method.) 20 A World Health Organization survey suggests the same is probably true elsewhere in the world (Smith-Khuri et al. 2004). Other “minor” violent acts such as bullying and sibling violence are largely unmeasured, though likely widespread (but see Straus & Gelles 1990).

41

are a predictor of more serious violence in the future (Borowsky & Ireland 2004; Elliot

1994; see also Centers for Disease Control 2004).

Nonetheless, many social scientists dismiss fighting as unimportant. The

following statement expresses the typical attitude toward fights within sociology:

“Violence, other than simple fighting, is relatively infrequent ...” (Hagan & Foster 2001:

879; italics mine). Oftentimes, researchers specifically exclude fights from research on

youth violence. There may be good arguments for doing so—for example, that fighting is

a relatively weak indicator of involvement in serious violent crime. In any case, one

consequence is that, although fighting is certainly widespread and consequential, little

academic research has documented the details of how fights happen, much less how the

fights of non-poor, non-minority youths happen.

A number of academic studies have, however, described physical fighting while

addressing related topics, including violent situations more generally, inner-city youth

street gangs, and other youth subcultures (Anderson 1999; Collins 2008; Farrington et al.

1982; Garot 2007; Horowitz & Schwartz 1974; Jones 2004; Labov 1982; Marsh et al.

1978; Morrill et al. 2000; Polk 1999; Prus 1978; Sanders 1994; Short & Strodtbeck 1968;

Toch 1969; Tomsen 1997; Winlow 2001; Winlow & Hall 2006). Each of these studies

has contributed something to what I have written, especially to Chapters 5 and 9. It is

evident that the meaning of fighting varies across different audiences, life-course stages,

and institutional contexts. Different fighting groups may make sense of their violence

through somewhat different lenses, each incorporating fighting as an element in broader

narratives of group membership and personal identity. Yet, although the styles and

42

symbols vary, fieldwork studies support several generalizations. Diverse youth cultures

appear to view fighting as: a symbol of prestige, toughness, and group solidarity; a basis

for narratively constructing one’s biography through storytelling; and an exciting form of

deviant “action” (in Goffman’s [1967] sense of the word). Collectively, this research

conveys the impression that when young people fight, they are trying to build reputations,

establish solidarity, or pursue thrills at least as often as they are trying to “manage”

conflicts or exert social control (cf. Black 1983, 1984; Cooney 1998).

THE DOUBLE-MYSTERY OF YOUTH VIOLENCE

The complicated empirical distribution of violence in America is doubly

mysterious. First, how have experts and popular culture been able to ignore violence

outside of impoverished contexts? Second, if the causes of violence cannot be found in

poverty alone, then where else should we look?

The answer to the first question must have a cultural, symbolic dimension. In

recent decades American experts and popular culture have been telling an overarching

narrative. Suffering, deviance, and disorder are virtually exclusive to the one type of

community most visibly marginalized by mainstream culture and institutions: the racially

segregated, impoverished, inner city ghetto (see e.g. Wilson 1987). In the extreme,

contemporary authors sometimes argue that the causes of all violent acts are rooted in

economic relations (Sanchez-Jankowski 1995).

During the first half of the twentieth century the tale was much different. Cultural

anxieties focused on threats to the old Protestant, middle-class, small-town, Midwestern

43

way of life (see Mills 1943). Urban ethnic groups that Americans now consider “white”

(although not necessarily then)—Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, for

instance—were then perceived to be as threatening as African Americans and Latinos are

today (see Whyte 1943; Thrasher 1927). The classic generations of “Chicago School”

sociologists depicted deviance as the result of urbanization, immigration, and community

disorder rather than a direct consequence of poverty (see Bulmer 1984; Faris 1967; Fine

1995). They wrote about a vibrant diversity of urban, youthful cultures: street gangs and

“play groups” (Thrasher 1927), pool hustlers (Polsky 1967), black jazz musicians

(Becker 1951), and lonely male immigrants in dance halls (Cressey 1932). There was

also room in academia and popular culture for stories of anomie and hardship among the

wealthier classes, such as Winick’s (1961) study of physician narcotic addicts and

Orwell’s (1947) famous tale of English boarding-school horrors.

Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, a backlash criticized those who attributed deviance

or violence to cultural pathology (see e.g. Lewis 1966; Rainwater 1966; Wolfgang &

Feracutti 1967). Sociological opinion began turning against the Chicago-style writers.

They were criticized for “exoticizing” deviants and ignoring the economic bases of their

outsider statuses (see Gouldner 1968). The focus of sociologists became increasingly

materialistic.

In recent decades, sociologists and Americans more generally have come to view

social problems and poverty as virtually synonymous. Notably, recent generations of

experts grew up between the 1950s and 1970s, many of them hoping in their youth to

correct the injustices of stratification, only to be disheartened by the large-scale failure to

44

ameliorate racial and class disparities. The current narrative, I would argue, reflects the

cultural anxieties of an affluent society that includes a prominent segment of

socioeconomic and racial outsiders who are no longer legally disenfranchised but still

live visibly disadvantaged lives (see also Katz & Jackson-Jacobs 2004). Importantly, the

same narrative is appealing to both those who believe that life rewards the deserving with

comfort (see e.g. Murray & Herrnstein 1994) and those who argue that the poor are

unjust victims of an arbitrary status system (see e.g. Sanchez-Jankowski 1991, 1995;

Wacquant 1997). Either way, the moral impulse is to view any kind of hardship or social

trouble as symbolic of the distinction between American affluence and poverty.

Ironically, sociologists who are earnestly motivated by humanitarian concerns

may have further stigmatized poor, urban, nonwhite Americans. For instance, by

depicting only the struggles of minority, “ghetto” drug users, they have failed to

document the lives of the American drug-using majority, which has always been white

(see also Jackson-Jacobs 2001, 2004). The narrative of hardship-reflecting-status-

distinctions has been so compelling that American culture has almost completely ignored

the tremendous diversity of troubles and traumas of its non-poor members. They do not

fit the story.

Sociologists in particular have been relying for decades on an exaggerated image

of middle-class suburban life as idyllic and serene, although they have rarely made it

explicit (but see Baumgartner’s [1989] ethnographic study, focusing on adult conflict—or

non-conflict, as the case may be). The two images of suburban and ghetto life are poles

that imply one another, symbolically and methodologically. One classic research formula

45

has been to argue that poverty causes crime based only on studies of the poor.21 In order

to make sense, such research must invoke the contrast between poor communities and

imagined nonviolent, middle-class communities.22 By focusing on non-lethal violence in

an affluent community I have tried not only to illuminate the social world I studied but

also to provide a missing point of comparative insight into the entire range of violent acts,

actors, and communities.

Sociology has produced periodic challenges to the presumed universality of the

association between economic status and crime or violence (see Kleck 1982; Nye et al.

1958; Tittle 1978). Nonetheless, I expect many readers to be surprised by my sample

members’ demographic characteristics. The initial impulse may be to assume that there is

something extraordinary about them and to conclude that their violence requires an

entirely different explanation from violence in more familiar contexts. I encourage

restraining this impulse and instead developing an explanation by examining available

evidence. As I argue in the following paragraphs, the lives of affluent and poor youth

differ in important ways, but they are less foreign to one another than many people

believe.

Historical and Local Contexts

I return several times to two historical developments since the 1960s: trends in

American youth cultural styles and the emergence of “late youth” as a life-course stage. 21 A more imaginative and methodologically sound solution is to compare multiple impoverished samples in the same study, as did Sullivan (1989) in his study of youth criminality in New York City. 22 More specifically, the kind of communities familiar to academic readers in their daily lives, which are unlikely to be representative of all affluent or middle-class lives and communities.

46

As journalists and other popular culture figures have pointed out lately, these changes are

producing youth cultures whose relationship styles and status symbols are largely

unrecognizable by the standards of previous generations (e.g. Grossman 2005; Korem

1994; Watters 2003; Wolfe 2004).

Perversely, the violent culture of the group I studied can be interpreted as the

legacy of 1960s and 1970s youth cultures, civil rights reforms, and peace movements.

The meaning of youthful deviance in America has changed over the past few decades.

Since the 1960s suburban, white, and middle-class American youth cultures have self-

consciously drawn inspiration from traditionally lower-class tastes. Starting with “beat”

and “hippie” styles, it has become fashionable for middle-class youth to adopt styles they

regard as symbolically transcending rigid class distinctions (see also Collins 2008; Katz

1988). While “slumming” had been a familiar activity for decades (at least), it now

became a lifestyle. Post-1960s young, hip suburban middle-class types have often lived

bohemian lifestyles and dabbled in street- and drug-oriented cultures, at least for brief

periods in their lives.

Members of my sample enjoyed the thrill of crossing class lines and returning to

their conventional pursuits with streetwise experiences. They were well aware of the

traditional association of violence and other deviance with lower-status cultures, and

viewed their own culture as a rejection of adult pretensions. It is common to dismiss such

suburban youth cultures as “wannabes emulating the styles of poor youth.” That

interpretation is not necessarily wrong, but it does miss an important point. Poor youth

also emulate the styles of poor youth. For instance, gang-bangers in St. Louis and San

47

Diego told researchers that they got the idea to mimic and name themselves after Los

Angeles-area Crips and Bloods after watching the 1988 movie Colors (Decker & van

Winkle 1996; Sanders 1994). Youth deviance almost always involves stylistic emulation

in the two senses that forms of deviance themselves go in and out of fashion and that

different forms of deviance are actually elements of subcultural style (see e.g. K. J. Fox

1987; Gaines 1992; Gladwell 2000; Muehlbauer & Dodder 1983; Newman 2004;

Thompson 1966).

What most obviously distinguishes my sample members from more serious

“dangerous violent criminals” (Athens 1992) and their poor, minority peers is their level

of commitment. As members of the contemporary leisure class they had the resources to

sustain long-term identities as “dabblers” in illicit street action even as they maintained

simultaneous commitments to conventional pursuits. Only a few members of my sample

ever became deeply involved in violent or criminal lifestyles. Most of their violence was

specialized and tended to be casual, even playful. They looked down on and usually

refrained from beating romantic partners, attacking unwilling victims, or sustaining group

vendettas as youth gang-bangers do. As I pointed out in a previous study of crack-cocaine

users, affluent “sneaky dabblers” have an easier time than impoverished users getting out

of trouble when it does happen (Jackson-Jacobs 2004). The same goes for violent actors.

The changing course of aging has also helped make dabbler lifestyles practical.

Historical, economic, and demographic trends in affluent societies over recent decades

have resulted in a lengthening of the transition to adulthood (for reviews see Furstenberg

2000; Shanahan 2000; see also the The Annals Special Issue: “Early Adulthood in Cross-

48

National Perspective” [Furstenberg et al., eds. 2002]). Some experts recognize a new life-

course phase starting after adolescence and lasting until at least one’s late twenties. It

goes by different names, but I refer to this period as “late youth.” Compared to their

parents’ generation, those growing up in recent decades have been slower to start families

and occupational careers and, on average, they have stayed in school and maintained their

youthful friendship circles for several additional years.

These circumstances afforded the young fighters in my sample the chance to

sustain their community of adolescent friendships during a period of prolonged youth.

They hedged their commitments to the disciplined, adult-oriented spheres of family,

work, and financial responsibilities on the one hand, and to the playful, youth-oriented

spheres of friendship, partying, and “action” on the other.

Moreover, this was Tucson—the New West, a place where many of the old

conventions of East Coast society were beyond the local culture’s consciousness. Tucson,

like other Western communities, has a casual atmosphere (see also Wolfe 1977). Tucson

does have extremely wealthy residents, but the youth I knew showed little awareness that

any local highbrow elite, in the traditional sense, existed at all. For instance, concepts like

“old money” might have been familiar to their parents,23 but the only time I ever heard

one of the Tucson friends use the phrase was after he had moved to the East Coast, and

then only to mock the pretensions of his Ivy League classmates.

Tucson has always lacked the one symbol of class stratification, urban fear, and

racial stigma that figures most prominently in affluent white culture elsewhere: the

23 Most parents had moved to Tucson from the Midwest, the South, or from the Eastern United States.

49

impoverished black ghetto. There are no 90-100% black census tracts or high-rise

housing projects as in, say, Chicago (Massey & Denton 1993; Venkatesh 2000). Tucson

does indeed have neighborhoods segregated along racial lines, but their boundaries are

newer and more permeable than in older cities.

According to the 2000 census, the population of Pima County was 61.5% non-

Latino white (hereafter “white”) and 29.3% Latino.24 It was only 3% black. Two rough

indicators give a sense of local segregation patterns (excluding the Indian reservation to

the west): the extremes of disproportionately white and disproportionately nonwhite

neighborhoods. In 2000 there were some census tracts whose populations were up to

96.8% white, but only about 5.4% of the population lived in tracts that were more than

90% white (45,265/830,866). There were no tracts less than 4.3% white, and only about

3.7% of the population lived in tracts that were less than 10% white (31,131/830,866).

While the pattern of racial segregation by neighborhood is clear to everyone, it is quite

moderate compared to the extreme segregation of Midwestern and Eastern cities, where

some neighborhoods approach 100% racial homogeneity. In Tucson, it is difficult to find

neighborhoods where there aren’t at least some Latinos and at least some white people

living and visibly passing time in public places.

As I explain in Chapter 6, my sample members were more attracted to than scared

of or hostile to poor minority neighborhoods. It may well be that middle-class youth from

the white suburbs of other medium-sized cities like St. Louis or Miami, where

24 The boundaries between “Latino” and “white” are porous, particularly in the Southwest. For instance, many people with one Latino and one white parent call themselves, and are accepted by others as, “white” in some contexts and “Latino” in others.

50

segregation is older and more extensive, have fewer ambitions to rival the elite violent

image of youth from notorious local ghettos like East St. Louis or Liberty City.

Institutional Location

The widespread expansion of leisure and affluence in the United States since the

mid-twentieth century has clearly provided disproportionate freedoms to wealthier youth

like those I describe. Even so, poor and non-poor American youth do not live on opposite

sides of the universe. On the one hand, poor, minority, inner city youth suffer hardships

and humiliations that most of my sample members were spared most of the time. On the

other hand, the survey research tells us that violence is anything but alien to youth in

higher-income communities. The social situations of nearly all American youth share

some similarities, such as subordination to and institutionalization by adults, and social

competition and physical conflict with other youth (see also Newman 2004). Many of the

young men I describe had been intimately familiar with violence since a young age. They

were not unique among economically comfortable American youth in having been beaten

by their fathers and older brothers, terrorized by neighborhood children, or bullied by

grade-school classmates.

Public school students, regardless of economic status, share several social

conditions in common with residents of inner-city ghettos and certain “total institutions,”

particularly prisons (see Goffman 1971). (See Table 3.1.) In each setting the community

members share numerous dense, involuntary, long-term, face-to-face relationships; have

trouble concealing discrediting information about themselves; frequently lack

51

opportunities to define their identities beyond the local peer community; and are subject

to heightened social control (see also Anderson 1999; Goffman 1963a, 1971; Irwin

1985). Consequently, coercive peer cultures predominate, gossip spreads quickly, and

some members hold a “no future” or “nothing to lose” perspective (see Harris et al.

2002).

TABLE 3.1. Three Types of Institutions that Produce Violent Peer Cultures:

Variations on Five Common Qualities. Institution Qualities

Public Schools Inner City Neighborhoods

Correctional Facilities

Imposed Long-Term, Dense Relationships

Students are grouped by the hundreds or thousands into large, constant cohorts for up to twelve years

Residents live in densely-populated, segregated communities, sometimes for generations

Inmates serve long sentences together, often in overcrowded facilities, up to life

Few Opportunities to Define “Outside” Identity

School dominates daily routines, friendships, and extra-curricular activities

Many residents have little access to mainstream institutions, work

“Total Institutions” rarely allow inmates to leave institutional borders

Inverted Social Control System (subjected to, yet underserved)

Subjected to teacher, administrator control; bullying often tolerated by school staff

Many residents feel that police unfairly persecute them while offering little protection

Inmates are constantly guarded; reluctant to “snitch,” they receive inadequate protection

Lack of Control over Discrediting Information

Rumors and gossip used as tools of bullying, details of personal life cannot be “lived down”

Respect and reputation for vulnerability or ability to defend oneself are widely known

Prison gang affiliation, potential for violence, and past victimization are basis of identity

Coercive Peer Cultures Predominate

Popular and stronger students freely harass, extort, and bully the unpopular and weak

Violent youth culture and adult culture blur; residents view the “streets” as dangerous

Youth culture is extended; forced contact with peers results in extortion, assault, rape

For instance, “rampage school shooters” in affluent communities universally

report suffering repeated bullying and torment at the hands of classmates. They view

violence as the only option to escape what they consider unendurable, eternal humiliation

(Newman 2004). Such daily troubles are experienced in less dramatic form by a much

52

larger segment of institutionalized populations. To illustrate by hyperbole one could ask:

Rich or poor, whose childhood isn’t a long series of humiliations, rituals of domination,

and feelings of powerlessness?

Psychology, Alcohol, and Violence

One of the most dramatic recent trends in academic and cultural thinking on crime

and violence has been the rise of genetics, neuroscience, and biopsychology (see Rose

2000). Ethnographic research may offer little to support or falsify such theories.

However, as genetic and brain sciences become more influential, it is worth reasserting

the continuing value of sociological explanation. Neuroscience may hold the most

powerful tools for explaining some orders of empirical variation, but others remain

beyond its reach. Human action, including violence, is organized along certain

fundamentally sociological dimensions, including institutional, group, and situational

contexts. A fight, my main unit of analysis, is an inherently social act: it requires—it

literally is—communication and collaboration between multiple individuals (see Chapter

9). Since mainstream psychology largely abandoned “subjective” topics (or at least forms

of evidence that could be construed as subjective) long ago, sociology also remains

important for gathering empirical data on the meanings, feelings, and practices of human

behavior. Nonetheless, there are two points of overlap worth mentioning: personality and

alcohol.

Two of the most widely discussed “antisocial” personality types are the impulsive

“low self-control” and psychopathic/sociopathic types (see Block & Block 1980; Buss

53

1966; Farrington et al. 1990; Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990; Megarge 1966; Polakowski

1994; Rose 2000; White et al. 1994; Wilson & Herrnstein 1985; Yablonsky 1963, 1967).

As I explain, my sample members fit the typical image of “risk-takers” and “adolescent-

limited” delinquents, but they did not lead universally violent or “out of control” lives

(see also Moffitt 1993). The evidence suggests that they lacked neither the ability to

control impulses nor to empathize with others. Some of the most violent members

dedicated themselves to “pro-social” pursuits like occupational careers, higher education,

and volunteer work. Personality factors generally fail to explain how individuals

specialize in specific types of violent acts in specific kinds of situations, a topic of

particular focus in my research (i.e. mutual physical fights against same-sex peers in front

of peer audiences in casual settings).

Readers will note that alcohol plays a role in many of the violent events, though

its causal impact is complicated and ambiguous. When the sample members were high

school students many of their fights took place while everyone was sober, but after high

school the majority of fights happened while they were drunk. Various kinds of research,

including controlled experiments and blood tests of arrestees, indicate that alcohol

consumption increases individual propensities for violence (see Martin 1993). It is

probable that without alcohol many of my sample members would have been involved in

considerably less violence, at least after high school. However, they often made plans to

get into fights first, then consumed alcohol, and then enacted violence (see Chapter 7). In

such cases it may be most accurate to view alcohol as one tool for achieving violence. As

twenty-one year old Tim described in an interview, he and his friends considered it a

54

single unit of activity to “get drunk and go fuck with somebody.” They believed that

alcohol facilitated violence and their actions often confirmed this belief—a self-fulfilling

prophecy that subsumes chemical causation (see also McAndrew & Edgerton 1969;

Orcutt 1978). Beyond any direct and interactive chemical effects of alcohol, fights were

also facilitated by the inherently social qualities of drinking lifestyles, such as hanging

out with peers and meeting strangers.

Interaction and Violence

Where else to look for the causes of violence? To demystify non-poor youth

fighting, two good places to look are within the violent situations themselves and across

the changing meanings of violence over time. I conducted fieldwork in the tradition of

naturalistic sociological studies of violent events (see e.g. Athens 1979; Katz 1988;

Luckenbill 1977, 1981; Sanders 1994). I focus on one of the most empirically accessible,

universal causal orders that organize when, where, how, and by whom fights are enacted:

the order of social interaction. The major contribution of the interactionist tradition has

been to discover levels of social organization within the violent events themselves, that

is, at the interaction-level. Much of this dissertation is devoted to the basic task of

documenting how fights happen. My hope is that a descriptive foundation will be useful

in academic, policy, and everyday thinking about fighting and violence.

While the interaction-level analysis explains what the members are trying to

accomplish during a fight, I use a biographical, career-level analysis to explain routine

changes in the patterns and meanings of fighting over time. The young fighters followed

55

the typical age-related trajectories of violent careers over the pivotal changes from

childhood to adulthood (see Hagan & Foster 2001; Ulmer & Spencer 1999; Laub &

Sampson 2003). But to simply call it “aging out” would fail to explain how, why, and

when some but not others began, stopped, or otherwise changed their involvement in

fighting (cf. Hirschi & Gottfredson 1983, 1993).

Approximately 96% (27/28; see Table 2.3 above) of those who ever got into

fights first did so as middle or high school students. They actively sought out fights in

order to claim tough, wild, or defiant identities. After high school many of them persisted

in fighting, although by then they reinterpreted it as a nostalgic reminder and

reaffirmation of their adolescent culture. By their mid-twenties most members had begun

to accept the idea of converting to responsible adulthood, and to lose the spirit of youth

that had previously animated their weekend carousing and brawling.

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS

The chapters alternate between interaction- and career-levels, and proceed

roughly chronologically. In the next chapter I resume where the members’ friendships

with each other and careers in fighting began: “Becoming a Fighter in Adolescence.”

Following that I turn to a chapter of “Notes on the Meaning of Fights” in the most

general terms. As I explain, my sample members understood fighting as a “victimless

crime,” through the metaphor of the “fight-as-athletic contest,” and as an exciting form of

“action.”

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I then proceed to a description of the group’s culture after high school,

“Remaining Open to Fighting in Late Youth.” The typical way to get into fights during

late youth was to go out “Looking for Trouble.” In Chapter 7 I explain that they did this

for three related reasons: to develop solidarity, to build character, and to make good

stories. The seventh chapter recounts a series of events from this period, illustrating the

complicated social roles involved in constructing the fight-occasion and the role of

fighting and storytelling in the group’s sense of solidarity.

Chapter 9 describes how opponents, partisans, and audience members collectively

construct fights in interaction—a generalizable theory of the dynamics of fight-situations.

I explain that there are three elements required to establish a “real” fight over a stretch of

interaction. The opponents must agree to fight as a solution to a character challenge,

transcend their fear of violence, and use specific practices of mutual combat.

I should point out that my focus on fighting is a strategic research decision. As

Chad explained, “My whole life wasn’t fighting although I got into them a lot ‘cause I

was a juvenile delinquent. I mean that’s just kind of normal.” I chose to write about the

group of friends not because they were extraordinary, but because they were quite an

ordinary group, in the sense that nearly every neighborhood and every high school has

one. From their perspective, this should not just be one long action tale about fighting.

Instead, they looked upon these events as a romantic story about friendship and growing

up at their time and place in history. As I explain in the last chapter, fight careers were

open-ended, like their friendships, lasting roughly as long as their youth. Despite fighting

57

it as best they could, their youthful friendships finally succumbed to the pressures of

adult life.

58

Chapter 4. Becoming a Fighter in Adolescence

From time to time there were rumors that the jocks and stoners would meet for a

rumble, just like in the old movies, but it never happened.25 The jocks may have felt the

same way, but the stoners believed they had the upper-hand.

“We thought we were cool ‘cause we beat up jocks,” Chad told me. “We weren’t

letting jocks rule our school. We were changing the whole of the system.” When Chad

intimidated the school’s physically largest jock into crying in front of their classmates, it

was a major coup for the stoners. “You think that you’re fighting for some cause,” he

explained as we sat in his one-bedroom apartment on a bright afternoon in August 2000,

five years after he left high school. It now pained Chad to recall the lifestyle that had

once won him so much popularity. “But what was I doing? I still picked on the nerds. I

still thought people were nerds. I still picked on the weak.”

There are at least two things to explain about people’s careers in fighting: the

difference between fighters and everyone else, and how fighters’ perspectives on and

participation in fighting change over time. To address both I chronologically outline the

typical fight career in my field site. The typical career in fighting can be divided into

three phases: (1) becoming a fighter during adolescence, (2) remaining open to fighting

after high school, and (3) avoiding fights as an adult. I devote one chapter to each.

Careers in fighting are personal, but not solitary, projects. The young people I

describe used fighting to construct their individual biographies but they did so,

necessarily, in collaboration with friends, opponents, and other social actors. Early in

25 “Stoners,” as in “stoned on weed.”

59

their careers the meaning of fighting was inextricably linked to the social order of

adolescence. It was a symbol of both resistance and affiliation. The young fighters viewed

their entire culture as a subversive, grandiose fight against “the whole of the system.” At

the same time, their friendships were based on an intimate form of solidarity. As Chad’s

tone illustrated, by adulthood many came to regret what they had done and who they had

been as adolescents, but they did so only gradually. The end of fighting was very uncertain,

reflecting the ambiguity of contemporary adulthood itself.

CONTINGENCIES OF BECOMING A FIGHTER

The reasons for single fights were different from the reasons for continuing to

fight (see also Becker 1953/1963: Chapter 3; Katz 1988). Many chance factors could lead

an adolescent to his or her “first big fight.” Based on my data there is no clear basis to

differentiate between those who never got into fights and those who got into at least one.

Instead, I ask why some of them became regular fighters: what is the difference between

those who did and did not organize their lives around trying to get into more fights?

Two biographical contingencies distinguish those who became persistent fighters.

First, they aspired to membership in the culture of rebellious students, attracted to their

adolescent deviance. Second, early in adolescence, each of them achieved a gratifying

new social identity through an important fight.

Aspiring to Membership in the Rebellious Crowd.

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Chad, like many of the other sample members, attended North Tucson High

School or “North High” for short. The most striking feature of the adolescent campus

culture was naked, invidious stratification: between the popular and the insignificant; the

good and the bad; the tough and the weak; the jocks, the stoners, the preps, and the nerds.

These distinctions were natural, taken-for-granted features of reality, so there was little or

no shame in openly striving to improve one’s social worth. One personal quality,

however, was important above all others: Popularity. Seventh- and eighth-graders are

usually the most self-conscious about it, sometimes able to precisely rank-order their

classmates’ statuses and say which ones have moved up or down recently. By high school

some adolescents are sophisticated enough to view it with a sense of irony or cynicism,

but for many its importance remains virtually infinite—understandable, given that many

cannot imagine a self-identity beyond the campus culture’s boundaries.

Popularity may be organized differently in different places, but at North High it

seemed to be distributed about evenly between the jocks and the stoners (see Figure 3.1).

The distinction between groups was both stylistic and moral. The jocks presented a clean-

cut, athletic image and maintained a general orientation favorable to conventional

success. The stoners defined themselves as “bad.” They dressed in clothing that repulsed

their parents and teachers (oversized, worn out, dirty) and denounced whatever they

considered symbols of adult authority. Thus, a second, particularly salient feature of the

stoners’ culture was open conflict with adults, especially school staff, but also police

officers, private security guards, and parents. Adults who exercised social control, from

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the stoners’ perspective, were all collaborating as a single, more-or-less coherent group.

The stoners talked often of “the system” and how to rebel against it.

Popular culture tends to depict youth cultures and popularity on campus as

divided along economic class lines. However, few of the students at North High

explicitly viewed wealth as a symbol of status in their culture. Their aversion to class

distinctions might have resulted partly from the apparent absence of poverty on the North

Side. Even so, there were noticeable variations across families’ economic statuses. It was

the adults who made the most of them. One vivid image from my own recollection of

North High was the pejorative phrase “apartment children.”

Figure 3.1: One of the “Stoners,” Age 16, Punk Rock Style (1995). 26

26 Besides blurring or clipping facial features, I followed two practices in protecting identity in photographs. First, I asked their friends to identify the subject of the image. They could not. Second, I asked and received the subjects’ permission to use the images.

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I was a sophomore when my parents came home from a Parent-Teacher

Association meeting at the school one night, griping about elitist parents. According to

them, several parents had publicly blamed the neighborhood’s youth delinquency on the

“apartment children” who lived in the district. It was the first time I had heard the phrase,

but I knew exactly who it was meant to identify: people like Powel, Chad, Will, and

Justin and his brother Joe. Some members of the stoner crowd lived in the district’s

handful of apartment complexes, many of which were within walking distance of the

campus. They were the North Side’s version of illegal immigrants—outsiders who had

snuck through the borders. Others, like Walter Block, Jerry, and Bob, were children of

home-owning attorneys, pediatricians, or dentists. Ten years later I asked my father to

recount how he first heard the phrase, documenting the conversation in contemporaneous

jottings and then immediately typing fieldnotes. As he remembered it, at least one parent

publicly raised the question of whether there was any way to stop all of these “apartment

children” and their parents from living in apartments “just to get into the school system.”

The school officials who responded seemed to “recognize what they meant” by the

phrase. “They never challenged that categorization,” as my father remembered it. School

staff listened to the parents’ concerns, but they neither confirmed nor denied that

apartment residents were responsible for a campus crime wave nor that they might be

stopped.

Years later, Steve would still speak with resentment about the stigma he felt the

school officials had imposed on him and his friends because of their working-class or

lower-white-collar families. I had not realized what a sensitive topic it was for some,

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perhaps because I was a child of the home-owning, professional majority. At one point I

interviewed a former “apartment child.” I asked a number of fixed-format questions

about his family background in a matter-of-fact way, ignorant of his lingering feelings of

embarrassment. When I asked about his father’s education and employment history, the

young man stumbled over his words. He mumbled that his father was a “dropout” who

usually earned minimum-wage while “job hopping.” His parents divorced before high

school, so his mother had supported the household. His face reddened and he laughed

uncomfortably while giving short answers. Although the North Side might have appeared

socioeconomically homogeneous from the perspective of people in impoverished or

wealthier neighborhoods, the adults found bases for making social class distinctions,

however narrow.

Although the students were conscious of the adults’ perspective on class

differences, most did not share them. In fact, the stoners took an openly hostile stance

toward class elitism. Like many youth cultures since the 1960s, they styled themselves to

outwardly mask or invert class distinctions. Once they could drive to hangouts and parties

in lower-income neighborhoods they tried to make friends and mingle with members of

“street” cultures, whom they often viewed with a sense of outlaw romanticism. Rick and

Walter, for instance, befriended Slick, Trent Dog, and several other young men from a

lower-middle-class suburban neighborhood who claimed “West Side Crip” gang

membership. At times, some of the North Side friends also dabbled in or created their

own gangs, but since there weren’t any other gangs to battle nearby, they always gave up

fairly quickly.

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When members of the stoner crowd adopted “gangsta” fashion, they viewed

themselves as claiming affiliation with impoverished ghetto “street” culture. When they

styled themselves as “punks,” they viewed their ratty clothes and unconventional

hairstyles as ways of rejecting upper-middle-class adult pretensions (see also K. J. Fox

1987). Different members viewed their antinomian styles along a continuum from

claiming street-wisdom to calling for class war. Although the superficial side of style was

important to them, for most the meaning of style was to represent a radical opposition to

“the whole of the system.” Activities like fighting, smoking, and drinking formed an

important part of the style. Not only did they violate adults’ rules and expectations for

children, but they flouted such fundamental ideals as bodily safety and personal restraint.

The meaning of troublemaking had several dimensions. In the context of symbolic

and interpersonal conflict, the stoners viewed their culture as resistance against both the

adult order and the jocks. Nonetheless, they also viewed it as a creative, affirmative

means of establishing their own socially rewarding identities and an emotionally

supportive community.

As Dewey saw it in hindsight, their group of friends was “pissed off at the

teachers, man. Pissed off at fucking rules.” Years later, his adolescent experiences were

still important enough to him that he got agitated while recounting them. “Like, fucking

we have to sit here all day … this is a waste of my youth!” he said in the present-tense.

“Instinctually or not, articulately or not, I guess, I’d say somehow we’re revolting against

all the bullshit, the teachers.”

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Dewey’s closest friend, Powel, was not interested in deviance until he began to

appreciate the stoners’ culture of rebellion. He had grown up in Tucson but moved away

to Illinois in the seventh grade. At the time, he said, he was “getting like As and Bs in

school. I was a track star.” When he came back in the eighth grade he was shocked to

find out that Dewey and his old friends had changed. They had new opinion leaders like

Chad and Steve and they were doing things like smoking cigarettes and marijuana.

“I didn’t want to go back,” Powel told me. “I was like, ‘That’s bad.’” We both

laughed. As he explained, though, he came around and began to view the group

positively. “And they were like the popular ones of the group, right? And so I started

hanging out with them,” he said.

I asked him, “So what did you think of all these people, what was your impression

of them?”

“Um, when I moved back it was kind of like culture shock,” Powel said. Not only

were they popular, but they were resisting adult limitations. He emphasized that he felt

“older,” like an “adult” around his newly deviant friends:

It was that whole mind thing of being older. And so everyone was trying new things, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed.... I was like, “Wow, I’m really doing this,” but I thought of them all, like, “Wow, this is something new.” ... And I felt hard or something, when I didn’t before.... I always wanted to be out on my own, you know. So these kids had no parental supervision. You know? And so I was obviously enjoying it.... And then I started rebelling against my parents. ‘Cause I was like, “Screw that! I’m sick and tired of living this baby life! I wanna start doing what these kids are doing!” And, so I started going and staying at people’s houses all the time. And it just started from there…. smoking—drinking a lot. You know. And it was just the thing. It was like the adult thing to do. Or it seemed like it at the time.... You know, we’re not kids anymore.

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In contrast to media images of rebellious teenage types, most of these adolescents

were not alienated loners, forced to band together by virtue of exclusion. Many of them

felt an almost romantic attraction the group, a feeling that would last for well over a

decade in many cases. Some had been established in more conventional friendship groups

whose members rarely got into trouble before being seduced to the “dark side.”

I asked Justin to tell me how he got into the group. I couldn’t help but notice that,

in some ways, his story was reminiscent of adolescent romantic courtship. He was “still

hanging out with the preps,” so at first he restrained his interest in the other group and

made only discreet advances.

“I was kinda’ shy,” he explained. Justin stammered and fumbled around for the

right words, seeming to reawaken the adolescent awkwardness of the time, “and Steve—

he was really popular, and—but, uh—”

I asked him more directly, “What did you think of him?”

“I thought he was really cool…. And Chad can be a little intimidating.” I asked

about his perception of their group. “Like the stoners,” he continued. “More like the

people who didn’t give a shit quite as much.”

“So what did you think about that?” I asked. Justin asked what I meant, so I

clarified, “Like, did you think they were losers, or—”

“No!” He cut me off adamantly. “No. I though they were cool. I thought, ‘That’s

who I’d rather be hanging out with rather than the people I’m hanging out with now.’”

“Did you try to work your way in or anything?”

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“Um, well, a little bit. Not really….” He considered my question. A moment later

he remembered a story. “I used to go out with Lindsay something-or-other. And I guess

one of the jocks liked her ... And he was being a real ass about it. And he came up to me

in lunch and like threatened to kick my ass. Like, ‘I’ll kick your ass after lunch.’ All

that…. And then I remember Steve—actually Steve Garrison and Chad—them coming

up…. Steve came up and had seen it…. He offered to walk out with me. He’s like, ‘Well,

fucking, if, you know, he tries anything with you I’ll kick his ass.’”

Since this was before they had become “good friends,” Justin appreciated the

gesture. He started to feel more comfortable around Steve. Slowly Steve introduced him

to the rest of the stoners. Justin recounted his exposure to new opportunities and feelings

of excitement from those days.

“Well, then I started talking to Steve. And on Friday nights after school I’d take

off with him…. He let me stay the night at his house on weekends.” There would be

parties with other teenagers. “We’d go sit in the wash…. drinking Mickey’s twenty-twos

and Mickey’s forties [22 and 40 oz bottles of beer] and freezing our ass off outside.” I

asked him how it all felt. “Just, you know, get drunk and have fun … see if I could hook

up with chicks, which never ever worked out for me. Except for a coupla’ rare occasions.

But that’s okay.”

One of the defining moments for the stoners came to be known by the lofty title

“the riot.” I was on campus the day it happened. Regardless of whether it was a riot, a

disturbance, or simply an adolescent tantrum on a grand scale, I recall being deeply

impressed.

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It started spontaneously in the morning when dozens of students, maybe a

hundred or more, amassed on the football field and refused to go to classes. They stood in

a big cluster smoking cigarettes and chanting underneath the cloud of smoke. Soon

enough, several teachers and administrators corralled them into the middle of the campus,

which only made them more visible and boisterous. Students were climbing on the

architecture, throwing debris around, and even starting to destroy property. Others, like

me, were watching in admiration. Sheets of notebook paper were flapping through the air

like confetti. The whole scene felt like a festival.

Powel laughed intermittently as he told the story:

We’re like, ‘Screw this. Let’s start rioting and protesting.’ And so we ripped off a drinking fountain…. Ripped off a pole. Like a railing…. Just went breaking stuff. Hitting lockers. Throwing stuff around, cussing at teachers and stuff like that.

I recall that someone threw a metal bench or some such object against a classroom

window, cracking it. Chad and a number of others were sitting on top of some of the

school’s tall, red, outdoor lockers, banging their heels against them and shouting in

unison, “Hell no! We won’t go!”

Then the climax of the whole event came. Naturally it involved Chad, who was

more or less the leader of the whole ordeal. Things were starting to die down, according

to Chad, as “everyone just either ditched, they wanted to go drinking or something.” But

Chad and some of the others “wanted a last stand. And we got on the patio roofs and

started screaming.” Some teachers and the principal coaxed him down. Chad recounted

that the principal started “poking me in the chest, like really hard. It actually hurt. Telling

me I’m screwed, that he’s gonna have me expelled from school and all this stuff. And I’m

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like, ‘If you keep poking me in the chest I’m gonna hit you.’ And so he took that as a

threat, and the principal went off. He really started poking me and pushing me hard.”

I wasn’t there to witness it, but Chad claims that other teachers actually started

taking his side, restraining both the principal and Chad. Even so, Chad threw a punch at

the principal. One of the teachers intercepted it before it landed. Chad recalls that the

teacher told him, “Hey, calm down. This is not what you want to do. Your whole life is in

this day, this one moment.” That teacher and another walked Chad away from the scene.

Chad still professes steadfast respect for those two teachers, who he says told off the

principal when he gave chase.

That semester the principal was demoted to the district’s administrative office, off

campus, just months after being hired. The school board declined to extend his contract

after the tumultuous year.27 As the students saw it, they had gotten the principal fired,

thanks largely to the rioters and especially Chad. Their prestige rose, as did deviance as a

symbol of membership.

Powel believed that the riot “really defined us as who we were at the end of it. We

kind of made a name for ourselves. You know, the bad kids. The kids that didn’t care.

The rebellious ones…. And people saw us like that, I think.” I asked how it felt. “Oh,

good … I felt like, ‘Screw you guys! I am who I am and I got my friends with me,

whatchu’ gonna do?’”

The stoners were winning on all fronts.

27 As reported by a newspaper. Given the ease of access to such information and my obligation to preserve the confidentiality of my research subjects I cannot disclose further detail.

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Discovering a Gratifying Self in Fighting.

That same year I recall a brief (and strange) conversation with one of the stoners

in my Spanish class. He asked me a series of questions, including whether or not I had

ever smoked cigarettes, gotten drunk, had sex, or gotten in a fight. Of course, I said yes to

each, lying about most. I took from this conversation both that these activities were

important to membership in the popular crowd and that I should undertake to do them at

the first opportunity. Everyone who became a persistent fighter had a gratifying

experience in an important early fight (as I explain, gratifying need not mean winning).

There were, however, members of the rebellious group who were never committed

fighters themselves. Instead they found success by adopting the culture’s other marks of

prestige, such as smoking, drinking, getting high, having sex, or simply making trouble

for adults.

Before his riot-inciting, principal-punching glory days, Chad had been a “nerdy

kid with freckles, red hair, a cowlick, and a Texas accent.” During the sixth and seventh

grades he lived in a small city near the Mexican border, where his stepfather had moved

the family. He had no interest in trouble or delusions about achieving popularity.

But a tough, popular eighth grader picked on him, pressuring him to meet for a

fight in the middle of campus and setting into motion his transformation into the tough,

imposing, proudly Irish, wannabe gang-banger who came to Tucson. Even for a young

man who would grow to stand over six feet tall, Chad always had a strikingly long arm

reach—a trait prized by boxers for the tremendous advantage it affords over same-sized

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opponents. As Chad discovered, students who fought well, whether by choice or

necessity, obtained a ticket to the in-crowd:

Case #76. Chad’s First Big Fight. Chad: There was this big guy who for some reason—like all the eighth graders—wanted to beat me up. Like this nerdy kid they could pick on…. I heard he wanted to beat me up … So we ended up meeting in the middle of the school. And he pretty much started pushing me over and over and over…. And I fell back and everything. And everyone’s all, “Dude, are you gonna take that?” I was talking shit then. You know, it’s a very gang oriented school…. There’s no preps and jocks, there’s gangs. But those are the popular kids…. And I’d never really hit anybody in the face before…. I don’t know what came over me. I was so scared, I knew this guy was gonna swing at me and hit me. I ended up hitting him. He fell down. And that’s when the principal came, so it looked like I won. I was like, “Yes! I won!” I felt like coolest person in the world. And everyone started looking at me different. You know, all of a sudden I wasn’t this nerdy kid anymore. All of a sudden people wanted to talk to me….So I started hanging out with Danny more…. And after I started doing the fighting thing, after I did that, he thought I was cool…. I started getting involved in the gangs…. Hanging out with high school kids and dropouts, whatever. I’d say the average age was eighteen in the gang. For middle school that’s huge. That’s a big deal.

Typical of adolescents, Chad viewed friendships as virtually indistinguishable from

identity. As long as I knew him Chad still carried around the confidence that he first won

in that seventh grade fight, although he expressed in different ways over those fifteen

years or so.

As Chad’s case illustrates, the two biographical contingencies I describe (aspiring

to the rebellious crowd and finding fighting gratifying) may come in either order. In

contrast to Chad’s case, Lauren’s first big fight came when she was fifteen, after she had

already started aspiring to befriend a group of older skinheads. She admired their

toughness and was working to build friendships with some members. While hanging out

and drinking with them one night, she got into a fight with another girl who had been

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sleeping with Lauren’s best friend Linda’s boyfriend. Lauren punched the girl in front of

the admiring audience and felt rewarded by the result:

#69. Lauren and Linda vs. Isabelle. Lauren: her entire face just looked so swollen and had like already-showing-up black eyes, like puffiness…. And the guys were like, “You’re the toughest girl we’ve ever seen in our entire life! You should be a skinhead!” And I had already had this total love affair with these guys, thinking that they were the toughest guys in the world.

She won not only personal praise, but membership as well. Most of the young women

who hung out around these groups were attracted to the men’s toughness and wildness.

As Lauren explained of the skinheads, their fighting only added to her perception that

“they’re all really attractive…. it just makes you feel really, really protected and you

really enjoy being around them.” Like Lauren, a number of the other women also found it

gratifying to be admired for their own toughness.

There were two important moments for Powel. While in the seventh grade in

Illinois he got into a one-on-one fight with another student in art class. Powel lost the

fight, but discovered two bases for feeling gratified. He found he had the fortitude to

vigorously defend himself and found peer support in violence. I asked him to tell me

about the “first time you got involved in a fight.”

Case #89. Powel’s Fight in Art Class. Powel:… this kid was just giving me a hard time in art class. And, uh, I was with this bigger guy—I believe that gave me a lot of confidence, knowing that I had backup. And he goes, “Go beat him up, you can take that dude!” And so I’m like, “All right. Yeah!” And I went up and went up and—[punches fist into his palm and drops a bottle cap onto his coffee table, creating a simultaneous pop! and cling]—hit him right in his nose. Next thing I know I’m in a freaking headlock. I can’t get out of it! I’m trying man, I was trying! And then his arm got over my mouth. And I just chomped down as hard as I could. And I’m biting on him as hard as I could, right? And he wouldn’t let go. And I’m choking. And everyone’s

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watching. And I’m feeling like a fool. And the big guy stands up and he’s like, “Let go of him. Now.” And he let go…. Curtis: Did that one change the way you thought about yourself at all? Powel: I felt—I felt a lot more confident. Like I would stand up to people.

The important thing is not winning the fight, but viewing it as a positive

experience. At that time, however, Powel was not aspiring to join the culture of

troublemakers. He did not start trying to get into other violent situations until two years

later, when he moved back to Tucson and befriended the stoners. Powel was drinking at a

keg party when he and his new friends “jumped” (i.e. beat as a group) another teenage

boy, someone they didn’t know (Case #96): “And that was as a group. And it just felt like

power, you know. ‘We don’t have to stand for nothing!’ You know, ‘We stand as a

group! Tear people down!’”

Non-Fighters

Fighting was a powerful tool for establishing reputation, solidarity, and

membership in the rebellious crowd. Most members were indeed persistent fighters,

defining their group as the “tough” crowd. However, rebelliousness alone was not

sufficient; not if the second condition was lacking. Consequently, the rebellious crowd on

campus did include individuals and cliques who never became regular fighters. What

distinguished these individuals from the persistent fighters was that they did not interpret

any of their first big fights to be gratifying, life-changing events. Instead, they based their

identities on different kinds of deviant acts. In the eight and ninth grades, for instance,

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Dewey considered his friends to be “the arrest clique” on campus. They were certainly

rebellious, but rebellion alone was insufficient to attract them to careers in fighting.

There were several sample members who got into just one fight but never

embarked on careers in fighting. Like those who persisted, those who fought only once

were divided between winners and losers, suggesting that technical outcome was of little

causal importance to their careers. Snoddy socked a classmate in the chin at school one

day, winning the fight and causing a wound that required stitches (Case #47), but he

never seemed to view it as a particularly meaningful moment one way or another. Kenny

got into a fight at school, beating up his opponent in front of classmates, but “thought it

sucked,” since the loser didn’t put up a good fight (Case #49).

Negative interpretations of technical losses varied from feeling slightly inept to

utterly humiliated. Scott described humiliation that was clearly still fresh more than three

years later. He and Harvey had been friends-of-friends, but the two would insult, gossip

about, and call each other names. Finally their rivalry reached a violent climax outside of

physical education class when Scott flipped Harvey’s baseball cap off of the second floor

balcony in the gym:

#48. Scott vs. Harvey. Scott: he just like grabs me in like a headlock…. Just like, Boom-boom-boom! [A bunch of quick punches in addition to the headlock.] And I’m just sitting there, like [exasperated], “God, man!” … pretty much beating me up, I guess you could say…. he lets go of me finally. And he’s all like, you know, “Fuck you man!” … I’m sitting there, almost completely going crazy. Just like shaking. And he walks back into like the weight lifting room. And I just walk in there, I’m just like, “Fuck you! I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking bastard!” … And finally like the PE teacher comes and separates us both….

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Characteristic of traumatic experiences, Scott recounted agonizing about his personal failure

in the form of a revenge fantasy:

I just thought I should’ve just picked up some weight…. And I was like, “Why didn’t I do that?” But the adrenaline was just rushing. I was like, I shoulda’ just thrown like a ten pound weight at him. He’d catch it, it wouldn’t a’ been that much. But his hands woulda’ been full so I could just punch him in the nose. And he wouldn’t have anything to block it.

Importantly, those who quit after a single fight never described physical harm as the

deciding factor, indicating that the emotional experience and social meaning of the fight

were the deciding factors. Andy’s nose was broken in his big fight, but what discouraged

him was feeling clumsy and foolish (Case #33). He had been the one to pick the fight but

then he didn’t land a single blow, conceding defeat after just one punch.

Luke’s one big fight was against a cellmate in a juvenile detention facility:

#46. Luke’s Big Fight in Jail. Luke: It was something really stupid. And I told him to fuck off. That’s my milk. It’s the only thing I get out of the day. And he shoved me, and I shoved him back. And he hit me really hard in the eye. And I hit him in the gut and he proceeded to kick me a couple more times when I was on the ground…. Curtis: Did you get hurt? Luke: Yeah. I got a black eye and my nose was bleeding. I think my pride was hurt a little bit more than my body.

Luke found other bases for popularity. He started dating Karen when she was fifteen and he

was seventeen. They were the kind of couple that other adolescents viewed as paragons of

independence and sexual sophistication. Karen was slim and exceedingly feminine in her

style of tight clothing, bleached hair, and heavy make-up, flaunting the kind of

overconfident teenage sexuality that entrances young males but makes many grown adults

feel very uncomfortable. A few years later, in 2001, Karen and a few other friends were

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discussing how essential rule-breaking had been for popularity at North High. To

emphasize her point, she turned and yelled, “Look at Luke!”28 He chuckled in amusement

as she recounted that he had been both “the coolest guy in school” and a drug addict. She

concluded that “everyone loved him!”

Alex was sitting on the couch next to Luke. He was one of Luke’s best friends

from high school, another of the campus elite. They made another interesting couple,

Alex standing about ten inches taller than Luke, weighing perhaps a hundred pounds

more, and considered one of the most intimidating men on campus. Alex leaned back and

laughed heartily in his loud, deep voice, giving Luke an affectionate back-handed slap on

the gut. Back then, Luke told me, he “watched a lot of people get beat up for different

reasons.” Friends of his, like Alex and Chad, did much of the beating. But he would not get

involved himself. Instead, Luke explained that as a teenager he was known as “the guy who

threw the parties.” He was a charismatic partier blessed with all the marks of distinction, it

seems, except being a fighter.

DROPPING OUT

Most of the Tucson friends graduated high school, but a substantial minority of

them either dropped out voluntarily or were kicked out (about 11 dropouts, 2 General

Equivalency Diplomas, and 14 regular graduates among the core group). Those who

dropped out were all aged sixteen or seventeen except for Steve and Bob, who were

fifteen.

28 This scene and the quotes in this paragraph come from fieldnotes.

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Beginning to drive a car, or at least having friends who drove, was a

transformative moment. Until then, the youths’ opportunities to socialize with peers had

been severely limited. Tucson did have a mediocre bus system, but it had virtually no

stops on the North Side. In order to socialize they had to either rely on their parents to

schedule transportation or spend their leisure time within walking distance of home.

Some lived within a mile of the district’s few major intersections, meaning they could

walk to fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and strip malls, which served as

hangouts. Others lived as far as three miles from the nearest commercial business.

So, at ages fourteen and fifteen, there was a strong incentive to remain in school.

Virtually all peer contacts were contained within the institution, meaning that the early-

adolescents viewed the campus community as the one all-important arena in which to

develop identity. By ages sixteen and seventeen they were considerably more

independent than they had been only two years earlier. They could drive around, make

new friends, and do things elsewhere in town, meaning they now had ways to define

identities beyond the high school walls.

In their late teen years, rewarding as they sometimes found the struggle during

early adolescence, they were becoming less willing to compete with the “jock” types for

status. Rather than seeing campus life as an exhilarating struggle, they started to view

peer conflicts as tiresome. Steve was the first to drop out, one of several who lost interest

or quit for “social” reasons. He had a long history of minor discipline problems, and by

the second half of the tenth grade he was more committed to hanging out with friends

than to staying in school. He claimed to have gotten good grades when he showed up, but

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“wasn’t there a lot” because he was “ditching all the time.” As he explained, he didn’t

like most of the other students or the faculty. Finally, one day he was suspended for

showing up at school after getting drunk in the morning at Bob’s house. After being

suspended he “just quit going and started going to Midtown night-school.”29

Though not committed to North High, a number of the dropouts did remember

feeling academically motivated at times. Many attended non-traditional high schools

along the way, such as night school, “alternative schools,” and General Equivalency

Diploma programs.

Chad felt much the same about school as Steve. Steve was his best friend, so

Chad also decided to try night school. It only lasted a few months:

I went [to North High] like six months without him. And it kinda’ sucked…. Every night I was drinking…. smoking pot or doing acid. And school wasn’t worth going to me. That was the last thing on anyone’s mind was school. So anyway we both dropped out and went to Midtown night together…. it’s self-paced. You do what you want. Sleep in all day and still go out and party afterwards. And it was too easy to ditch, I suppose. And we never went…. You could walk out of the classroom and they didn’t care.

When Steve and Chad left, a number of their friends followed within the next

year. Powel described an experience similar to Chad’s, feeling that the old group was

dissolving and that school wasn’t worth the hassle anymore. Bob got into a physical

altercation with a teacher and, in a huff, lit a cigarette right there in the building. When

the teacher told Bob to leave and that he was going to be expelled, he simply walked off

campus and never tried to return. (By Bob’s account, the teacher had physically assaulted

him.) Similarly, Rick was also told informally that he was kicked out of high school.

29 Source: Interview recorded in fieldnotes.

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Neither he nor his parents ever challenged it. Expulsion from Arizona public schools

requires official notice and a formal hearing. But official proceedings seem not to have

been filed against Bob or Rick. Instead, school officials—or a single staff member, as the

case may have been—relied on the students’ readiness to leave. It may have simply been

the age when students are most likely to drop out, but their accounts suggest a cascade

effect. Once the most admired members of the clique, Chad and Steve, were gone, others

seemed ready to follow.

ON THE ORGANIZATION OF ADOLESCENT DEVIANCE

Motivated though they are, teenagers do not construct their troublemaking alone.

Adolescent deviance is, at least in part, organized by adults. One of sociology’s more

famous arguments is that communities produce their own deviants in a variety ways

(Durkheim 1895/1966; Tannenbaum 1938; Lemert 1951; Erikson 1962, 1966; Becker

1963). There are two different versions of this argument relevant to adults’ contribution

to adolescent deviance. First, as the bearers of social control, adults are both “rule

creators” and “rule enforcers,” defining what “trouble” is and who is in it (see Becker

1963). Second, they organize the actual behavior of troublemakers, not just the

definitions of trouble (see Erikson 1962). Adults invite certain forms of adolescent

deviance by imposing coercive social control and by holding certain values dear, thus

provoking youth to retaliate and providing symbolic targets to attack. (Consider smoking

and ditching class as acts of defiance.) They structure adolescents’ basic needs, daily

routines, and opportunities for peer relationships. This is not to say that an imaginary

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independent adolescent society would be utopian, to deny that it would turn into a Lord of

the Flies scenario should they somehow escape the adults. Instead, as an empirical

matter, the point is that adults always make some causal contribution to teenagers’

troubles, if only because adults care for and control children.

In a literal sense, there is little that adolescents do that is not somehow shaped by

adults. The spatial and temporal location of adolescent deviance reveals both the reach

and the limits of adult control. As Frederic Thrasher (1927) observed in Chicago more

than eighty years ago, one finds youthful deviance flourishing in “interstitial” areas—that

is, those thin strips of the city that are beyond anyone’s control or responsibility, such as

empty lots and abandoned buildings. The same was true for the North High students.

Their self-expression, autonomy, and deviance were organized around the peripheries of

adult institutions (in a broad sense of the word) like neighborhoods, schools, and daily

schedules.

Parents’ residential choices were particularly important. Since they could not

drive, most of the adolescents had carved out little places in their neighborhoods where

they could hang out unobserved by adults. Adolescents and younger children do the same

thing everywhere, but in Tucson’s ecology “tunnels” made ideal hangouts. Since Tucson

is in the desert, but has violent summer monsoon rainstorms, there are sandy washes and

concrete tunnels running through low-lying places between houses and under roads.

Beneath commercial areas the tunnels even form complex underground mazes. Physically

concealed, it is no accident that they were “underground” hangouts both literally and

metaphorically. The telltale signs that youth had taken over a tunnel were graffiti and

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cigarette butts. I saw larger tunnels that were even furnished with candles and old

couches and rugs.

The adolescents also found places to gather at the boundaries of their school

campuses. Whatever the habitat’s specific features, students try to convert it to their own

purposes. Within walking distance of North High there were two large tunnels where

students hung out during the interstitial minutes and hours between time spent at home

and the start or end of the school day (waiting at bus stops had the same quality).

The most popular and revealing ecological niche, however, was called “the wall.”

It was a six-foot tall brick wall running for hundreds of feet, marking the border between

the high school and a large apartment complex. Both institutions had security personnel

who rode around on motorized carts, looking for teenagers who smoked cigarettes in

large groups, sometimes drinking alcohol or smoking joints, “writing” graffiti, or

watching fistfights. The teenage smokers not only had safety in numbers but were able to

see the guards coming when their carts were still far across the parking lots. The students

would quickly step out of reach onto the opposite side of the wall where they could

delight in the frustration they were causing the security guards.

Adolescence and Violent Careers

The institutional setting may have provided the backdrop against which members

initiated long-term deviant lifestyles. But becoming a career fighter depended on a

combination of two factors that were closer to what Katz (1988) called the “foreground”

of experience. In my field setting two conditions were shared by every individual at the

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time of becoming a career fighter: (1) aspiring to membership in the rebellious crowd and

(2) discovering a gratifying self in fighting.

Sociologists and other academics have only rarely recognized that some people

find violence gratifying and that people do not voluntarily persist in violence unless they

find it rewarding (but see Athens 1992; Collins 2008; Katz 1988; Wright & Decker

1997). Instead, scholars usually view violence either as tantrums of uncontrolled

emotions (Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990) or failures to employ more civil means of conflict

resolution (Black 1983, 1984; Cooney 1998). A faithful explanation of violence,

however, must document the various ways its practitioners experience it, including its

sensual and moral attractions (Katz 1988). No doubt some members of dangerous

correctional, public school, and inner city ghetto communities do persist in violence

involuntarily or instrumentally (that is, for self-defense) because they have no way to

hide from or escape conflict and because they have diminished access to the protection of

official social control (see e.g. Anderson 1999). And there were indeed defensive fights

in my data on high school. Yet those who persisted in my field site did so voluntarily.

Even in the most violent, coercive contexts, it is doubtful whether high levels of violence

could be sustained unless at least some critical number of individuals discovered a

gratifying sense of self based on their violent performances.

To call the process “social” does not mean that the fighters were only subjected to

forces “outside” of themselves. The Tucson friends underwent personal transitions,

though the changes were not strictly “internal” either. Instead, the two conditions I

identify were interactive: the personal attraction to the group was developed though

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conversations and friendships on campus; and the new, gratifying post-fight identity was

created as one’s sense of self changed vis-à-vis relationships with peers and adults.

Sociologists have long observed that all communities define certain members as

deviant outsiders-within; indeed, they must do so. But the adults didn’t just arbitrarily

impose “deviance” on these particular students, nor did the “bad” adolescents simply

select them to be new members and then convert them to the “dark side.” Instead, as the

stoners’ comments illustrate, they achieved a sense of personal charisma, elitism, and

liberation in deviance—the typical self-aggrandizing thrills of adolescent rule-breaking

(see Katz 1988: especially Chapter 2). The thrill is largely to be deviant. One achieves

feats that most people are too timid or feeble to try. Dostoevsky’s protagonist

Raskilnikov in Crime and Punishment had a similar feeling; by committing murder he

was transcending the mundane limitations to which ordinary members of society are

subject. Breaking rules is often to claim that one is beyond their reach.

The challenge for sociology is to explain these processes without ignoring either

the social or personal dimensions. As Powel described it, the thrill was a combination of

social prestige and personal glory (see also Adler & Adler 1989). “People knew who you

were,” he recalled. I asked him to tell me what that was like.

Powel: I mean, you’d hear people talking about you, and you’d be standing right there…. “Did you hear about that dude Rodney Powel?” … You’d tell people who you were and they’d be like, “Whoa.” And that was a cool feeling, man. You could walk through school, push whoever you want…. And that was kind of like celebrity feeling.

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Chapter 5. Notes on the Meaning of Fights

Watching from a safe distance, physical fights can look inhuman, animalistic—

group fights especially. It can be hard to tell who is fighting whom, much less why. Arms

swing and heads bounce. Projectiles fly. People run around frantically. And the noises—

sounds you never knew humans could make. Everyday language aptly conveys this sense

of chaos and disorder. Fights are called “melees,” “dust-ups,” “free-for-alls,” and “knock-

down, drag-out brawls.” They “erupt” and “break out,” like forces of nature. Primitive

paroxysms of romping berzerko aggression—beyond all comprehension. What to make of

these twelve-fisted beasts?

Looking more closely, however, it turns out that fights are actually prime sites for

studying what is most human about humans: social interaction that is thoroughly

meaningful and organized at each moment. A first step toward understanding fighting is

to recognize that violence is no uniform category of behavior. One of sociology’s main

contributions to the study of violence has been to document which distinctive categories

of action constitute the spectrum of violent interactions (see e.g. Collins 2008; Johnson

1995; Katz 1988; Levi 1981; Luckenbill 1977, 1981; Newman 2004; Sanders 1994). In

order to make distinctions between different types—such as drive-by shootings,

robberies, and domestic beatings—the sociological method requires evidence that the

participants socially organize them to be different from one another.

By “social organization” I mean to include three classic sociological topics: the

socially constructed meaning of a violent event, the interactional process of enacting it

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(see Chapters 7 and 9), and its distribution across time, space, and social-institutional

context (see Chapters 4, 6, and 10). This chapter focuses on the first: how members

define “a fight” and what it means in their culture.

THE SIMPLEST ADEQUATE DEFINITION

A good starting point from which to chart the social organization of fighting is at

the conceptual level: What makes a fight “a fight”? Many research paradigms advise

strictly defining one’s terms before collecting data, especially if the goal is to test existing

hypotheses. However, my goal was to develop new hypotheses and theories about

fighting, not just to test existing ones. I based my definition on the term’s practical

meaning, that is, on how people use and define the concept in interaction (see Becker

1963; Blumer 1969; Emerson & Messinger 1977; Glaser & Strauss 1967; Katz 2001;

Matza 1969).30

I explain only the meaning of physical fights, as members of the culture I studied

understood and used this concept—what they considered “real fights.” I exclude the

metaphorical sense of nonviolent conflicts and verbal arguments as “fighting.” Individual

and cultural definitions must always vary to some degree, but to make empirical headway

30 I compiled lists of interactions that sample members indicated were fights, that they indicated were not fights, and that were ambiguous. Next I listed descriptive details that seemed to show up regularly in the fight category, and I abstracted these details into qualitative characteristics. Which characteristics could I eliminate and which were necessary to distinguish fights from non-fights? I attempted different combinations until I reached a parsimonious set. The final set of four qualities applied to all “fights” in my dataset. But as a group they did not apply to any of the “non-fight” interactions.

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I highlight the shared meaning in my field setting (and, at times, contemporary American

culture more generally).

The simplest adequate version of their definition of a fight is: a stretch of

competitive, serious, hand-to-hand violence. Each of the four criteria (stretch,

competition, seriousness, and hand-to-hand violence) serves to distinguish the category

“fight” from other kinds of social interaction, so each requires a brief explanation.

Members may have debated how to define a specific case, but when disagreement

happened it rested on whether these particular criteria applied.31 In the next paragraphs, I

highlight the ambiguous nature of some events in order to emphasize the concept’s

specific meaning.

(1) Stretch.

The word “stretch” denotes a single course of continuous face-to-face interaction.

As members see it, the fight proper begins only after violence has been exchanged

between opponents and ends when one or both stop trying to attack the other. The

preceding dispute is not considered part of the actual fight, only a prelude. Members

define the fight as lasting as long as opponents share a continuous focus on mutual

combat, ending when a victory or draw is established, third parties “break it up,” or the

fight transforms into another kind of violence (e.g. a “jumping” or a shooting). As the

final possibility indicates, the end of the fight need not mean an end to the violence.

31The definition could be ambiguous if one opponent considered an event a fight but the other did not. In one such case (#39), Walter appeared to believe he was in a “real” fight while his opponent Skyler seemed to believe they were having a play-fight. Fighters usually try to avoid that predicament by dramatizing that “this is a fight,” not unlike robbers initiating a stickup (see Luckenbill 1981; see Chapter 8).

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There is a constant threat that fights will “turn into” something else, usually some more

dangerous style of violent attack. This danger adds an extra element of thrill for many

people who fight, but is a powerful deterrent for others who do not.

Sometimes one fight at a social gathering will be followed a few hours or minutes

later by a second fight involving some or all of the same opponents, or even entirely

different opponents. These are typically considered multiple fights since the original

“focused interaction” (Goffman 1963b) has ended and the opponents have dispersed, if

only temporarily.

However, group fights are considered single, collective interactions. In group

fights several fighters collectively focus their attention on a continuous stretch of time

and space. Audiences corroborate and contribute to this interpretation by circling the

entire attention space, forming a single arena. Group fights were relished by my sample

members for the ecstatic esprit de corps they make possible—that is, should everyone

perform well and demonstrate proper solidarity. Deciding whether a particular event is a

group fight or multiple simultaneous fights is always a contingent matter. Agreement is

sometimes reached only retrospectively or not at all. Problems of defining group fights

are consequential for fighters themselves, who may wonder: Were you fighting on my

side or by yourself?

(2) Competitive.

The adjective “competitive” excludes violence that seeks only unilateral

dominance or purely instrumental ends, and includes only violence undertaken at least

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partly for the sake of trying to win a contest. At least in the culture I studied, the criterion

of competition not only implies mutual combat, but also adds a motivational element to

the definition: both sides are trying to win over the opponent’s violent resistance. Popular

culture provides evidence that this concept of fighting is widely shared, as when a

character in the 2007 film Eastern Promises says to another: “It’s not a fight if one of you

doesn’t fight back, right?” Thus competitive violence rules out not only various forms of

assault-style attacks and beatings, but also rebellions and riots and most violence in

military and law enforcement contexts.

Certain kinds of non-fight violence, especially between same-sex peers, share

empirical similarities with fights but have subtle differences. “Jumpings” are a different

kind of violent event, but they happen in many of the same kinds of social gatherings and

among the same kinds of people as competitive fights. “Jumping” can be a noun or verb,

meaning a one-sided group beating of an individual or smaller group. Members of the

group feel a thrill of ritual solidarity by selecting for sacrifice a weak victim who has

somehow challenged the group’s boundaries, thus dramatizing that they are within (see

also Collins 2008; Erikson 1962, 1966). The “Wrong Walter” case (Chapter 1) is typical.

In the extremes “fair fights” and jumpings look quite different. Many times,

however, deciding whether a specific event is best described as a “fight” or “jumping”

can be a problem for members. For instance, is it still a jumping if the smaller group

competes and “wins”? What if the weaker party is clearly the initial aggressor? In such

cases the principle of competitive, mutual combat is evidently the central deciding issue.

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Consider a violent interaction in which one side (Brad and Freddie) was attacked

but did not counterattack. Freddie and Brad were at a drunken house party when Freddie

and a young, Latino, anti-racist skinhead started mocking each other.32 Several of the

skinheads took up their friend’s cause and jumped Freddie. When Brad tried to help

Freddie, they jumped him too. A few days later I met Brad at a bowling alley:

#163. Freddie and Brad Get Jumped by Skinheads.33 I asked if he was hurt and turned his hands over to look for swelling around the knuckles. He stressed that he and Freddie “weren’t fighting.” Brad told me that he and Freddie just kept saying they didn’t want to fight. At first, Brad said, the skinheads were all hitting Freddie one at a time—even as he kept saying he didn’t want to fight. Brad eventually “tried to get in the middle,” at which point he started to get hit as well. As he summarize: “Neither of us were fighting back, though.”

Brad’s account raises an important complexity. There is a distinction between the

noun “a fight” and the verb “to fight.” Members consider the verb “fighting back” to be

necessary in order to apply the noun “a fight,” but it is not sufficient for categorizing a

violent event as a fight. Victims of unilateral violence may fight back defensively during

robberies, assaults, and episodes of domestic abuse—but typically they do not do so

competitively, that is, in order to “win.” Members of my sample did not consider these

interactions “fights.”

32 As the skinheads I knew I explained to me, different skinhead groups may define themselves around various competing identities, ideologies, and symbols: racists, anti-racist, anti-intoxicating substances, homosexual, and others. Those I knew were vehemently opposed to Nazi and racist groups (several were Latino and one was black). Will, whose best friend in high school was black, did not understand this when he first met them at the house where they usually partied. He tried to provoke a black member into a fight by aggressively demanding to know how he could participate in a racist group. Jerry broke it up once the two factions had lined up for a fight outside the skinheads’ house. In addition to anti-racist, these skinheads defined themselves as politically conservative, pro-American, anti-drug, and anti-homeless. 33 From my December 20, 2000 fieldnotes; edited to transform most of the direct quotation (as I originally wrote my fieldnotes the day after our meeting) into indirect quotes.

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(3) Serious.

The qualification of emotional seriousness is necessary to distinguish between

what members consider “real” fights and violent contests that are playful or literally

athletic. Play-fighting, boxing, and various other kinds of sparring are only “fights” in a

figurative sense: they are simulations of the “real” thing (the reverse of the fight-as-

athletic-contest metaphor I explain below; see also Hoffman [2006]).

It is possible for play-fights to lead to real fights. My dataset includes six fights

following “rough play out of hand” and several others that followed similar scenarios

(e.g. food fights that turned violent). In fact, part of the excitement and challenge of play-

fighting is to test one’s composure or ability to maintain the state of relaxed play (see also

Anderson 1999). Ambiguous events illustrate the importance of the distinction. When

play-fights become rough or get out of hand it may not be entirely clear whether either

side was actually serious. In fact, whether or not to consider it a “real” fight depends

precisely on imputations of emotional seriousness.

In the following interaction, notice that Harry made emotional seriousness

intentionally ambiguous. Although Harry started hitting harder he continued to display a

playful front, apparently trying to avoid a complete shift to a “real” fight. Applying

members’ standards, I coded it as a non-fight:

#156. Harry Beats up Melvin. Retrospective Observation: On the fifth of July (1996) Harry, Jerry, Melvin, and I were drinking beer on the football field of our high school at about six in the morning [still awake and drunk from a Fourth of July party]. We had been playing “rugby” with beer cans. Jerry and Harry had been play-fighting. Melvin, with whom we were not really [close] friends, began play-fighting with Harry. As I watched I

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realized that Harry was hitting Melvin harder and harder. Finally, Melvin sat on the bleachers and covered his head while Harry assaulted him with rapid punches. Afterwards Harry laughed, but Melvin looked like he might cry.

(4) Hand-to-Hand Violence.34

From the perspective of members “real” fights involve “real” violence. What

counts as real violence, however, can be open to disagreement and depends on qualities

of the situation. Fights frequently begin with aggressive invasions like “accidental”

bumps or hard stares, and then may progress to threats, intimidating postures, and

pushing and shoving. Such acts are viewed as aggressive proposals to fight, but as long as

the dispute does not escalate further, members will not define the event as a completed

fight:

#195. Near-Fight Playing Pool. Lonnie: …we’d almost gotten in a fight earlier that night. With a group of people…. We just exchanged words…. I walked up and he just pushed the guy. Then mostly by-standers broke it up.

“Just” arguing and “just” pushing constitute “almost” fights, or near-fights as I call them.

The violence necessary for establishing a real fight radically transforms the situation.

Techniques of “real” violence include punching, kicking, choking, or striking with hand-

held weapons. Once real violence has begun, verbal disputes are abandoned and,

typically, both sides immediately start attacking each other’s bodies at a quantitatively

faster pace and with qualitatively greater intensity.

34 Note: “Hand-to-hand” does not mean the same thing as “unarmed.” What I mean by hand-to-hand is close-quarters fighting—opponents within reach, able to touch one another—as opposed to exclusively throwing objects or firing guns back-and-forth.

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Most fights in my dataset were unarmed but people did sometimes fight with

weapons, especially “handy weapons,” ordinary objects like bottles and pool balls. It was

rare to fight with manufactured weapons (but there were robberies and unilateral attacks

with guns and knives, and a few occasions when someone pulled and/or fired a gun at the

end of a fight). In my research setting, at least, gun violence was considered something

other than fighting. I did not record any mutual “gun fights.”

THE CULTURAL MEANING OF FIGHTS

One of sociology’s important lessons is that meanings and definitions are not “just

words.” They matter for what people do and especially for how they do things together.

In this way, the idea of a “real fight” is deeply consequential. Most members of the

culture I studied specialized in fighting and purposely tried to refrain from predatory

violence. The choice to fight was motivated in part by cultural meanings. They were

attracted to “toughness” and fighting, not violence for its own sake (see also Wilkinson

1984). In the following sections I describe three ways they understood fighting: (1) as a

“victimless crime,” (2) through the metaphor of the “fight-as-athletic contest,” and (3) as

a form of exciting “action.”

Fighting as a “Victimless Crime”

The language we use reveals clues about what a concept means to us, often at a

level beneath our conscious recognition (Pinker 2007). Consider how we talk about

fights. One cannot fight “at,” “on,” or “to” someone. Instead, one must fight “with”

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someone else, implying a quality of cooperation or competition. (People sometimes use

the preposition “against,” also implying competition.) In order for one person to fight

with another, the other must also fight.

Compare this to other kinds of violence. In abuse, “X beat Y.” The verb

construction is revealing. The violent actor X is the only active agent in the statement,

while the victim Y is only the passive object of the action. Note that it is possible to use

the verb “to fight” without any preposition, as in “A fought B,” but the statement

necessarily implies the reciprocal that “B fought A.” The meaning is virtually identical, a

symmetrical quality that is absent from the use of verbs such as “to beat.” To make Y the

subject of a statement on beating requires a passive verb construction: “Y was beaten by

X.” The same is true of bullying, attacking, robbing, raping, shooting, and other unilateral

violent acts.

The unilateral direction of action is found not only in language but also in the

actual practices of predatory violence. People who perform robberies or violently attack

their romantic partners typically rely on stealth, overwhelming force, and/or a history of

“intimate terrorism” to discourage resistance (Denzin 1984; Dobash & Dobash 1979;

Gelles 1972; Gelles & Straus 1988; Johnson 1995; Katz 1988; Luckenbill 1981). In

contrast, fighters routinely issue challenges and insults to provoke their opponents into

actively resisting and fighting back. If an instigator fails to secure an active, violent

counter-attack from his opponent then he must either choose between aborting the fight-

attempt or committing an act of bullying, assault, or abuse—unilateral violent acts that

some people find attractive in certain situations, but which conferred minimal or negative

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prestige in the culture I studied. Thus when someone tries to start a fight he or she must

orient to mutual combat—orient to his opponent, to some degree, as a partner in

competition—or risk coming off as a predator or a sadist.

One sample member described a robbery he committed at age seventeen. I use the

name X and indirect quoting as extra layers of confidentiality because he professed

special shame about this event. Typical of robbery, X used firepower and stealth

purposely to prevent a struggle:

#123. Person X Robs a Motorist. Person X explained that he and a friend had done a robbery, using a pistol. They had been using methamphetamine, and were strung out and needed money. They talked about robbing someone. At night, they drove around [X’s neighborhood], and followed a car with one person inside. After pulling up a driveway and into a garage, the male driver got out. X [riding in the front passenger side] decided to get out of the car. Once he got out of the car, he said, he was committed. There was no turning back. He felt the same sudden surge of energy he would in a fight. He brandished the gun and ordered the guy to hand over his wallet and took the money. X then ran back to the car, at which point the victim started shouting at and threatening him. [X and the driver successfully fled and got away with the robbery.] But afterwards X felt horrible. He felt like a predator, he explained, unlike after fights, when he felt like the other person was also partly to blame.

“Fight” is a normative as well as descriptive concept. Characterizing violence as a

“fight” can be a rhetorical device for neutralizing the potential culpability of committing

a violent act or even to deny the shame of being passively victimized (see Scott & Lyman

1968; Sykes & Matza 1957). As X’s case illustrates, many violent actors are quite

sensitive to the moral implications of their violence. My sample members usually

preferred to see themselves as “winners” rather than “perpetrators,” and even as “losers”

rather than “victims.” In other words, the morality of fighting is a concern for fighters

themselves in many of the same ways that it is for outsiders.

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Aggressors may exploit the normative qualities and consequences of fighting to

pressure their targets. In fighting cultures men are obligated to accept challenges to fight

and to vigorously participate in battle (see also Anderson 1999; Nisbet & Cohen 1997).

Aggressors may use their targets’ normative obligation to fight as a way to mitigate their

own potential culpability. Especially during adolescence, the youths I spoke with

frequently felt coerced into publicly demonstrating their willingness to fight even while

privately wishing they could escape. From the instigator’s perspective: Why simply bully

a victim when you can goad him into fighting and then beat him up anyway?

Fighters are not the only ones who frequently consider fighting a “victimless

crime.” These normative consequences (i.e. consequences of defining an event as a

“fight”) are also reflected in the administrative practices of institutions that must respond

to and classify cases of violence. Many organizations (e.g. schools, prisons, police

departments) have certain obligations to victims within their jurisdictions, namely

protection and justice. In fact, claiming or applying the label “victim” constitutes the

definition of the violence as a unilateral assault and not as a fight (Emerson 1994;

Holstein & Miller 1990). But sorting out the details of violent episodes can be

complicated and organizationally costly and it often violates the moral sensibilities of

bureaucratic social control agents (by definition, labeling someone a victim exonerates

them and entitles them to special privileges [Holstein & Miller 1999]). From the

perspective of control agents it is usually more expedient, and often more morally

palatable, to classify the event as a “fight” and punish each party equally (or not at all)

than to sort out perpetrators and victims. At least historically, police officers have

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regularly opted for this solution as well, even extending the definition “family fight” to

cross-sex domestic violence calls, often as a way to justify treating the violence as a

“conflict” rather than a “crime” (Davis 1983; Ferraro 1989; Smith & Klein 1984).

As sociological fieldworkers have repeatedly found, police officers (and

apparently many judges) display a preference for non-arrest in cases they view as fights

or interpersonal conflicts.35 In the written decision in Watson v. Kansas City 36 the court

noted that the local law enforcement “training encourages officers to attempt to ‘defuse’

the situation and to use arrest as a last resort,” particularly in cases of domestic violence.

However, when criminal justice workers are motivated to pursue official action (rather

than to avoid it) they may justify doing so by specifically denying that an event was a

“fight” or mutual combat situation (see e.g. Emerson 1994).

To illustrate how applying the label “fight” can be consequential to the

administration of justice, consider the case of Luis Noriega, a DeKalb, IL bartender who

was beaten to death in April 2007 by three men and one woman.37 Initially, some

members of the small college-town and its news media referred to the event as a fatal

“fight.” The local State’s Attorney, Ron Matekaitis, called a press conference, apparently

with the primary aim of redefining the event as a non-fight:

“There were some early reports that Mr. Noriega’s death was a result of a fight,” Matekaitis said. “The use of the word ‘fight’ would imply that the confrontation was mutual. In making the charging decision in this case, we believe this was an attack against Mr. Noriega where he was badly outnumbered and was struck by an individual who was superior in size….”

35 See Chapter 8, fn. 21 on the sociological concept of “preference.” 36 857 F. 2d 690, 696 (10th Cir. 1988). 37 These excerpts are drawn from the (Dekalb, IL) Daily Chronicle, April 21, 2007.

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The deceased’s girlfriend also emphasized the normative consequences of calling it an

“attack” rather than a “fight,” telling reporters, “I think it’s a great thing that the (state’s)

attorney changed the wording from ‘fight.’ It was not; it was an attack…. Luis had no

chance.”

Louisiana Third Circuit Court Judge J.P. Mauffray made a similar statement to

justify his decision to let stand the controversial battery conviction of the so-called “Jena

Six” member Mychal Bell:

“The victim was ‘sucker punched’ and knocked immediately unconscious before being stomped and kicked…. There was no credible evidence … that the victim had provoked the attack by word or gesture. The evidence showed that this was an attack, not a fight.” (Associated Press, September 14, 2007.)

Judge Mauffray not only dismissed the label “fight” directly. Note that he also indirectly

defined the event as “an attack” rather than a “fight” by emphasizing the “victim” label

and denying any precipitating provocation (see Holstein & Miller 1990). More generally,

American jurisprudence has long upheld “fairness” as an essential normative principle of

mutual combat, including “comparable tools and capabilities” (Harvard Law Review

2005: 2437; see also People v. Thompson).38 Whether or not the label “fight” is applied to

an event, and by whom, is a contingent but highly “micro-political” matter (see Emerson

& Messinger 1977).

When police arrived on the scene of same-sex peer violence in my research, the

officers virtually always appeared more oriented to “restoring order” than to making

38 821 N.E.2d 664 (Ill. App. Ct. 2004).

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arrests (see Davis 1983). This finding might be different in lower income contexts where

police may be more inclined to respond punitively, or should the violence involve

weapons or lead to serious injury (see Black 1970, 1982; Smith & Klein 1984). In my

data, when police did make arrests it was rarely for fighting or even for any kind of

personal violence, but instead for situationally-related misdemeanors, including “criminal

damage of private property” that occurred during the fracas, driving drunk while trying to

flee, being drunk in public, or being a “minor in possession of alcohol.” In fact, the term

“mutual combat” is part of criminal justice jargon; technically it can be used to warrant

an arrest for charges like “disorderly conduct/fighting,” but it can also be used to justify

informal practices of not making arrests for assault or battery. One Illinois police officer

told me that judges criticized him for bringing “mutual combat” cases to court. In actual

practice, if not official policy, the criminal justice system tends to treat fighting as do

members of the broader culture, as a “victimless crime.”

The Fight-As-Athletic Contest Metaphor

Fights are not just mutual, but a special kind of mutual. They are competitive. A

central theme in the meaning and experience of fighting is the metaphor of the fight as an

athletic contest. As linguists have noted, we interpret much of the world and organize

much of our conduct through such metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980).

Despite the literal differences, there is considerable overlap between the

sequential, narrative structures of athletic matches and physical fights. At a certain point

in each narrative sequence two opposing sides confront each other face-to-face. There are

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stretches of physically creative action, organized by each side’s mutual focus on

achieving reciprocal outcomes. Each side has an offensive and a defensive aim. In

fighting as in sports like soccer, hockey, and basketball, defense and offense must be

played simultaneously in continuous stretches of emotionally intense action. Each next

move requires an awareness of the field’s creative possibilities for attack and a

simultaneous sensitivity to one’s own vulnerabilities. Part of the thrill of fighting is the

opportunity to spontaneously try out fantastic creative possibilities, as when a skinhead

reportedly jump-kicked an opponent with both heels or when Rick claimed to have

kicked a bottle off of a table at an opponent’s head just to see if he could do it (even if

these moves were simply fantasy, they illustrate the athletic aspirations of fighters).

The conclusion of literal athletic matches is structured differently than in fighting.

Time runs out or a certain number of points are achieved. But for each, the narrative is

organized to conclude with victory and defeat, with “winners” and “losers,” or in

“draws.” Thus, fighters try to “beat” each other in two senses of the word: not only in the

sense of “attacking” but also in the sense of “defeating.” The idea in fighting is not to

simply injure one’s opponent, but to overcome the opponent’s active resistance, and to do

so by creative feats of athleticism under pressure.

During group fights there are also strong parallels with the idea of “teams.”

Groups or “firms” of European “football hooligans” are fighting teams loyal to particular

official football clubs. They spend their match days trying to fight the groups loyal to

their club’s present opponent (Armstrong 1998; Buford 1990; Collins 2008; Marsh et al.

1978). In fighting groups, different members may be known for playing different

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positions on the team. In my field site, for instance, Bob and Powel were known as

“instigators.” Neither was very skillful at the technical side of fighting—in fact, Bob was

usually downright awful—but both had a special talent for inciting strangers to attack

them during group drinking outings. At that point their friends would come to their aid,

then friends on the other side would “jump in,” and eventually some star slugger like

Chad would stroll through the crowd leveling opponents with his monster right-handed

haymakers.

The athletic metaphor is strong for observers as well. Witnesses become

audiences, forming circles or semi-circles around the fighters, constructing impromptu

arenas for the bout. On American high school campuses there is a familiar routine (see

e.g. the movie Three O’Clock High [Universal Pictures 1987]; Collins 2008). During the

day a rumor spreads that so-and-so and so-and-so are going to meet “at the wall” or “in

the pit” or at some such secluded place when the day ends. Throngs of classmates gather

at the appointed place at three o’clock, standing around talking in anticipation and

reckoning the outcome. As in most spectator gatherings there are vocal displays of

approval or displeasure.

I witnessed such a fight between high school classmates in about 1996. Notice

how the audience, myself included, treated the fight as a spectator event:

#33. Brady and Anthony Showdown. Retrospective Observation: A large crowd of about forty high school students followed a junior, Brady, and a freshman, Anthony, out into the desert after school. We had been talking about the fight all afternoon. The two squared off and pushed each other several times. Mostly they just stared at each other. After about five minutes the crowd was jeering the two. When one came too near to Rudy Baylor, an audience member, Rudy said, “You wanna get hit?” Finally Brady threw a punch at Anthony. I commented to Perry that it looked like a painful punch. He agreed,

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noting that it hit Anthony’s temple. I heard Marshal say, “Let’s see some elbows and knees.” Both boys punched each other in the face several times, stopping for as much as several minutes between exchanges.… The next day people commented at school that the fight was “weak.” They said that Anthony and Brady were “pussies” because they [took breaks and] didn’t fight continuously.

Settings like bars and other carousing scenes provide ready-made audiences of

drunken acquaintances and strangers, should the spectacle of violence arise. Rick used

the language of spectator sports to recount watching a nightclub brawl between his

military friends and a group of men from another branch of the military (Case #15). His

team was winning, so Rick felt he was not needed. Instead, he recounted, “I was just kind

of like sitting on the sidelines, drinking my beer, watching.”

The metaphorical relationship between sports and fighting works both ways and

holds in a diverse range of cultures. Sports are often viewed as violent spectacles

(consider Mayan and Roman death sports; see also Elias & Dunning [1986]).

Historically, American football has been a self-conscious training field for developing

manly toughness, aggression, and violent skill. Fighting sports like professional boxing

liberally allude to the disputatious character of “real fights,” especially before grudge

matches. To cultivate an audience, boxing promoters often establish an atmosphere of

personal conflict between opponents. Boxers and their entourages occasionally attack one

another in staged press conferences (e.g. Mike Tyson vs. Lennox Lewis). (See also

Hoffman’s [2006] discussion of practice sparring as simulation of “real” boxing.)

The metaphor of a fight as an athletic contest suggests motivations to fight,

including, first of all, to put one’s self publicly on the line in a high stakes, unpredictable

competition. Committed fighters repeatedly tell stories of these events to peers,

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narratively constructing their biographies so as to demonstrate “strong character”

(Goffman 1967). Successful fighters often report feeling a sense of gloried celebrity

among their peers, especially while they are still attending high school, much like athletes

in the literal sense (see also Adler & Adler 1989).

Fighting As “Action”

Like all sports, fighting is a form of “action” in Erving Goffman’s (1967) sense of

the term. In this special sense, action has two qualities: it presents fateful risks to the

actor and the actor enters it voluntarily for the sake of taking the risk.39 Goffman’s

archetype was an episode of high-stakes casino gambling. He noted the sub-category of

“interpersonal action,” or contests, including sporting matches, fights, arguments,

ritualized verbal aggression (e.g. “the dozens” [Labov 1972: Chapter 8]), and other

situations whose challenges consist of face-to-face competition.

To be precise, people don’t undertake action simply “for its own sake,” but

instead for its variety of experiential and symbolic attractions. In particular, action is

thrilling. Thrill itself can be understood as an emotional appreciation of a situation’s

potential damages and payoffs. Borrowing Jeremy Bentham’s term, Geertz (1973)

described the Balinese cockfight as a form of “deep play,” meaning that the stakes were

too high to be rational by utilitarian standards. The Balinese men Geertz observed bet

huge sums on cockfights—more than they could afford to lose—in order to put on the

39 As I recall, Bob once said, “We fight to fight.”

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line “one’s pride, one’s poise, one’s dispassion, one’s masculinity,” to experience “the

thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph.”

Action’s consequences can be more or less multidimensional. Certain outcomes

depend on the specific kind of action—financial ruin or hitting it big in gambling,

humiliating rebuff or a self-affirming encounter in seeking out sex partners. But others

are present in all action situations, including, most importantly, the potential to

demonstrate “character,” especially the masculine version of character.

The important consequences of fights can be divided into two categories: first, the

immediate physical consequences for the fighters’ bodies; and second, the symbolic

consequences, including attributions of success or failure and the meaning for

relationships.

Physical Consequences. In fighting, the physical stakes are usually low but the chances

of sustaining some degree of physical damage are high. To clarify by contrast, consider

the opposite risk structure found in extreme outdoor sports, what Lyng (1990) calls

“edgework.” The clearest example is skydiving, in which the physical stakes are

extremely high but the chances of harm are extremely low; skydivers die when they make

the wrong kinds of technical mistakes, but they hardly ever do. In my field setting the

typical injuries sustained in fights were minor but ubiquitous. When the techniques of

violence are punching or wrestling the modal physical harms are short-term pain, light

bruising, and cuts or scratches.

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Clean punches and kicks can certainly break ribs and facial bones, and vigorous

wrestling can break leg and arm bones, but these injuries happened in a small minority of

fights in the setting I studied. Furthermore, the symbolic meaning of injury bears on

fighters’ subjective assessment of physical risk. Smaller or less crippling factures may be

tolerated. Oftentimes fighters won’t seek medical attention for broken metacarpals (in the

hands), cracked ribs, or other fractures that do not need to be re-set (snapped or surgically

screwed back into place). On a few occasions I noticed that young men, and at least one

woman, had visibly misshapen right hands where their fifth metacarpals had healed

crooked (hand bone at the base of the pinky, called a “boxer’s fracture”). If treated

quickly, the injury can be repaired easily (medical professionals sometimes call it a

tolerable injury in an intolerable patient because it is almost invariably caused by

punching). But the procedure requires hospitalization and can cost thousands of dollars.

Chad was the only sample member I knew to have had the surgery, which attaches metal

screws and plates to the bones and leaves a telltale scar running down one’s fist.

On one occasion Moreno, an anti-racist Latino skinhead in his early twenties,

asked me to feel his most recent injuries with my fingertips. Moreno philosophized that

you need two points of intimidation to be a good fighter. For him they were height—he

was six-foot-six—and the ability to really take a punch. A few weekends or so before, as

Moreno explained, he had gotten into an argument with another skinhead who was bigger

yet. The guy had punched him first in the face and he had taken it. Moreno placed my

fingertips on his face. I could feel a pronounced ridge, apparently a fracture, running

from his left nostril down between his teeth. After Moreno took that punch his opponent

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gave up on the face and started on the body. This time he put my hand on his ribs.

Another sharp edge of a bone was poking out of place. After taking that blow without

flinching, Moreno said, his opponent was intimidated into backing down. I took

Moreno’s meaning to be that he “won” the contest of wills without even having to fight. I

wasn’t convinced that his strategy really worked all that well, but it was an instructive

lesson on the meaning of such injuries to fighters.

In my experience, persistent fighters expect not to be hurt badly and usually deny

any serious risk of being truly disabled or killed. Their perspective makes sense in light

of what the routine injuries of fighting mean to them. If most broken bones are not

considered serious injuries, and if they make good props for storytelling, then fighting

loses much of its aura of true physical danger.

In fact, most physical harm is less dramatic. But because fights happen at close

quarters and it usually takes many blows to end a fight, each side will usually take some

degree of punishment. Simply using one’s fists as the primary weapon can easily result in

soreness, swelling, or fractures in the knuckles, hands, and wrists. Still, it is easier than

most people realize to punch someone repeatedly in the face without actually leaving any

visible bruises or cuts, and so it’s very possible for everyone to walk away without

showing any evidence of having been in a fight at all.

Disabling or disfiguring injuries were extremely rare in my research and I knew

of no deaths resulting from fights. Though rare, some of the most dramatic injuries in

fight situations appeared to be those inflicted by sharp hand-held weapons. Knives were

unpopular but on occasion someone would smash a glass beer mug or bottle against an

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opponent’s head, sometimes failing to break the container, sometimes only making a

dramatic smashing impact, but at other times leaving very bloody lacerations.

In fact, the most serious physical risks came less from the fight itself than from

the possibility that the fight would lead to a more serious kind of violence—specifically,

a one-sided stabbing or shooting, or a frenzied unilateral jumping. In two different

jumpings attackers used a baseball bat and a metal kitchen blender to fracture the skulls

of people I knew. The storm of feet raining down is a terrifying enough prospect, even

without the weapons. When members of my sample did profess fear of injury, they were

usually describing the fight-turned-jumping scenario:

#101. Rick, Brian, TJ, Joe Get Themselves Jumped. TJ: there were so many people around me kicking me … And at that point I was getting really scared. ‘Cause stories of like Walter Block and people getting beaten almost to death ‘cause people just don’t stop when you’re on the ground—stories like that started coming into my mind.

It is worth noting that people do sometimes die after fistfights and fistfights-turned-

jumpings. Forensic studies find that death following fights usually results when the victor or

the victor’s partisans repeatedly kick the head of a fallen opponent (Strauch et al. 2001).

Electronic searches (using Lexis-Nexis’ Academic Universe) yield numerous newspaper

stories each year describing fighters who have died after taking unlucky falls, especially

when banging their heads against hard surfaces like concrete curbs or the corners of

barroom furniture. As sociologists have noted for decades, such chance factors often decide

the difference between life and death and the application of legal labels such as “mutual

combat,” “battery,” and “homicide” (Wolfgang 1957; Luckenbill 1977; Katz 1988).

Fistfights are also sometimes followed by shootings, as happened at least four times in my

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data (usually “for effect,” straight up into the air, rather than aimed at anyone in particular).

There is no reliable evidence to indicate what proportion of fights actually end in deaths, but

the risk was small enough in my field site that I never heard of such a case (even

secondhand).40 Thus, what ends in homicide often begins as a fight, but what begins as a

fight is very unlikely to end in homicide.

The fighters I write about expected to wake up the day after a fight feeling ill-effects

of about the same magnitude as an alcohol hangover—or, as it happened often enough,

unable to tell exactly which of their morning-after discomforts owed to the alcohol and

which to the fight.

Symbolic Consequences. Although the harm is mitigated, fighting is physically

dangerous enough for its participants to perceive some sense of risk. Perceived risk is an

essential resource for claiming the symbolic payoffs of action. More so than the physical

outcome, the symbolic upshot must take shape over time during interaction between

fighters, witnesses, and their peers as a sort of conversational “sequel” to the fight itself.

Technical vs. Moral Outcome. Evaluating success and failure is a complicated social

process. As I explain in Chapter 9, fighters often take steps to negotiate victory and

defeat during the actual fight event. Fighters may verbally admit defeat, for instance by

shouting, “That’s it. I quit! I quit!” (Case #33).

40 I did know at least two individuals that were shot to death, but their murders did not involve physical fights and the victims were not members of the core sample. At least one member of my sample was arrested for homicide after I completed fieldwork, but again, the evidence reported in news stories suggests there was no fight, only a one-sided stabbing and shooting.

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There may be overwhelming evidence of who the victor and vanquished are, as

when one opponent beats another unconscious. But draws and ambiguous or disputed

technical outcomes are more common. In these cases it can be easy to spin the evidence

in either opponent’s favor, especially in conversation with supportive friends.

Even when the technical outcome is established, the symbolic interpretation of

that outcome still remains a highly contingent matter. Unlike most organized athletic

matches (at least according to their official scoring) fights are not strictly zero-sum

games. The technical loser of a fight will still regularly make a claim to moral victory. In

fact, my dataset contains cases that fit all four possible combinations of technical

victory/defeat vs. moral victory /defeat (see Table 4.1).

Table 4.1: Cases Exemplifying Combinations of Moral and Technical Outcome.

Moral Victory Moral Defeat Technical Victory

Case #77. “Chad’s First Big Fight.” Chad unexpectedly knocks down a schoolyard bully. Feels like “the coolest person in the world.”

Case #75. “Ronnie Starts & Loses a Fight.” Norman beats Ronnie up at school, but then cries over his victory.

Technical Defeat

Case #89. “Powel’s Fight in Art Class.” Powel loses a classroom fight, but afterward “felt a lot more confident.”

Case #47. “Luke’s Big Fight in Jail.” Luke loses a fight to cellmate over milk carton. “My pride was hurt.”

The two combinations Technical Victory | Moral Victory and Technical Defeat |

Moral Defeat are the most intuitive. So below I concentrate on the two less obvious

possibilities: experiencing moral defeat in technical victory and constructing moral

victory from technical defeat.

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I observed Case #75 in about 1996, as a high school student. Although Norman

was the technical victor of the fight, at the conclusion he was clearly deeply dismayed,

experiencing it as a moral defeat. The second half of the excerpt also illustrates the social

process by which Ronnie’s supporters tried to construct a positive interpretation of the

technical outcome:

Retrospective Observation: Karen, a junior, was standing outside the cafeteria accusing Norman [another junior] of talking shit. He pleaded that he had done nothing. Then a sophomore boy, Ronnie, joined in, accusing Norman of talking shit about him. Norman protested that he had done nothing. Two girls and Ronnie’s best friend, Manuel, urged Ronnie to kick Norman's ass. Norman went into the cafeteria [apparently to get away]. The group followed him. He continued to protest, but Ronnie pursued him, and finally began throwing punches. Norman returned fire, punching Ronnie several times, knocking him down. [It seemed that Ronnie was quite dazed from Norman’s punches to his temple.] Norman then held Ronnie, looking at the crowd. Norman appeared distraught and apologetic. His punches were thrown reluctantly [but effectively, I thought]. Finally Norman let Ronnie up and started crying [and then walked away]. Everyone congratulated Ronnie on a good fight. In art class, Ronnie bragged about the fight, calling it a “draw.” After school, in a group of smokers, Manuel said that Ronnie had made Norman cry [implying that Ronnie won the fight]. I pointed out that Norman was only crying because Ronnie had forced Norman to beat him up even though Norman didn't want to fight. Manuel looked away and said, “Yeah, I guess.”

More common are cases in which one side concedes technical defeat but finds

other grounds for claiming moral victory. In Case #60 Chad punched his friend Jerry in

the face repeatedly, leaving him with black eyes and a bloodied eyebrow (see Chapter 9).

Jerry wrestled with Chad but didn’t throw any punches. Jerry is a large man. But Chad is

not only large; he is also known as a divinely blessed fighter. When Chad punches people

they frequently fall down (movies exaggerate this rare event enormously in most people’s

imaginations). They both ended up making heartfelt apologies and feeling badly at first,

but eventually Jerry reinterpreted the defeat positively. In April 2004 I showed him the

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2001 interview transcript in which he had described the fight to me. He started

enthusiastically reliving and reenacting the fight. I immediately jotted down notes on his

reaction.

Jerry boasted that he was “proud” that he kept yelling back even while “getting

punched in the face.” Acting as Chad, he threw a punch in the air and shouted, “Bam!”

Then, acting as himself, he shouted back, “Fuck you!” Then another back-and-forth:

“Boosh!” followed by “You’re a bitch!” He laughed heartily.

It is important to recognize the qualification that imputations of victory and

satisfaction with fights are never final. The symbolic upshot is open to revision every

time it is discussed or remembered and it may change with a fighter’s audience or mood.

Status and Solidarity. One popular theory is that young people fight mainly in order to

dominate their opponents, to climb a rung in the local pecking order. Applied to evidence

in my dataset, this claim helps to explain a few fights, but for the rest it is oversimplified

and often inaccurate. Dominance appears as a common theme in family violence (Gelles

& Straus 1988; Johnson 1995), stickup (Katz 1988; Wright & Decker 1997), and school

bullying (Newman 2004). Observers of violence in ghetto youth cultures report that

fighting is organized around a zero-sum competition for scarce respect, and is

instrumentally concerned with dominance for the ultimate goal of protection (Anderson

1999; Jones 2004). However, since fights in my dataset were not necessarily zero-sum

games, both combatants might achieve improved status.

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For members of this culture status was often a relevant concern, but usually not in

the strictly hierarchical sense. The status itself usually took the form of prestige or

membership in the local “violent elite” (see Collins 2004, 2008). “Chad’s First Big Fight”

(Case #76), described in Chapter 4, is illuminating for its status-transformative impact.

After winning the fight “all of a sudden I wasn’t this nerdy kid anymore.” He became a

new person on campus, befriending older, “popular kids” and “gangster” types.

Chad suggested a name for another set of important relational consequences:

“friends through fighting.” He used the phrase to describe two phenomena: building

friendships by fighting alongside one’s peers and, counter-intuitively, becoming friends

with one’s opponents.

The camaraderie of fighting as a group is the easier of the two to grasp. Sharing a

common project—especially a risky project that defines one group in opposition to

another—is a classic exercise in solidarity-building. Jerry recounted this characteristic

reaction after a large group fight at a bar. Hr described his team as feeling “really proud of

everyone for sticking together” (Case #5).

Becoming friends with one’s opponents is the more surprising phenomenon. To

understand it, one must recognize the depth of mutuality and solidarity involved in

fighting. At the most basic level, as Simmel (1905) noted, parties to a conflict necessarily

share some degree of solidarity by having a relationship and a mutual focus on the

conflict—acts of “sociation,” to use his term. By virtue of fighting with each other,

especially in front of peers, fighters also share two additional bases of solidarity noted by

Collins (2004, 2008). First, they receive the focus of their peers’ attention—a

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situationally-stratified, scarce resource. The combatants are positioned to garner prestige

by being on stage together before audiences of their peers. Second, by fighting they may

publicly claim membership in the local culture’s violent elite, the prestigious category of

people known as capable of handling themselves in violence.

During some fights opponents develop a sense of respect for how the other

conducted himself and appreciate that they both share a similar culture and attitude. The

fight may even become a convenient basis for striking up a friendship. An example from

my own experience: When I was 15 years old I had a friend, Franklin, who had just

moved to a new neighborhood across town. Soon after moving he went out vandalizing

property and threw a wad of wet biscuit dough on a white Cadillac owned by a 17 year

old, Bennie. Bennie eventually confronted Franklin, who blamed me. Previously I had

only one brief, forgettable meeting with Bennie. Franklin arranged for me and Bennie to

meet for a fight:

#34. Bennie and I Have a Showdown. Retrospective Observation: We walked about two hundred yards into the desert where the neighborhood kids had a fighting spot [called “the pit”]. Everyone [besides me and Bennie] took a seat…. [Bennie] punched me in the left cheek. I put my hands up and punched him alternately in both eyes…. [He] threw me to the ground. He punched me in the right kidney several times…. He said, “Are you done?” I said I was…. We stood up and shook hands. I said to him, “You wanna drink a beer?” He smiled and said yes. All of his friends patted me on the back and congratulated me. One of them called me “Mike Tyson” whenever we saw each other after that.

Similarly, after beating him in a fight with dozens of peers watching, Joe gave

Brandon a hug (Case #35). Gestures of solidarity between opponents like hugging and

shaking hands are more reminiscent of boxing matches than one-sided beatings. Even

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when boxers meet in grudge matches, they frequently make displays of affiliation.

Professional boxers are required to touch gloves at the beginning of the match, but they

continue to voluntarily “touch ‘em up” throughout the fight itself, especially after

possibly dirty moves, like inadvertent low blows. The most dramatic display of solidarity

is usually the post-match hug. Although the hug is almost obligatory in boxing, it can still

feel like an authentic expression of tenderness each time. When the final bell rings boxers

often drop their posture instantaneously and directly approach one another to profess their

respect.

Solidarity between “real” fighters is a contingent matter. But when it does happen,

it is based on the same social experiences as solidarity between boxers. Boxers and

fighters share public stages before admiring audiences, elevated in the stratified order of

the situation. Opponents usually feel that the fight has revealed something about the

character of each. And following the intense action, fighters may even feel that they have

developed a special intimacy with one another.

CONCLUSION

It is always somewhat arbitrary to separate the conceptual and practical sides of

human action, just as something of the experience is always lost in writing about it.

Nonetheless, doing so is useful for shedding new light on a concept and highlighting

misconceptions. The details of the meaning of fights challenge several notions about

violence held by outsiders. Witnesses and other non-participants often view fighting,

along with other violence, as fundamentally a breach of peace and safety. Institutional

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workers understand fights through professional “corrective” lenses (Matza 1969).

Criminal justice agents use the concept of “mutual combat” either to justify not making

arrests or to define each party’s action as “assault” and/or “battery.” Like police officers,

health care workers often take an “end-result” approach to understanding fights and other

violence. Their primary concern is with the nature of the resulting injuries rather than

with the end-result of legal definitions.

There is a characteristically academic issue at stake in the meaning of fighting,

one to which I return in more detail in Chapters 7 and 9. As I have explained, my

research was inspired by several related, overlapping, classic qualitative philosophies of

sociological research, which are less sharply divided than the labels below might

indicate: “symbolic interactionism” (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934), Goffman’s (1959) own

brand of Durkheimian sociology (see also Collins 1994, 2004, 2008), ethnomethodology

(see Cicourel 1974; Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984; Sacks 1992), and sociological

phenomenology (Katz 1988, 1999; Schutz 1962). Part of the point is that meaning,

emotion, and experience are endlessly creative, constitutive elements of reality. To sort

them out requires a disciplined investigation into members’ devices for categorizing

action (see Sacks 1992).

At this point it is apt to recall George Herbert Mead’s (1934: 43-44) famous

account of two dogs fighting as a “conversation of gestures.” Humans fighting are also in

a conversation of gestures, that is, communicating bodily, “a great deal [of which] has to

be without deliberation.” But there is an important difference between the two. For the

dogs each move in a fight is an instinctive response to that of the other: “offense and

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defense must not be considered,” but immediate. There is no “meaning” involved, only

movement and response. Moreover, the meaning for humans is not only constructed

afterwards, but is understood in the midst of the action. For humans much of the

“conversation of gestures” is actually “significant” in ways it cannot be for the animal.

Although “a great deal [of human fighting, boxing, or fencing] has to be without

deliberation,” it is still socially sensitive in the sense that one fighter represents to himself

what move the other is likely to make next and, at moments, considers his own range of

responses. Thus one “may deliberately feint,” knowing that one will “call out” in the

other a certain offensive gesture, intending then to parry or dodge and deliver the decisive

counter-punch. From this perspective, there is a fundamentally social basis for the “ways

of the fist” (cf. Sudnow 1976).

The substantive topic of fighting may seem quite distant from some of the

foundational philosophical concerns of the authors cited above. However, substantive

research in the same spirit can deepen our understanding of both the general principles

that underlie social life more broadly and more mundane, practical concerns, such as the

work of bureaucratic agencies such as criminal justice, education, social work, and health

fields. One thing we can see in fighting is the general lesson: we are endlessly and

minutely sensitive to the meaning of human action, our own and others’. In the everyday

world—in the “natural attitude” (Schutz 1962)—“a fight” makes immediate sense and

requires no reflection to understand, at least not for the kind of understanding one needs

to get on with the action. But for sociology and studies of violence specifically, there are

gains to be made by looking past our surface perceptions of such interactions.

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I began this chapter by explaining one level of the phenomenology of fighting:

fights seem animalistic and beyond the control of social restraint. That such urgent, high-

stakes, thrilling action should have such a precise underlying meaning (as outlined above)

is a second, deeper layer of its phenomenology. Even—or perhaps especially—when it

appears we have found the animalistic within human behavior, we may in fact have only

discovered that sociality runs much deeper than we previously supposed.

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Chapter 6. Remaining Open to Fighting in Late Youth As Powel explained at the end of Chapter 4, he felt like a “celebrity” during

adolescence. Then at age seventeen he was arrested for stealing a car and had to move

back to Illinois for a year, where he had spent the seventh grade. Now, at age eighteen, he

returned from exile for a second time. And again, he found that things had changed

dramatically during his absence. All of a sudden he was “like a washed up celebrity.”

Powel shared one memory that had stayed with him. It was his second day back.

“I went out with Luke,” he recounted:

And we went up on the hill, smoked a joint. And I remember getting really stoned, looking out over the city. Going, “Oh man, things have changed.” … And I remember his words. “What does it feel like to be an average Joe now?” So, I exhale … “Things are over, man. Things are over.” And that’s when reality came. And it was hard. It was like losing a brother.

Powel may have taken it harder than some of the others, but he was right. Things

had changed for everyone. When they left high school, the social structure supporting their

adolescent culture vanished. But their adolescent friendships and fight careers did not end

immediately. Instead they took an ironic twist.

As adolescents they had used fighting to claim the rights of adulthood. Now, as

technical “adults” they used it to claim the spirit of youth.

Most of those who began fighting during adolescence remained open to fighting

beyond high school. Among those for whom data is available, approximately 78%

(21/27) of the adolescent fighters also had at least one fight after exiting high school.

Only 1 of the 22 (5%) post-high school fighters started after high school. In this chapter I

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ask: How did they continue to make sense of their fighting lifestyle beyond high school?

What sustained their commitment? What was the culture of the group?

The endpoint of their youth would be ambiguous, but it was approaching

nonetheless. By their mid- to late twenties some of the friends would start families and

others would still be hanging out with the old crowd. Some would become professionally

successful and others entrenched in street-life. For a few years, though, they lived

together in between these worlds with competing obligations. Fighting, while it lasted,

was emblematic of their culture—a culture of noncommittal dabbling in action despite

the demands of conventional life; of holding onto intimate adolescent relationships even

as new responsibilities encroached; and of transcending the conventional status

distinctions of the same adult society they knew would eventually win them over.

FRIENDSHIP AND DIFFERENCES

As I mentioned toward the end of Chapter 4, there was a cascade of group

members who dropped out of high school around age sixteen. Most of those who

graduated immediately went on to attend universities, some eventually pursuing

advanced degrees. But there was little sense that the college students and the dropouts

were embarking on sharply different pathways in life—at least not right away. The

college students still socialized, made new friends, and met romantic partners through

their old high school networks. It was automatically assumed that the in-town college

students would party with the old crowd on weekends, but if there was something

interesting to do they would also go out on weekdays.

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Even those who left Arizona typically remained closer with their high school

dropout friends than they ever became with new acquaintances at college. Many of the

out-of-town college students and others who had moved away would return to Tucson as

often as possible. Those living in California might come back one or more weekends per

month. Those living farther away would come back at least for Thanksgiving, Christmas

and New Year, spring break, and summer vacations. They took special pride in staying

together (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1: Curtis and Sample Members,

Ages 22-24, in San Francisco (2001).

Those who went to college did well academically, but some of them felt alienated

from their new classmates. The most common complaint was about the meaning of

college friendships. As they saw it, their college classmates understood friendship as a

convenient, short-term, casual relationship—a shallow and empty view of friends as

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whomever one has been hanging out with lately. Their peers were inexplicably excited to

leave their high school experiences behind, start new identities, and find new friends.

The young Tucsonans had a much more sentimental, nostalgic view of friendship,

in some ways more closely resembling the meaning most people assign to kinship or

marriage. Like romantic couples, they used various kinds of “magical thinking” in their

relationships, proclaiming themselves “friends forever” and insisting that their

friendships were unique in the whole world. It was common to exaggerate by saying a

friendship had begun in kindergarten. Whenever good friends got together there would be

a customary round of big smiles and affectionate hugs—cross-arm style for men (one arm

above the other’s shoulder and one below), rather than wrap-around style (for one

hugger, both arms beneath the other’s shoulders; for the other above), so as not to draw

attention to differences in stature or make one of them seem feminine. At the end of

phone calls Jerry would always say “I love you” to good friends.

Friendship was a history of shared intimate experiences, taking years to develop

and not easily replaced. After Nathan had been hanging out with the group for over a year

he met one of Snoddy’s cousins for the first time at a party. “Hi, I’m Nathan,” he said.

“I’m new.”41 Everyone laughed in approval since Nathan made it clear he understood

what real friendship meant.

Their relationships involved certain commitments that exceeded even those made

by many married couples. For instance, rather than exchanging rings they expressed their

commitment with shared tattoos, symbols that can’t simply be removed on a whim. One

41 Fieldnote, May 12, 2001.

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example among many: Jerry, Toby, Chad, Bob, Snoddy, and TJ all have tattoos of each

other’s initials in a circle about two inches in diameter, leaving a space at the center

where each placed a different personal symbol (e.g. a shamrock or a Chinese character

that was supposed to mean “friendship”). Some had been close friends since age thirteen

or younger, remaining together considerably longer than many people stay married. In

adolescence, when adults had tried to obstruct their relationships, they felt like forbidden

teenage lovers. By college they believed they had proven wrong the conventional adult

wisdom that deviant friends aren’t real friends (see also Bagwell et al. 2000; Cairns et al.

1988; Giordano et al. 1986).

In fact, there were other college students with whom they shared much in

common, though many failed to realize it. They often spoke with disparaging sneers

about “frat boys” (and frequently sought them out as opponents to fight). So-called frat

boys weren’t always actual fraternity members but, instead, young men who looked like

the jocks they had known in high school. At times the young fighters I knew would

express indignant stereotypes about fraternities—in the extreme, as flocks of racist,

elitist, homophobic, date-raping, no-individuality sheep without honor. Nevertheless,

their own lifestyle shared more in common with fraternity culture than they liked to

believe: carousing as a ritual of solidarity; defining friendship as a transcendent bond

(e.g. as “brotherhood”); viewing loyalty and manly toughness as prestigious; providing

one another with audiences for stories and performances; forming a supportive

community to cope with age- and institution-specific challenges; and also, not

incidentally, admiring and participating in occasional collective fighting. The kinds of

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groups more commonly associated with violence have their own distinctive symbols and

styles of violence, but they also share these same general features (e.g. skinheads, street

gangs, tagger crews/graffiti writers, outlaw bikers, some sports teams, young military

buddies, and European football hooligans).

In my sample, being a high school dropout and being a college student were not

necessarily inconsistent. The concept of “highest level of education completed”—a

standard sociological measure—fails to capture the complex on-again-off-again nature of

some educational pathways. At least three of the eleven high school dropouts about

whom I gathered the most data eventually attended a four-year university, as did one of

the two who received a General Equivalency Diploma from an “alternative” school.

Others of them had attended or still were attending community college when I completed

the research.

Although dropping out of high school is a statistical risk factor for various kinds

of trouble and diminished opportunities, the dropouts in my sample did not follow

universally downward trajectories in life. A few, like Bob and Walter, did become

increasingly committed to criminal careers or illegal drug-centered lifestyles, becoming

regulars at the local jail or doing state prison time. Others pursued employment or higher

education with remarkable commitment.

Many of those who dropped out were not, as it might be assumed, noticeably lazy,

unwilling to work, or even uninterested in formal education. In fact, the case was often

quite the opposite. Chad, for instance, dropped out of high school and never resumed

formal education but, by age eighteen, was living on his own and supporting himself as a

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plumber. He dedicated himself to several years of apprenticeship, training under the

guidance of experienced plumbers and starting a successful career. Luke and Steve both

overcame considerable obstacles in order to attend college classes and eventually earn

Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Arizona. Getting back into school and finding

a good career may have depended on social and cultural capital, but they were also

matters of dedication to an ideal of conventional adult achievement.

By age seventeen Steve was already running a successful landscaping business

with a friend of his named Brock. They started it themselves, buying the tools—including

an old $1,500 pickup truck—or occasionally stealing them, advertising in the phonebook,

doing the bookkeeping, and writing invoices on Steve’s computer with professional

software. They never hired official employees (i.e. besides friends off the books), but

within a year or so they were doing well enough to subcontract most of their work to

other landscapers. Steve first enrolled at Pima Community College to take small business

courses. He enjoyed it, so he started taking other coursework that interested him, mainly

science and math classes.

By the time he got interested in education, he explained a few years later, he felt

too old to go back to high school. So he completed two years of coursework at Pima,

allowing him to transfer to the U of A.

I recalled that he had told me he did well at times in middle and high school, so I

asked him if he wasn’t interested in education in high school.

Not really, he told me but then corrected himself. He had always been interested

in science, but during high school he found it difficult to keep up with the responsibilities

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of “the schedule and everything.” And, he said, he “had some troubles with some of the

staff.”42

Steve continued to run the landscaping business, saving his money, until he

finally earned his Associate of Arts degree at Pima and transferred to the University of

Arizona. He was a dual-major in two mathematical sciences.

“It’s just that I love it,” he told me one evening shortly after he declared his

major. “I love all the calculus,” he continued in an enthusiastic mood, “that’s just what I

like to do.” He worked for several years as a research assistant on a federally-funded

grant and graduated with nearly straight-As. It seemed that those years working at the

landscaping business had given Steve the maturity and focus to take his coursework more

seriously than many of his younger classmates.

When Steve began attending the university full-time he made the generous

gesture of handing his stake in the landscaping business over to Luke. Luke made the

most of the opportunity, following an educational career remarkably similar to Steve’s.

He worked as a landscaper while attending community college until he saved up enough

money and earned enough credits to transfer to the university. He retired from

landscaping to double-major in philosophy and history. The Germans were his favorites,

so Luke learned their language, read their classics, and eventually visited their country

with Karen.

Appreciating Diversity

42Quotes here and below are drawn from fieldnotes, July 1, 2002.

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None of the usual sociological variables of attitudes, politics, or socioeconomic

statuses captures the distinctiveness of the group’s bond, nor do any of the typical

narratives of growing up in America. Though they came from economically privileged

backgrounds, the young Tucsonans did not view themselves as having any particular

loyalty to or affiliation with middle-class, suburban society. Their lives and relationships,

as they saw it, were organized around a deeper connection.

Although Bob never worked regularly until his mid-twenties, he remained good

friends with Chad, who lived according to a proud blue-collar work ethic. Both were

friends with Jerry, who graduated from a private university and attended an Ivy League

law school. For a while Jerry and Chad played together in a punk rock band, touring the

country in a dirty cream-colored conversion van. At times, Powel, Rick, Joe, and Justin

were outspoken in their commitments to Christianity or conservative politics. Jerry and

Chad volunteered at the far-left-leaning organization Food Not Bombs. (“Fucking

commie pinkos,” I recall Luke jesting.) Despite these outward differences, the post-

adolescent friends developed a particular cultural “habitus”—that is, a set of routine

practices, tacit knowledge about the world, and ways of seeing reality (Bourdieu 1984).

Their bond was based on a shared ethic of transcending conventional differences.

The core group was overwhelmingly white and affluent, but they grew up

routinely spending leisure time hanging out at public places, commercial locations, and

house parties in lower-income, less-white neighborhoods, such as downtown and the

South Side. They perceived a “reverse stigma” attached to their neighborhood. Tucson

teenagers nicknamed their school “North Tucson, 85797,” alluding to the television show

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“Beverly Hills, 90210.” When meeting people from other neighborhoods, some preferred

not to disclose where they had grown up. Once, when someone asked what school James

went to, I recall hearing him reply “Tucson High,” a very misleading abbreviation of

“North Tucson High School” since Tucson High’s socioeconomic profile was practically

the opposite of North Side’s.

The group’s demographic uniformity may have been largely the result of their

parents’ residential choices during the years when they formed enduring friendships, but

nonetheless it was a source of personal embarrassment. At least by late youth, their

culture was highly intolerant of racism and classism (as well as homophobia; see below).

On occasion I did hear a few friends, especially those at the fringes, making racist

comments and jokes. But overall, it was very rare that I could detect any difference in

how they acted according to whether poor or minority individuals were present. Of

course, my own demographic similarity to the group may have blinded me to some kinds

of differences.

It was clear to me, though, that many members took satisfaction in the

interactions and relationships they did have with poor and nonwhite people and that they

made efforts to find such opportunities. Their positions in the life-course and the

American class system made it practical to dabble in blue-collar jobs and live in lower-

income neighborhoods in a romantic, noncommittal spirit.

Jerry, for instance, lived for several years in a mostly African-American, working-

class section of Oakland, California. He enjoyed the blue-collar jobs where he sometimes

worked. He would frequently recount the time he spent with his American Indian, Latino,

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and black coworkers. Although he found it rewarding at the time, he never viewed this as

a permanent lifestyle. He was a university graduate, unmarried, and without children, and

was at the age when young people—especially those who possess some kind of economic

or symbolic capital—may travel or try different experiences without seriously

jeopardizing their futures.

I attended a graduation party for Snoddy at his parents’ house in May 2001. 43

It was a ritual of transition, a moment when the prospect of becoming an adult

was on everyone’s mind. There were a couple dozen “real” adults—Snoddy’s parents’

age—hanging around the backyard. Snoddy’s friends, about twenty-three and twenty-

four years old, sat in a group together, discussing the future.

Luke mentioned that he was going to graduate from the University of Arizona in

December. I asked him what he was going to do. He didn’t know yet, except that he knew

he was going to take at least a year off from further education. “See how the job market

treats me.”

I asked what kind of work he wanted to do. “You’re not going to revive [the

landscaping business] are you?” I asked.

“I hope not!” he said, but added that he was leaning toward something more blue-

collar.

Jerry chimed in to agree. He thought it was definitely good to do something “like

that.” That’s why he went and worked in a factory for a year when I got out of school.

“Especially ‘cause I was in borderline-elitist philosophy and psychology,” he explained.

43 Fieldnote, May 12, 2001.

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He just had to get out there and do some work that would remind him of “the kind of shit

people have to do to make a living.”

Before he started law school at age twenty-five, Jerry was still free to

pursue the kinds of blue-collar jobs that the Tucson friends found more socially and

emotionally rewarding. He recounted some of his experiences at a steel factory. We were

killing an afternoon and shooting the breeze when the conversation somehow came

around to his broken nose. 44

Joking around, I shook my fist at Jerry and said, “I’ll fix your nose for you.”

He laughed, admitting that he would sometimes tell people “it got broken from

boxing.” In fact, he said, “I told everyone at work that I used to box.”

“You told them that?” I knew it was not true. Jerry never boxed and his nose had

been broken for longer than he could remember.

“Yeah, well I was the only white person there.” He felt like he “had to say

something.” There was at least one occasion when Jerry “almost got caught,” though,

when a co-worker asked, “‘Hey, can you teach my nephew some moves?’” Jerry said he

declined, using the excuse that “‘it’s been a while.’” Jerry laughed with humility, as he

was inclined to do, at his own folly.

But later he spoke with pride about having taken the job. “Nobody believed I was

really going to get a job doing manual labor, but I did,” he boasted. He was particularly

proud of his relationships with co-workers. When Jerry left the job, he told me, “this

Indian guy, Ernie” gave him a good-bye card. According to Jerry, Ernie repeated his

44 Fieldnote, October 2000.

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grandmother’s maxim that “a real friend is a friend, no matter what race they are.” Jerry

seemed to have been moved by the tender gesture.

Chad was a consistent blue-collar worker, but even so, he too felt the need to

diversify his social contacts. When he moved away from Tucson for the first time he

found an apartment in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, a neighborhood where

most of his neighbors were poor African Americans. Inevitably, the reality was somewhat

less romantic than what he had imagined. Interestingly, however, when he had unpleasant

interactions in public places, it did not increase his fear of black men but instead his fear

that they would think he was afraid:

I hate to say it, but, you know, there was a definite fear of homeless, um—there was a little racial fear…. one morning I walked to my Suburban [truck]. And there was about like ten black guys sitting on the porch waiting for a shop to open…. And it looked as though—like I was walking away from them in the street…. But what I was doing was going in the street to get in my Suburban which is parked right in front. So they’re all, “Wait! Hey, hey! What’s wrong?! What are you doing?!” And I’m like, “Going to work.” And they’re all, “No, what?! What?! You can’t walk on our sidewalk?”... Ever since then I’ve had a fear like, “Oh, these guys think I’m a racist.”

As Chad explained, he had to change his style of interacting with strangers. He

was not greeted with open arms in the Tenderloin, but he did succeed in broadening his

range of daily experiences and developing what he considered a more complicated,

intimate understanding of “street” etiquette. That is, he became “streetwise” (see also

Anderson 1990; Goffman 1963a):

[At first] I would walk through and I didn’t know how to look at people. I thought maybe if I smile at everyone or nod my head that everyone would be nice to me. But it didn’t work. It made everyone ask me for change more or like want to start fights with me or always ask me if I wanted drugs or prostitutes or whatever…. Then I tried not looking at anyone. And that didn’t work. ‘Cause then all they

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want to do is get my attention. So then finally I learned the only way to deal with it is have a mean look like you’re crazy like them…. Not like being like I was tougher or I wanted to fight. You just have to like squint your eyes and look like you don’t give a fuck. That’s the only way to stop them.

Several others of his friends also moved into high-poverty neighborhoods, both in Tucson

and elsewhere. Still others dabbled in street culture while buying drugs, especially

cocaine, crack, and heroin. Certainly these experiences did not give the young suburban

friends a full sense of what it means to be poor in America, sometimes not by far. Nor

was the irony lost on them that they relied on pernicious stereotypes to seek out such

experiences. Yet, as these youth saw it, they found ways to close the distance between

themselves and those Americans whose lives were most foreign to theirs.

Most of the young men had some amiable relationships of the kind that Jerry

developed with his coworkers. The Tucsonans valued such relationships because they

often felt uncomfortable about the social distance between themselves and poorer,

nonwhite Americans (cf. Duneier 1992: Chapter 6). In a surprising way, though, they also

valued the kinds of aggressive conflicts that Chad had with his neighbors. They were

gratified by the feeling of street-wisdom, but they also appreciated such interactions as

having a deeper significance. By participating in confrontations on equal footing as face-

to-face disputants, they learned by experience that one of American culture’s most

pervasive racial fears is exaggerated: the fear that interactions with the “underclass” are

invariably dangerous for middle-class white people. They felt satisfaction at having

transcended racial and class-based fears, if only in conflict. As Chad explained of

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arguments on Tenderloin sidewalks, “I never felt threatened that they would punch me.

Not there. Here, yeah,” he said, meaning the Tucson party-scene.

There were further, more subtle, parallels between fighting and living a lifestyle

of “transcending differences.” Just as fighting is a morally ambiguous and ambivalent

form of violence in American culture, their youthful lifestyle was only a marginal

commitment, never actually preventing them from returning to mainstream affluent

futures later. And just as one sacrifices oneself and one’s body in a fight, the young

Tucsonans tried to subject themselves to some of the same hardships that poor Americans

experience, if only temporarily.

LEISURE ROUTINES

In late youth, the men and women found much of their satisfaction in life from

leisure time spent with a group of friends whom they viewed as transcending

conventional status distinctions. Partying together—that is, drinking, looking for sex

partners, and sometimes brawling as a group—was a ritual of solidarity, dramatizing their

ongoing commitment to the friendship group. Moreover, as partiers generally do, they

used carousing as an opportunity for antinomian rule-breaking and opposition to

generalized conventional authority (Collins 2008). After high school, when they got into

physical fights it was usually while partying (see Chapter 7).

The particular balance of freedoms and obligations during late youth allowed

them to maintain heavy routines of partying without risking their opportunities for

educational and occupational success later in life, when they would “grow up.” They

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often bought the cheapest possible products (including food and alcohol) and rarely

committed any resources to family or savings. It was not yet necessary to seriously

commit to work, at least not to an extent that would infringe on important friendships. At

any given time, some would be unemployed and saving on rent by living at home,

leaving free time and spare cash to spend with friends. Others lived with women who

worked regularly and helped support their socializing.

Moreover, as a group they were willing to endure levels of physical discomfort

that most grown adults would consider intolerable, including daily hangovers and lack of

sleep. People who get drunk every night do experience less intense hangovers than people

who drink rarely. Nonetheless, their commitment was staggering. At least until age

twenty, Chad claimed that four hours of sleep was ideal. He had to get up at five AM to

work as a plumber, so he would limit himself to a twelve-pack of Keystone Light beer

and go to bed at one AM on weekdays. Many of the others would stay up until five and

wake up around noon or later.

Given the opportunity, the friends would go out in groups of two to several dozen,

night after night, sometimes for weeks on end. The ideal of unlimited leisure was most

closely approximated during summers when “everyone” was back in town. The college

students would have few formal obligations and would constitute the critical population

needed to sustain nightly group outings. In one set of field-notes in September 2001, for

instance, I recorded an outing to a nightclub with at least thirty-four people I knew by

name (plus their friends whose names I did not know, and, of course, the other bar

patrons). Some local friends even quit their part-time jobs in order to spend more time

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socializing. For months on end every day would be a race to get through the hangover

mornings, back to the eleven-hour-euphoric-adrenaline-rush nights. Periods of freedom

from responsibility were pursued with such vigor—such resolve to carry on despite the

inevitable physical exhaustion—that one got the impression the friends knew their time

together could only last so long.

They divided socializing activities into two major groupings, “hanging out” and

“going out.” The former referred to casual socializing, usually during the day, at a

friend’s house or a restaurant. It could be a pleasant way to kill an afternoon and catch up

on gossip, but it usually felt like waiting around to go out—that is, for the more important

and exciting nighttime outing.

Going out included a few specific kinds of activities. The friends might go to bars

or nightclubs to “have a few drinks” or for a “big night out”—in other words, to go

carousing and looking for trouble (see Chapter 7). Below I recount outings to people’s

residences. They distinguished between “get-togethers” and “house parties.” House

parties were anonymous and had presumptive open-door policies, attracting dozens or

even hundreds of people. There would be fewer people at get-togethers, usually between

half a dozen and two dozen, and virtually everyone would know each other (and,

importantly, anyone unfamiliar would be introduced by name). As I explain, they used

each kind of outing to establish solidarity, but in different ways. Get-togethers were

opportunities to privately establish personal intimacy, while house parties were

opportunities to publicly confront outsiders. Both, however, dramatized “transcending

differences” as the basis for solidarity.

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Wittgenstein’s Dog

The physical locations of and social interactions at get-togethers revealed much

about the group’s habitus. It was very important to the group to have a “home base” at all

times, somewhere to gather almost nightly. Preferably it would be a house or a duplex

rather than an apartment so neighbors wouldn’t complain about the noise. (By their early

twenties they were beginning to care.) In Tucson, like much of the Southwest, many

rental units are small stucco or adobe brick houses with one or two bedrooms, carports,

and small dusty yards. Starting in their early twenties Luke and Karen’s place became the

favorite spot. They continued to live in racially diverse, blue-collar Midtown Tucson.

Still childless and property-less, they had yet to face the distinctively middle-class,

“adult” dilemma of whether to move to affluent neighborhoods with better schools or to

continue living where they felt most comfortable. For Luke and Karen, that meant

remaining in neighborhoods where they wouldn’t have to feel isolated from people who

do “honest work,” as Luke would say. He saw nothing inconsistent about admiring

honest work and earning most of his income as a drug dealer or bookie. Karen worked at

an airline and attended the university, both part-time.

Several days a week Luke would wake up early and clean every inch of their

cramped but tidy one-bedroom duplex (they usually maintained good relations with

neighbors and an “understanding” that allowed frequent partying). The living room was

set up for people to gather and watch television—exemplifying the American home-as-

entertainment venue ideal which came within the reach of most working households in

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the second half of the twentieth century (Halle 1984). There was a loveseat, a three-

person couch, and a recliner arranged around a vast wooden entertainment center, in

which a large TV was hooked up to cable with premium movie channels. They had

various other electronics, stacks of DVD movies, and several shelves of books. Their

animals would lay around on the furniture most of the time: a dull-witted hound dog

named Red, a yappy little black Schipperke called Cubby, and Katze, a stray cat they

took in. A narrow, knee-high, wood and glass coffee table ran the length of the larger

couch, which faced the television directly. Little doors opened into a compartment where

Luke and Karen kept news magazines, remote controls, knick-knacks like batteries and

screwdrivers, and pieces of marijuana and tobacco paraphernalia. In back of the house,

underneath a brown wooden awning, there was a concrete patio where they kept a

barbecue grill, washing machine, and various other large items, everything coated in dust:

bicycles, punching bags, card tables, and a couple of old couches. They had a good-sized

backyard for central Tucson, covered in scraggly grass which they hardly ever cut,

mainly because Luke pledged never to do yard-work after quitting the landscaping

business.

Luke would spend most mornings and afternoons reading several newspapers and

magazines and watching news programs on TV. At most sunsets he would go to the

kitchen and take a tumbler from the china hutch—their prized possession, filled with shot

glasses from around the world, dusty tokens, pieces of historical memorabilia,

photographs of trips around the US and overseas, and other sentimental trinkets. He

would always place ice cubes in the cup first, then pour room-temperature scotch over

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them, and add a little water. One or more of his friends would usually come over to hang

out and sit on the couch while “shooting the shit,” watching TV, drinking beer, and

smoking pot.

There was a particularly revealing moment during one get-together at Luke and

Karen’s in June of 2003, which I documented the next day in my fieldnotes. It was

Karen’s twenty-fourth birthday. Earlier in the day Luke had called to invite everyone

over for a barbecue. He wanted to “get started” early, he said, indicating that the occasion

was special. I arrived around seven PM to find Cato, Gilbert, Moe, Jordan, David,

Hernandez, Manuel, Larson, and possibly a couple of others. Will, Brandi, Steve, and

Karen’s sister stopped by to sit and talk for a while before leaving. A couple of Karen’s

female friends also came by. Everyone was standing around the backyard in small

clusters, drinking lots of beer while grilling chicken breasts, hamburgers, and pork ribs.

Some were smoking joints.

After a couple of hours the conversation had turned to academic matters, which

seemed a bit out of place given the level of drunkenness by then. Luke and I were talking

to Karen’s seventeen year-old sister, who would be going to college soon. Then Gilbert,

Luke, and I talked for a while about sociology and philosophy. Gilbert mentioned debate,

something he studied while attending university for a year or so. Luke scoffed, making

some objection about how argumentation “violates the Categorical Imperative,” which he

explained, when I asked, was a term used by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. At a certain

point Luke’s younger brother Jimmy joined the conversation and I decided to exit. Luke

and Jimmy argued about the Categorical Imperative as I walked toward the barbecue.

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Manuel and Hernandez were acting rather indignant about the philosophical turn

in the conversation. “Speak English motherfuckers!” Hernandez shouted, “What the fuck,

man, talking about philosophy-fucking-this-fucking-that, nonsense and shit!” He and

Manuel continued to laugh and joke, mocking Luke and his brother. Hernandez declared

that he wouldn’t go to “some party and speak fucking Asian or some shit man!”

Luke was an intellectual type, usually a modest one, and a self-defined “stoic.”

When provoked, he would speak intelligently on international politics, the history of art,

gangsta rap, or professional sports. He was physically unimposing, short and paunchy,

always wearing faded, basic clothes: blue jeans, t-shirts in solid colors, and dingy

sneakers. The most striking characteristic of his personality was his unconditional yet

understated self-assurance. According to Luke, as a child he steadfastly refused to learn

or even try to write in cursive. It didn’t make sense to have two handwriting styles.

Knowing him as an adult it is not hard to imagine him coolly shaking his head, resisting

the pressures that his elementary school teachers must have tried to apply. As an adult he

still signed his name in capital block letters. Luke certainly had moments of drunken

foolishness, but they were overshadowed by moments of sensitivity and insight. He

seemed unusually perceptive at times, remaining quietly pensive during moments when

most people would feel compelled to say something. As Chad once said, for some reason

everyone wanted to tell their problems to Luke even though he never had any advice—

which was the point, since this was how one knew he understood.

Although Hernandez and Luke had been close friends since 1994, one wouldn’t

have guessed it at first glance. Hernandez, who was about two years younger than Luke,

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did not work regularly and never finished high school or pursued further education.

Hernandez was tall, heavy, and imposing, often wearing a shaved head and full black

beard. He was one of the leaders in a clique of young graffiti artists. He wore youthful

urban hip-hop fashions: baggy pants, sports jerseys or bright t-shirts with labels by stylish

designers, and spotless basketball or skateboarding shoes. His gravelly masculine voice

was colored by a Latino accent and tone of jaded wryness. Hernandez spoke openly of

cruelty, shame, and suffering, giving one the impression he understood hard-living, yet

with such sensitivity that one felt he must also be quite compassionate.

I went inside with Manuel and Hernandez to listen to some hip-hop CDs on the

computer, leaving Luke and Jimmy outside with Immanuel Kant. Hernandez began

tagging up various pieces of paper and other objects in the kitchen with a thick gold paint

pen. We spoke about the kinds of graffiti I would see in the mostly-Latino Hollywood

neighborhood where I lived at the time, and he talked about going there to “write” some

of his own.

Luke came into the kitchen. He went to the back of the room and returned with a

homemade poster. As Luke explained, it was an old collage that he had made as a class

project at the university. It depicted the biography of Luke’s hero and one of history’s

great miserable geniuses, the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Luke had

pasted a number of black-and-white photographs of Wittgenstein and paragraphs of

printed text onto a large, rectangular piece of purple construction paper. Since the course

ended he had posted it on his kitchen wall above the refrigerator.

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Drunk and unselfconscious, Luke started reading excerpts and telling people

about Ludwig. It was a very strange thing to be doing, I thought. Can you do anything

more square at a get-together than show off your homemade collage of Ludwig

Wittgenstein? Hernandez and Manuel had already been visibly annoyed by Luke’s

intellectualizing about the Categorical Imperative. What were they going to say now that

he had actually brought out a homemade philosophy poster for show-and-tell? Surely

Luke was in for some verbal abuse.

But, to my surprise, Hernandez listened patiently. When Luke looked at him and

waited for a response, Hernandez asked with no hint of mockery if that was “that dude”

who read about the Catholic priest and then started writing down all his sins and

confessing them to his friends.

It was immediately apparent to me that there was a long history behind this

strange moment in the kitchen. I knew that Luke had carefully read the biography of

Wittgenstein called Duty of Genius (Monk 1990). It describes how Wittgenstein read St.

Augustine’s Confessions and was inspired—perhaps “possessed by a compulsion” is the

right phrase—to confess a long list of his own wrongs to his friends. Poor Ludwig’s

friends considered him insane when he insisted that they meet face-to-face and listen as

he recounted his personal history of reportedly benign yet bizarre faults. It was a

tragically comic moment in his sad life.

Clearly, Luke had told Hernandez about Wittgenstein’s biography in some detail

during a previous conversation and Hernandez had remembered. Although I doubted

Hernandez would have been at all inclined to study up on the biographical minutiae of

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dead European thinkers, they had somehow shared this piece of information which was

so meaningful to Luke. What patience must Hernandez have had in that previous

conversation to listen as Luke told him about the psychology of some long-dead

philosopher? What intimacy must the two of them have had in order to share such details,

so important to one’s identity but so irrelevant to the other’s?

What vulnerability for each, standing there in the kitchen, Luke opening himself

to scorn and Hernandez risking the appearance of ignorance.

Luke looked at Hernandez, nodded, and said, “Yeah.” They started to laugh.

Hernandez continued, “Like how he killed a dog when he was a little kid and

shit?”45 They started laughing louder. Sitting there at the table, I remained silent, finding

it such a private, touching moment.

It was not only their vulnerability that was so striking, but also the more general

quality of their culture that it represented. During this scene, each had dramatized his own

individual personality and, by implication, the differences between them. The parallels

were compelling. Hernandez was tagging pieces of paper in the kitchen, displaying the

artwork that was so central to his identity. Then Luke brought out a piece of paper of his

own, a creative document of his identity. In terms of content, their artistic projects could

not have been more different, the one drawn from the culture of impoverished urban

streets, the other from the elite institutions of old world academia. Luke and Hernandez

not only dramatized their differences; they appreciated them. In fact, the whole get-

45 I did not recall at the time nor could I later find reference to this incident as one of Ludwig’s sins, so I assume, as I did then, that one of them invented it in a previous conversation to illustrate. In fact, the details of Ludwig’s wrongs remain mostly unknown to his biographers.

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together might be viewed as a stage for transcending the conventional status distinctions

among the group’s members.

Entrapment

Large anonymous house parties were popular carousing opportunities, particularly

between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one—not incidentally, the period between the

official transitions to driving and drinking ages. Residents of a house would invite all of

their friends to come over on a specific night for drinking and partying. They in turn gave

all their friends permission to invite over whomever they wanted. Those friends assumed

they had permission to do the same. Lines of communication spread out, drawing in wide

networks of people, many of them strangers to each other. The age distribution would

usually be concentrated around eighteen. Oftentimes the “hosts” were high school

students whose parents were out of town. Sometimes they were college students living

alone for the first time.

The most enjoyable parties could contain a couple hundred people at their peak,

often bursting out of backyards and front doors and spilling onto sidewalks and streets.

On the suburban North Side the houses would be secluded from foot traffic, but in lower-

income residential and densely populated Mid-town neighborhoods, parties would attract

attention from potential partiers who happened to walk or drive past. Parties near the

university would draw the most diverse crowds, usually including some mix of college

students (usually identified by my sample members, correctly or not, as frat boys and

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sorority girls), taggers and gang-bangers, “mature” high school students, “youthful”

grown adults, and occasionally a couple of homeless men.

Sometimes one could discern one or more large groups of a couple dozen friends

who had come there together. When multiple unfamiliar friendship groups were at the

same party, expectations would be high that two of them might brawl, sustaining a sense

of excitement all night long. Based on anecdotal impressions, I would hypothesize that

the most dangerous parties are those consisting mainly of two or more distinct, similarly-

sized groups. Not only do large groups increase the odds that each individual will act

violently (by distributing conflicts among coalition members), but the members view

these situations as attractive opportunities to dramatize solidarity in combat.

Various situations at house parties could lead to violence, but at least ten cases of

violence in my dataset followed one specific scenario: two groups of strangers spatially

segregated themselves across a yard or house and then eyed each other suspiciously until

someone got into an open argument (Cases #5, #16, #98, #99, #101, #105, #113, #162,

#181, and #184). I describe a similar situation below, although it ended as a near-fight.

Over time the sample members heard about fewer of these potentially thrilling

gatherings. It seemed that above age twenty-one enough people preferred bars to reach a

tipping point in their communication networks, after which it was considerably harder to

hear about house parties through friends. Nonetheless, many of them continued to attend

as long as they could, on rare occasions as late as their mid-twenties. Interestingly,

adolescents saw these parties as brief glimpses of what adult freedom must be like, but

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for young adults, just a few years later, they became nostalgic reminders of the

spontaneity and excitement of teenage glory days.

One party illustrated the multiple transitions and ambiguities of late youth. As far

as house parties go, it was a fairly tame one. The scene I described in my fieldnotes

illustrates how looking for trouble made social life exciting and meaningful, regardless of

whether a fight actually happened. It was a time when the members were starting to

withdraw from fighting, so they no longer picked fights openly. Nonetheless, on this

occasion I felt they were trying to entrap a number of strangers into committing a hate

crime, thus creating a sense of fighting for justice and combating prejudice, however

misguided. I wish I could say I made no contribution to this case of “entrapment,” but I

made no effort to discourage it, so my presence would have been taken as partisanship by

everyone present.

It was one AM on September 3, 2000, and the Wooden Nickel had just closed for

“bar-time.” At the time a number of the friends were regulars for Saturday night Karaoke

at the Southeast Side strip-mall tavern. When the Nickel closed, the group would either

find a party somewhere or have a get-together at someone’s house. I was with eight other

men, all between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three: Snoddy, Chad, Nathan, TJ,

Jerry, Tray, Aaron, and Aaron’s out-of-town friend who claimed to be a former

professional baseball player. Everyone was calling around on their cell phones. TJ got in

touch with Juan, who was at a house party near the university. Juan said to come over, so

we all headed out.

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We met Juan, Rick, and Rick’s military buddy Nelson there. When we arrived

there were only about twenty-five people there. By the standards of the house party scene

our group was middle-aged, all in our early twenties. Everyone else appeared to be

college-aged, about nineteen to twenty-two. The party was lively, but not wild. The house

was quite small, so when the living room filled up, people spilled through the narrow

kitchen and out to the front yard. There was one keg of beer, still half full. Several slim,

pretty young women were dancing on a large coffee-table in the living room, enjoying

the attention of a group of men who stood in a circle gawking at them. The standard

college-age female fashions of the time required garments made of solid pink, black, and

reddish fabrics that fit tightly over the frame, just elastic enough to make it impossible to

hide any bodily imperfections beneath. The men would wear casual, baggy clothes that

hung off their shoulders and waists like cotton curtains, the only visible buttons being

those on the rows of cargo pockets that saddled their khaki shorts.

Tray and Juan knew more people at the party than the rest of us. They were

alternately mingling with two groups that were otherwise staying separate. Everything

seemed peaceful and casual for about an hour or so, up until Tray came walking over to

our side of the party. We were standing around in the front yard, plastic keg cups in hand.

One of the strangers (to me, anyway), it turned out, was an old acquaintance of Tray’s

from North High named Trevor Weiland.

Tray made a dramatic announcement, pointing into the house. Trevor Weiland,

Tray claimed, was inside “talking shit” about Aaron, TJ, and Nathan. He was reportedly

calling them “faggots” and saying “that someone should kick their asses.” Tray said he

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had already confronted Trevor and he was now consulting everyone about whether or not

he should beat Trevor up for this offense. Although Tray seemed mainly concerned that

his friends had been insulted, everyone else focused on the fact that the insult was a

homophobic one (including those who had reportedly been insulted).

According to Tray, Trevor Weiland was in Tucson “on leave” from the Marines.

His body certainly looked like the typical nineteen-year old military male body, of

average height and physically fit. He carried himself in the awkward posture of “new

muscle”—the stance of high school football players and other newly-fit males—the stiff,

elbows-out, square-shouldered pose that betrays an exaggerated perception of how one’s

own body appears to others. Trevor was inside talking with a group of larger men who

looked athletic and aggressive to me. They seemed to have about as many teammates as

us.

Chad proposed an alternative, “nonviolent” plan. At this time in his life, Chad

would encourage his friends to be nonviolent and was also advocating feminism and gay

rights. He was more vocal in these opinions than his friends, but they generally agreed. In

fact, most of them had gay friends, and a few of the group’s straight, core males had even

had homosexual encounters themselves, although they were sometimes shy about

discussing them. One constant throughout Chad’s biography was his spontaneous,

ambitious sense of humor. His solution to the present dilemma was for the entire group to

start acting as gay as possible—to turn the insult back on those who issued it and delight

in their unreasonable homophobic discomfort. Although the ostensible charade was to

feign homosexuality, the plan itself was also a charade—that is, to pretend that the group

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was avoiding a fight even though everyone knew full well that the idea was to indirectly

provoke one. Starting trouble was not the only goal. It would also be good for a few

laughs and no doubt make a good story. Everyone immediately, enthusiastically agreed.

Chad tied his t-shirt into a knot in front to simulate a bikini top, as teenage girls

sometimes do, letting his naked beer belly hang out over his belt. Nathan and Aaron

unbuttoned their shirts completely, exposing hairy chests and stomachs. Then Chad and

Nathan walked into the living room with big smiles on their faces. They got up on the

coffee-table, where Trevor’s group had been watching the girls dance. Now Chad and

Nathan started dancing and groping each other to the loud rap music with the bass turned

up. They laughed out loud while trying to do the Lambada, the popular suggestive Latin

dance of the day. Neither was very graceful. Jerry watched with amusement and decided

to unbutton his shirt as well. Then Chad climbed down and led TJ into the bathroom,

where he started making loud sex noises that everyone could hear throughout the small

house.

During all this Trevor’s group became visibly disgusted and exited the living

room. I stayed in the kitchen, where I could watch the homoerotic antics inside but also

monitor the homophobic reaction in the front yard. About eight men had now gathered

outside. They were talking and gesturing in ways that indicated they were planning to

beat our group up. There were other men at the party, but it was unclear whether they had

any loyalty to our antagonists.

Jerry shared Chad’s attitudes, including the belief that violence is a last resort to

be used only in self-defense. He seemed to see himself as the conscience of the group,

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sometimes being the only one to dissuade the others from violence. When Jerry saw the

antagonists grumbling outside, he said he thought it was better to try to “educate” than to

fight them. He walked outside, I suppose, to give them an earnest lecture. But when Jerry

returned to the kitchen he had changed his mind. He said that when he approached he

heard them saying, “Let’s kill those faggots.” Jerry now said they were evil and it would

be justified to beat them up.

Chad came up with another idea. He took Nathan aside and convinced him to strip

off all of his clothes (underwear included) except for a shirt, and then run a lap through

the inside of the house. We all laughed as he did it.

Our side was assembled around the front door, still maintaining the double-

charade. It was an odd scene. On the kitchen side of the door stood this group of about a

dozen large men (besides me and Juan, all standing 5’11” - 6’7” and weighing about 170

- 230 pounds), grinning widely and laughing out loud, affecting stereotyped gay voices

and exaggerated feminine mannerisms, all while still wearing their improvised costumes.

On the other side, maybe ten or fifteen feet away, stood a group that was similar in

stature and numbers, but opposite in mood. They were scowling and muttering to one

another, casually smacking closed fists into cupped palms, wearing the hyper-masculine

fashions of gangsta’ rap. It seemed like violence would begin any second.

Trevor’s group stayed put. Maybe they were trying to decide whether it was

acceptable to fight gay men or maybe they were worrying about the prospects of losing a

fight to gay men. Perhaps they were wondering what would possess this crowd of

strangers to try to start a fight by pretending to be gay.

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Finally, Trevor Weiland said loudly to his friends, “Man, there’s too many

faggots here.” He suggested they “get out of here” and go for “some tacos at Nacho’s.”

Nacho’s Tacos was a 24-hour Mexican fast-food restaurant where various groups of

young, drunk Tucsonans gathered after midnight. It was the default place to go looking

for trouble at the end of the night when other options had failed. They all agreed, driving

off in a few different cars.

We all laughed. Ostensibly, this was the correct result. Yet it seemed everyone

was secretly disappointed. Perhaps Trevor’s group was not as different from us as we had

thought. They weren’t willing to attack nonviolent opponents, either—not even ones who

were obviously trying to provoke them.

The excitement was over and it was getting late by then, so our group prepared to

leave as well. We all stayed together and left at once, just in case the other group only

pretended to leave and was actually waiting somewhere nearby to ambush a few

stragglers, or perhaps just to draw out the ritual of solidarity for a few more moments.

While driving home I discovered that Trevor’s crew had indeed gone to Nacho’s Tacos. I

saw a crowd of a few dozen young men apparently facing off for battle, Trevor’s crew

among them. I pulled over to watch, but someone must have pulled a gun, because

suddenly young men were leaping over parked cars and jumping into moving ones to get

away. The entire parking lot emptied, tires screeching, in seconds.

Practically speaking, it may be doubtful that the case of entrapment could have

benefited the cause of gay rights in any way. (If anything, I would speculate the

opposite.) To be sure, the youthful friends’ lives were organized around fun and thrills,

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but they also considered it important to live according to their own notions of justice and

virtue. As they saw it, they were actually living out the exciting epic battle between their

progressive youthful morality and the diffuse forces of prejudice and repression.

POST-ADOLESCENCE AND THE MEANING OF FIGHTING

For these youth, the meaning of fighting was inseparable from the meaning of

their biographies and friendships. Their culture was made possible by the extended period

of post-adolescence in contemporary affluent America. Until the mid-twentieth century

or later, youth were forced to choose between either outsider-subcultures or mainstream

adulthood after they left high school. After the 1960s, however, with the confluence of

late youth as a demographic trend and oppositional styles as a cultural movement, young

people from affluent backgrounds have become increasingly free to defer full

commitment to either.

Of The Liminal and The Criminal

During adolescence, the Tucson friends had used fighting as a practical solution

to the existential dilemmas of being rebellious students. During late youth, they still

found fighting functional and rewarding, even as the challenges they faced changed.

Fighting is such a useful, adaptable symbol because it straddles the boundaries of so

many of the broader culture’s fundamental values: between right and wrong, safety and

danger, freedom and responsibility, courage and cowardice, civility and savagery,

conflict and solidarity, creativity and destruction. Unlike the many members of the

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society who inhabit one side or the other, these youth prided themselves on traveling

across class lines and moral worlds. They were capable of walking society’s back alleys

as well as its respectable avenues. At least they were for the moment.

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Chapter 7. Looking for Trouble

“I love to fight.” Angel was a Latino former gang-banger with two strikes (as he

claimed) 46 and a bullet still lodged in one buttock, living in the Los Angeles halfway

house next to my apartment building. The first time we ever spoke, he said it. Brentano

was a preppy white guy from a wealthy New York suburb, living on my dorm floor in

Madison, Wisconsin. He used to say it all the time.47 People from diverse backgrounds

share this sentiment: skinheads, college athletes, high school outcasts and high school

celebrities, police officers, ex-cons, military types, and ordinary drinking men and

women.

“Because it’s fun,” many of them say when asked why they love to fight. A

former police officer and current assistant professor used that exact phrase after I finished

a presentation for a small academic audience.48 He and his law enforcement colleagues

used to fight and he claimed the reason was really that simple. The fighter’s explanation

is revealing but as a sociological theory it is inadequate. Fighting isn’t inherently fun. For

one thing, some people don’t view it that way at all, including most of the universe of

people who avoid fights. For another, even fighters don’t view it that way all the time.

People do sometimes smile and laugh during fight situations, but at other times they

growl, cry, beg for help, and even lose consciousness and have seizures. So when do

46 I.e. two felony convictions of the three required at the time to apply potential life sentences for habitual offending in California. 47 Sources: Angel, fieldnote; Brentano, recollection. 48 Source: notes written during commentary on my presentation.

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people actually find fighting gratifying? And what, exactly, are the gratifications? To

answer these questions, I describe the details of one revealing activity.

Many of my sample members made a routine of “looking for trouble.” Sometimes

they would start planning to fight long before discovering any particular conflict or even

a specific opponent. Looking for violent trouble is neither necessary nor sufficient for

actually doing violence, so in this chapter I treat it as an independent phenomenon in its

own right. In order to actually go through with a fight people must still solve the practical

problems of finding specific conflicts and summoning violent emotions—the topic of

Chapter 9.

In this chapter I explain how members of my sample went looking for trouble and

why. They had three, related reasons: in order (1) to achieve solidarity, prestige, and

membership in the local elite; (2) to test their own “character”; and (3) to tell stories

about it later. These motivations are not exclusive to trouble. The satisfactions of

membership, discovering one’s own “strong character,” and talking about one’s fine

performances later are pervasive in social life. Looking for violent trouble is only one of

several practical means to achieving them, but one that is particularly suited to the culture

of youthful “action” crowds. I conclude by arguing that the thrill of fighting is an

emotional appreciation of the symbolic challenges of fighting, not simply a biological

reaction to physical danger.

MEMBERSHIP

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Preparation could begin well in advance of actual outings, even months ahead of

time. Members of the friendship network I knew viewed special occasions as the most

likely times for trouble, especially holiday drinking outings and outings while friends

were “back in town.” The next big special event was always a popular topic of

discussion. Even if there wasn’t a holiday or long weekend coming soon, one of many

out-of-town friends would be “coming home” for one of many weekend trips. Steve and

Will discussed one highly anticipated trip in 2002. To the best of my recollection, as I

wrote in my fieldnotes the following day, our March 20 conversation went approximately

as follows.

Steve and I had been walking down Fourth Avenue, a popular strip of bars near

the University of Arizona campus. Will was working at a small nightclub on Fourth, so

we stepped in to talk for a few minutes. We talked casually about current events in the

friendship group: who was instigating fights, who was “smoking crack,” and/or who was

“doing good” at work or school. The rumor was that Chad and Danny were planning to

visit sometime in the next few months.

Both Steve and Will recounted stories about how Powel had been starting a lot of

fights recently. We were all laughing. Steve commented that Powel was turning into an

“instigator.”

Wait until Danny and Chad get into town, Will said. The fighting would only

escalate then.

“Oh yeah, no shit,” Steve agreed. Danny always “causes something to happen.”

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Will nodded vigorously and rolled his eyes. He added that Danny was especially

likely to “make sure something happens” when he and Chad got together.

Steve nodded in agreement and then he shook his head a moment later. “No way

around it.”

The tone of the conversation was typical, expressing a theory of violence that

many members of the group shared. That trouble would happen was certainly predictable,

but the specific details were not. They acknowledged that some members, some

combinations of members, and certain of their actions (getting together while “back in

town”) were partly responsible for trouble. But they simultaneously described their

involvement in the trouble as passive. Trouble “happens” and they “get into” fights. Even

when Danny “causes” or “makes” trouble, he only makes it “happen,” as if his role is

only to catalyze independent forces.

In one sense fighters use this account to rationalize or neutralize moral

responsibility (see Scott & Lyman 1968; Sykes & Matza 1957). But in another sense it is

a sophisticated sociological theory: people indirectly “cause” trouble to happen by first

contributing to the collective social conditions for trouble—that is, group processes

beyond any individual’s control—and then finding themselves subject to those

conditions.

Especially after exiting high school, most members held a complicated,

ambivalent attitude toward trouble. They considered it juvenile and morally offensive to

openly incite violence for its own sake (although I discuss exceptions), but nonetheless

they did things to find it. Trouble and fighting were certainly welcome turns of events but

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members of the group preferred to see themselves as reacting to the conditions for

violence rather than creating them. How, then, to find trouble without forcing it? The

most expedient solution was to join collective activities in which no single individual, or

even any particular group of friends, would create the conditions for trouble alone.

During early adolescence, schools did much of the work of organizing the

conditions for “finding” trouble. In the following paragraphs I focus on a different

opportunity for trouble, one that becomes possible only later in youth: carousing.

Members of my sample started carousing once they had a friend or two old enough to

drive—once they could make their way to collective “action” scenes like house parties,

punk rock concerts, or nightclubs in Mexican border towns.

Carousing scenes are a special kind of social situation, described in sociological

detail by Collins (2008). Carousing and fighting share several goals in common,

including the projects of creating “action,” constructing a “situational elite,” and making

good stories. Carousing includes all of the important ingredients for trying to get into

physical fights, but also for finding sex partners, scoring drugs, drinking to excess,

destroying things, and quarrelling with strangers. It involves large gatherings of people

who create collective action and disorder in a spirit of mischievous anomie. People pack

densely and disregard ordinary restraints, thus creating numerous opportunities to interact

with strangers. Crowds of people dance, joke and laugh, watch drunken spectacles

together, talk openly with anyone standing nearby, and put their hands on each other with

various intentions. Importantly, the crowd’s focus of attention is stratified and constantly

changing (see also Collins 2004). Numerous audience members watch smaller clusters of

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people making interesting spectacles, whether they are fighting, dancing like fools,

sexually groping each other, or just lying in their own vomit.

Where the Trouble Is

There was a big fight during a 1998-99 New Year’s Eve party (Case #16). I was

there, and as I recalled, Bob’s friends expected trouble but didn’t avoid it. He explained

that he already knew most of the people who would be hosting and attending the party.

During a tape-recorded interview in December 1999 I asked him, “So did you

think there was gonna be any trouble that night?”

“Yeah. ‘Cause they don’t like me,” Bob affirmed. He stopped speaking, taking it

for granted that it makes sense to go to parties where the hosts and other guests don’t like

you.

I pressed him to explain further, “But you went to the party anyway?”

“Went to the party anyway.” His exasperated tone implied I was an idiot for even

having to ask. “It was the main thing going on. It was where everybody was going to be.

We just decided to go. It was a freaking New Year’s party!”

From an empirical perspective, Bob’s group (myself included) was indeed

contributing to the collective conditions for violence by going and participating in this

setting. But from the members’ perspective, such places were dangerous independent of

their own contribution and beyond their own control. Most nights the friends arranged to

look for trouble without saying a word about it—simply going out together was

considered a tacit agreement to look for action and to “back each other up.”

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House Parties. Big house parties present countless opportunities for action and trouble

between strangers. At the wildest parties residents would charge $2 - $5 at the door for

the standard 16-ounce plastic keg cups, bright red like clowns’ noses. There would

always be a few people trying to drink without paying, sometimes by smuggling in

contraband clown nose red keg cups. Stealing was more common at adolescent parties,

but young adults continued to break things accidentally and make all kinds of horrible

messes. Some public vomiting was almost mandatory at large house parties and, of

course, there would be a constant stream of men going outside to urinate around the

periphery of the house. Every once in a while some young man would get blind drunk

and urinate right in the middle of a room, maybe even with a crowd watching and

laughing at him. Trying to keep people from smoking in carpeted areas was often a

hopeless battle. And unless hosts managed to exercise extraordinary control over their

“guests,” any alcohol in the house would be discovered and drunk. It didn’t matter how

much alcohol there was. More people would come, they would stay as long as necessary,

and they would fill the trunks of their cars with the alcohol if they had to. One way or

another, the party would continue until every last drop was gone.

Besides antagonism, another major excitement was seeking out sex partners, an

activity with interesting parallels to looking for fights. Both getting laid and getting in a

fight would typically begin with a loosely structured “pick-up,” and for both activities the

preferred partners were strangers. The men in my research would spend much of the

night checking out the other partygoers, sizing them up for appropriateness and trying to

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make eye contact. Upon entering they would quickly scan the crowd, making note of one

or two groups of “hot girls” and “big dudes” and commenting about each to their friends.

Initial eye contact might be established right then.

Strangers made ideal partners because they promised noncommittal encounters.

Group members did fight their friends sometimes, but they rarely did so in public

contexts and rarely tried to find reasons to do so, as they did with strangers. Fights with

friends damaged relationships and required prolonged series of apologies, sometimes

involving uncomfortable stretches of crying. Likewise, outside of longer-term romantic

relationships, the men preferred to have one-time sexual encounters with strangers or at

least distant acquaintances. (I am less certain about the women’s sexual preferences.)

However, it was relatively infrequent to successfully meet and then have sex with a

complete stranger in the same night. In practice, they regularly settled for “hooking up”

with opposite-sex friends or friends-of-friends toward the end of the night, but this was

socially risky and led to many regrettable situations. At any given time there was usually

some uncomfortable situation between at least one male-female pair who had gotten

drunk and had sex at the end of a previous night, or within some male-male-female or

female-female-male trio whose distributions of affections were now in question.

Some people wonder why anyone would host the kind of party where some guests

are likely to steal, where strangers become indignant and sometimes violent when denied

entry, and where many of the partiers have no idea whatsoever, nor do they particularly

care, whose house they are invading. Afterwards the hosts sometimes ask themselves the

same question. But they do have a few reasons. Mainly, parties are “where the action is”

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(Goffman 1967). And so people host parties to put themselves right in the thick of it. It

doesn’t always work out this way, but they do it to hold a special place in a large crowd’s

focus of attention—a precious experience even if lasts only for the night. They do it for

the promise of prestige—prestige during the party and prestige in the local party scene

generally. They do it to become momentary social elites among the masses of sloshed

drunkards. Elites of the upper echelon: the people who keep the party going night after

night, making memories and fantastic stories. Of course, the fantasy is sometimes better

than the reality. This is especially true for vulnerable hosts—ones who don’t have the

means, “social capital,” or inclination to control a hundred rowdy drunken young people

all at once. Some hosts realize that they’ve just become the latest victim of the carnage

rampaging through town, leaving a path of cigarettes burns and puddles of human fluids.

But in the end it all works out. The next night, somewhere within driving distance, the

fantasy will seduce someone else, despite their better judgment, and the party will go on.

Bars and Nightclubs. Groups of friends regularly looked for trouble at bars and

nightclubs with violent reputations. Once they were old enough to get into American

bars, their version of slumming was to hang out at “dive bars” or “white trash bars.”

Before then they considered Mexican border towns especially good places to look for

trouble. Other young Americans went there in droves to carouse, viewing it as a lawless

place where teenagers could drink in bars, where ordinary standards of behavior didn’t

apply, and where police could be (and regularly were) bribed. What happens in Mexico

stays in Mexico, they would say, just like the television commercials about Las Vegas.

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For drunken, badly behaved American young people there was a lot of trouble to

be had in border towns. Although I didn’t try to measure the frequency, during any given

trip they considered it likely that someone would end up in Mexican jail. It was routine

enough that many of them would know right where the jail was and the rest knew that the

way to find it was to get into a taxi, hand the driver US$5, and say “¡Vamanos al carcel!”

Usually the police and other prisoners were friendly enough, and it only took a quick

$40-$200 bribe to get someone out (depending on the circumstances).

In the Mexican beach town Puerto Peñasco, aka Rocky Point, a gravel road and

paved but potholed street meet at an intersection surrounded by at least four popular

nightclubs. It was 3 AM, “bar time,” so the clubs were closing down for the night and

hundreds of people were gathering outside. Jay and I stood up on a hill overlooking the

intersection and waited for the show to start. A police truck and several officers were

parked in the middle of the crowd, also waiting. It turned out to be a bigger show than

usual (each of these incidents, with the exception of the man and woman arrested at the end,

appeared to involve completely different parties, meaning they were a cluster of separate

events rather than a back-and-forth series of attacks and counter-attacks):

#4. Multiple Fights in Rapid Succession. Retrospective Observation: The bars had just closed. Hundreds of people were lingering in the intersection [almost all American]. Without warning a man charged at several other men, throwing wild punches. Within seconds the police cuffed him and threw him in a truck. Another group of men began scuffling and were also taken into custody. A few minutes later we heard shouting. A man was punching the windows of a car in a rage. The police took him away. A woman followed the officers pleading that they release the man. She was also arrested.

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The military service members I spoke to felt especially free in Mexico, several of

them claiming that active duty provided them immunity from overseas arrest. Rick

described how he and his military buddies anticipated an array of disorderly behavior on

one of many evening trips from Southern California to Tijuana. The club’s reputation for

fights was no deterrent:

#2. Rick, Sailors, Civilians, Marines, and Bouncers Brawl in Tijuana. Rick: We always go down there in groups of about six to eight people. And whenever we go down there we always get drunk and trashed and, you know, go to the strip clubs or whatever ... we always know there’s a possibility that we’re gonna get in a fight…. Every night there’s a fight down there. So we never know if it’s gonna be us.

One “never knows” for sure whether there actually will be any action or trouble this time,

much less exactly what it will be or when it will happen. The point is to subject oneself to

the unpredictable possibilities and allow the action to develop spontaneously.

Membership in Trouble

Besides going to places with dangerous reputations and getting drunk, another

strategy for finding fights is to go out with people known to be provocative and open to

trouble.

Bob was well known to have special talents for inspiring strangers to beat him up.

Jerry once joked that he was convinced the only reason Bob’s friends hung around with

him was because he got them into so many fights. Bob’s friends all agreed that, as Aaron

put it, “It always starts with Bob somehow.” Most viewed it as some mysterious or

inherent personality trait, rather than anything that Bob did on purpose. “He doesn’t mean

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to start fights,” Chad explained, “but his arrogance gets him into a fight every time.” Bob

would agree: “Apparently, most of the time, it’s me. For the reason for the fight.” He was

actually quite bad at the technical side of fighting. He was skinny, in miserable physical

shape, and not at all intimidating, unlike most of his friends. Moreover, he drank

enormous amounts of alcohol, which helped him say offensive things but left him

defenseless much of the time. During most fights he wouldn’t land a single punch. For

his friends, this was not necessarily a bad thing. Bob would get himself beaten up by

some stranger(s). Seeing Bob in distress, usually lying on the ground with his glasses

knocked off and blood pouring from his perpetually broken nose, his friends would feel

compelled to defend him. Afterwards everyone would be outraged that Bob had been

attacked totally out of the blue and they would congratulate themselves for sticking up for

each other.

With friends like Bob, it is easy to find trouble without blatantly instigating it.

Friends establish that they will “back each other up” over the course of their friendships,

in talk and occasionally in action, and they assume that going out carousing will involve

some degree of looking for trouble. So they don’t always find it necessary to actually

mention fighting out loud when they look for trouble. Some commented that over time

they and their friends developed standing, unspoken agreements that they were going to

go out and get in a fight, as Leigh put it. They preferred quiet agreements but, as I

describe, there were also occasional, revealing moments when they foreshadowed,

strategized, or even openly planned for trouble.

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Charlie described an outing that illustrates how anticipating fights serves to build

a feeling of membership. He was going out with a number of young men whom he had

just befriended. Before going out they spent some time drinking beer at Charlie’s

apartment and talking. They established themselves as members of the violent elite and

defined each other as teammates:

#1. Brawl at the Midtown Club. Charlie: It was me and my roommate. And we were with his friend who’s a well-known athlete and his younger brother…. And they had two friends from St. Louis in town.... I knew they were kind of thugs and that they had been in a lot of fights. One of them told me that he had been hit with brass knuckles the week before.... Then we went to the Midtown Club ... There’s a lot of fights there. I kind of suspected something was going to happen. I kept saying, “Man, if we get in a fight tonight, people are going to die.” But they were like, “No, we shouldn’t fight tonight.”

Even in hypothetical or negative form, foreshadowing suggests real possibilities and

directs attention to them, if only so one can avoid them (or pretend to). Notice how the

comment “we shouldn’t fight” confirms the idea of “us” as a fighting team. Developing

this sentiment was particularly important for Charlie’s group, since they were just getting

acquainted and trying to build a quick solidarity. Later on Charlie and his new team

brawled against a group of “frat boys,” exactly as he “suspected” they would.

Members could also affirm the sense of the group as an elite fighting team by

coordinating group strategies. Rick continued describing the outing to Tijuana mentioned

above: “we never know if it’s gonna be us. So we set up like code words and signals, you

know?” The code word for this particular night was borrowed from the song lyrics of DMX,

a popular hip-hop artist. “So we came to the agreement that if any of us got in trouble,

tonight it was hooo-deee-hooo, right?” Practically speaking, they were arranging to look

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for trouble but, rhetorically, they still maintained plausible deniability. That is, they did

not plan to “start” trouble, only to defend themselves as a group. (Indeed, the code word

came in handy when they got into a group fight with some other Americans.)

The clearest way to look for trouble as a group is to make an explicit verbal

agreement, but members usually avoided doing so. Agreeing openly does make it much

easier to establish that friends will fight as a group and much simpler to actually get into

fights. But it also makes it harder to deny one’s responsibility and to define oneself as

being genuinely aggrieved by one’s opponents. Nonetheless, there were times when they

would do it anyway.

TJ described making an open agreement to start a fight while he was at a large

house party with Rick, Joe, Brian, James, Bob, and Aaron (Case #101). They had been

there an hour or so. “We were getting drunk and a lot of people started showing up. And

there was dancing going on,” he told me. They were having a good time, talking with old

acquaintances, “staring down” strange men, and checking out “hot girls.” TJ explained

that Brian was the first to say it out loud and the rest promptly concurred: “‘I want to get

into a fight.’ And Rick was like, ‘Yeah, I kinda’ want to get in a fight too.’… So I was

like, ‘Yeah I want to get in a fight too.’”

Friendship groups vary in how explicitly they are willing to coordinate violence.

But however they do it, looking for trouble as a group is always a project of constructing

membership. Tim was a member of a violent “crew” of anti-racist skinheads (one was

black and others were Latino). Members of Tim’s group were quite willing to openly

plan for trouble and were more tolerant of one-sided violence than most of the other

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young adults I knew. They used violent trouble as a ritual to affirm membership and as a

way to establish theirs as an elite group in their highly stylized world of local youth

subcultures, at different times starting trouble with groups they viewed as “fucking Nazi

skinheads,” “dirty long-haired hippies,” “drunk-ass frat boys,” and “drug-dealing bums.”

Tim explained that they considered getting drunk as a group and getting into a fight a

single unit of activity, one organized around feelings of solidarity.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase, ‘Let’s get drunk and go

fuck with somebody,’” he told me. “‘We’re going out in a group,’” he described the

feeling, explaining that “you know that if you talk shit you got a bunch of guys backing

you.” Even if a fight does not happen, knowing that one has such backup is an important

part of the thrill of looking for trouble.

According to my explanation, one would expect that friendship groups are most

likely to look for trouble during times when membership is in question—during

“boundary crises” to use Kai Erikson’s (1966) phrase. The practice of planning to look

for trouble when friends come back to town supports the hypothesis. Are we still the same

group? One brawl happened at a time that was doubly-challenging to membership. Jerry,

Chad, and Danny came back to Tucson two nights before Steve and Kate’s wedding. It

was a time of potential crisis: not only had several central members moved out of state

but another was getting married. Is this how it all ends? As it turned out, things couldn’t

have gone better for the group. Reunited for only a few hours, the group found itself in a

grand barroom brawl.

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They had gone out to the Wooden Nickel, a little “dive bar” on Tucson’s

Southeast Side, a reputedly dangerous neighborhood. At bar time Bob was the first to

walk out. Some strangers surrounded him in the parking lot and pounded him to the

ground, supposedly unprovoked. At least nine of Bob’s friends (seven men and two

women) and several other strangers (about six men and one woman) proceeded to have a

blood-splattering battle in the parking lot. Importantly, it was not just the out-of-town

members who reaffirmed their solidarity with the group. So did Steve and Kate, the

groom and bride. They rushed to Bob’s rescue and fought alongside the rest of the team,

both of them punching male opponents. At one point, Kate handed her high-heeled shoe

to Steve, who then drove it into the back of an opponent’s head, causing a gushing flesh

wound.

The group sustained their “collective effervescence” (Dukheim 1912/1995) by

immediately gathering at Justin and Will’s apartment to celebrate the fight. “Everyone

was all pumped up,” Jerry summarized the tenor of the celebration, “just really proud of

everyone for sticking together. That was the main thing. We all got back and we’re still

sticking together still.”

Solidarity was not the only thrill of or reason to go looking for trouble. Revealing

character and making dramatic stories are additional thrilling prospects and reasons to

look for trouble. These are not entirely independent concerns; loyalty is a quality of both

solidarity and personal character, and both solidarity and character are dramatic elements

of fight stories. All three were evident, for instance, when TJ recalled the time that Rick

“saved Chad’ life” by pulling out a knife and warding off a group of attackers.

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CHARACTER

As Goffman (1967) famously put it, the reason “action” situations are so fateful is

that, as many people see them, they expose the foundations of one’s moral self. Action

demonstrates “character,” or more precisely, our culture’s masculine version of character.

Strong character consists of qualities like courage, daring, toughness, and loyalty. Weak

character consists of such shameful traits as cowardice, indecision, and passivity.

Goffman’s analysis did not, however, emphasize one of action’s important

experiential dimensions. Action is not just revealing of character; it is also probative.

Action situations are self-revelation contexts, opportunities to probe and reveal the depths

of one’s moral self, and people frequently seek them out in a spirit of “testing the self.”49

Albert Camus (1963) expressed the impulse: “To know oneself, one should assert

oneself.”

Testing One’s Character

Why test one’s character? In the culture I studied, members shared some degree

of existential concern over the kinds of masculine character described by Goffman. In my

data, periods of heightened character concerns and character crises arose most obviously

during biographical transitions and following victimization but also, less intensely, over

the course of ordinary social life.

49 Cf. Sanchez-Jankowski’s (1991) discussion of “testing skills” as a motivation for gang violence.

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After fights participants often felt that they had revealed strong character, for

example, feeling “like the coolest guy in the world” (Chad; Case #76) or “a lot more

confident…like I would stand up for myself” (Powel; Case #89). During two interviews,

TJ described fighting as a way to reveal and cultivate his potential for withstanding

violence. More abstractly, he suggested a feeling of impenetrability and invulnerability.

He was pounded by a group of about six to eight larger men, as were Rick, Joe, and

Brian. Nonetheless, he described the experience as one he was ultimately “happy” to

have endured.

#101. TJ, Rick, Brian, and Joe Themselves Jumped. TJ: I think it was good that we fought those guys, though. Because now I’m not afraid to fight really big guys anymore, because they didn’t really hurt me.50 TJ: …even though I got beat up, I was kind of happy we got in a fight. Just because it’s kinda’ good to do that once in a while so you don’t forget. Curtis: Forget what? TJ: Forget what it’s like to get in a fight.

Fights reveal character, regardless of whether one looks for trouble first. But

consequences are not the same as reasons. Additional evidence is required to support the

claim that, recognizing the consequences of fighting, some people choose to look for

trouble as a solution to concerns about their character.

In my research, the best evidence of this motivation comes from two kinds of

character crises in individuals’ biographies: while transitioning to new social

environments and after previous defeat or victimization.

Members often looked for trouble just after starting new schools or moving to

new neighborhoods. Chad moved to Tucson and started attending a new school in the

50 Excerpted from February, 2001 fieldnote.

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eighth grade. As he explained, he looked for trouble in order to be a popular “tough guy.”

This project included not only looking for fights, but also looking for other kinds of

trouble, including disciplinary problems at school:

I knew I wasn’t going to be the same kid. I was kind of looking forward to this situation… You know, I pulled the tough guy act. The “don’t fuck with me” mentality. Ended up getting a lot of friends that way… already my first day and I’m in ISS [in-school suspension]…. The teachers started to think I was bad. But this is what I wanted…. Everyone’s kind of intimidated but everyone still wants to be my friend. So it’s my perfect world at that time and age.

Dewey went through a similar phase after moving away from Tucson, where he

had been bullied by middle-school classmates. At his new school Dewey looked for

opportunities to bully classmates as a way to develop what he viewed as a “psycho”

tough guy image, one adolescent male version of strong character:

#217. Dewey Challenges Classmate. Dewey: See, I switched when I went to Houston to a private school. And so everyone there was pretty much pussies. Like—I was the bully at that school. I was the toughest one there…. And I wanted to get in fights. I would try to start them. I was all fucked up, especially with my dad hitting on me and all that. But they all thought I was psycho so they wouldn’t fight me. Curtis: Can you give me an example of when somebody wouldn’t fight you? Dewey: Yeah, there was one time. I was sitting in class. And I was talking shit to this chick, calling her a ‘ho and shit…. So her boyfriend comes up and grabs my desk and throws it. So I jumped up and was just like crazy. I was like, “Raaaa! Come on! I’ll fucking kick your ass! Come on fight me!” And he was just like, “No, man, it’s cool. I don’t want to fight. I was just kidding.” I was like, “Yeah, it was real funny then, but it’s not now—huh?—you motherfucker!” So he just was like, “No way, man,” and totally backed down.

Dominating peers in character contests, taking pride in forcing others to back

down, is a classic way act like a “badass,” to reveal oneself as tough or powerful (see

Katz 1988: Chapter 3). Southern California gang-bangers act on a similar principle when

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they walk around their neighborhoods challenging strangers to fight. They use the

practice of “banging on” or “hitting up” strangers, that is, demanding to know their gang

affiliation with the question, “Where you from?” (See Garot’s [2007] ethnographic

research for a more detailed description and analysis.) Asking the question communicates

one’s willingness to do battle and claims “hard” character, at the same time forcing the

target to choose between claiming to be hard or revealing weak character by “punking

out.”

Winning the contest without violence can sometimes accomplish the same thing.

Drawing upon years of fieldwork on the East Coast, Anderson (1999) describes a more

general phenomenon in inner-city youth cultures: intimidating peers to “campaign for

respect.” In both cases—“banging on” and “campaigning for respect”—the instigator

reveals strong character by “stepping up,” voluntarily risking violence, and taking

character from opponents who “back down.”

Dewey’s case (above) suggests another kind of biographical period during which

individuals look for trouble. He had been bullied in Tucson and claimed he looked for

trouble in response to his “dad hitting” him. Victimization creates a character crisis for

many men. In the ideal masculine version of character one does not passively take abuse,

act cowardly, or back down. Ideally one stands up, fights back, and shows grace under

fire—no matter what.

As Athens (1992) describes, part of the trauma of victimization for men is that

they sometimes break under pressure. They find themselves begging for help, trying to

pacify their tormentors, and being too terrified to defend themselves. After the event

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ends, the new crisis is to reconcile those perceived moral failures with a view of oneself

as possessing strong character. Opportunities to display character are attractive solutions,

allowing one to transcend one’s past self or to reframe moments of submission as flukes.

Athens describes such a biographical process of “violentization” among seriously violent

actors, from being brutalized to becoming belligerent brutalizers themselves (with other

steps in between). Contemporary male culture recognizes the process more generally as

becoming “hard.”

Ryan reported living his childhood as a victim, being beaten by his father and

repeatedly tormented by classmates until about age twelve. Then he followed his father’s

advice to fight back at school. He made a transition upon discovering that his “dad was

right. Nobody fucked with me.” Enjoying the new self he discovered in violence, Ryan

made a habit of breaking rules and looking for trouble:

During this time I shaved my head into a Mohawk. I started fucking hanging out with weirdos who were a lot older than me. I started getting in a series of fights… when that violence stuff started, I decided I was gonna deal with everyone that way.

Upon returning to school from a suspension for violence, he recalled, “at this point I like

almost had a reputation. Nobody fucked with me.” For Ryan, the payoff was to reclaim

strong masculine character.

On one occasion, he got into a fight with another teenager while on an outing with

his aunt, who informed his father. He recounted (Case #45), “I was so animalistic, dude,

that I fully bit down on the top of his head until I got a mouth full of blood. My aunt …

her husband is a biker. She said she had never seen a man fight like that before. My dad

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was concerned.” (Emphasis added.) Not only did he reclaim his self-respect, but he also

impressed both sets of previous tormentors.

Self-Revelation Contexts

Creating proof of virtue is a seductive solution to existential anxiety. There is a

variety of existing evidence that people experience fateful action generally as a self-

revelation context—that is, an opportunity to probe one’s fundamental self. Evidence can

be found in popular culture. The movie Fight Club alludes to action’s probative nature

when one character asks, “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been

in a fight?” Literary accounts of gambling, Goffman’s action-archetype, suggest the same

quality. Charles Bukowski (1983: 83) wrote: “the racetrack tells me quickly where I am

weak and where I am strong ... one day at the racetrack can teach you more than four

years at any university.”

A classic illustration comes from the occupational culture of test pilots

documented by Tom Wolfe (1979) in his book The Right Stuff. Military test pilots appear

to have little control over whether or not the experimental technology fails and kills them.

Their solution to the anxiety of technological uncertainty is a special theory of personal

character, a quality they refer to as “the right stuff.” Those who have it are protected from

harm by a sort of fundamental charisma. It can’t be cultivated and there is no way to be

sure who has it, except in death; fatal crashes are evidence that the pilot never had it.

Pilots might take comfort in their own survival so far and interpret it to foreshadow

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continued survival. But the inherently negative form of self-revelation leaves them

forever wondering: Do I really have the right stuff?

However, self-revelation contexts need not be action. Max Weber’s (1930)

description of “the Protestant ethic” suggests a culture of self-revelation. In nineteenth

century American Calvinist theology, one’s eternal status was preordained. One’s

destination, Heaven or Hell, would not be revealed until the afterlife—naturally, an

unendurably anxious prospect. American Protestants’ practical solution to constant

anxiety was in fact a technical departure from strict theology. Believers practiced an

ascetic devotion to virtue and restraint, treating each moment as a context for self-

revelation, reading it for hints of one’s eternal self. If one led a virtuous enough life,

wouldn’t that imply that one must have been touched by grace—preordained all along?

“Looking for trouble” is a voluntary means of probing the self. The most familiar

involuntary self-revelation contexts may be emergencies. Besides actually creating them,

fights share certain other similarities with emergencies. Retrospectively, participants

commonly feel deep concern about what their performances under duress have revealed

about their character. The lasting trauma of emergency situations is often a feeling that

one’s own conduct was a moral failure. Reflecting on a time when he failed to protect a

female friend from an abusive boyfriend, Chad lamented his own “no-backbone

moments,” professing shame despite his many other courageous and loyal performances.

Many of the psychiatrically-defined symptoms of post-traumatic stress are also existential

concerns for fighters: reliving the experience, imagining how it could have gone

differently, prospectively rehearsing how one will act next time (see Diagnostic and

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Statistical Manual IV-TR 2000). For career fighters, these existential concerns can have

various positive or negative emotional tones. But, sooner or later, even those with long

records of strong performances find themselves wondering: Could I do it again? What if

the stakes were just a bit higher?

STORIED ACTION

Membership and character are rewarding as private experiences. But the most

attractive consequences may be the enduring and public ones. Part of what makes

fighting so seductive is that people talk about it. Momentary triumphs aren’t just

preserved in memory. They become dramatic stories. As Chad explained of one friend

known as a dramatic storyteller, this may mean exaggeration. Whatever factual details get

lost, though, the sense of “glory” in storytelling is real:

Chad: …he’ll turn whatever fight we got into into this beautiful, heroic, Braveheart movie. He’ll paint this picture: “And Chad said, ‘I will not have you acting this way, punk. I will hurt you. Snap your neck like a chicken.’ And the guy goes, ‘Oh dude, I don’t think you know how strong I am,’ and then Chad goes—Snap his neck just like a chicken! And he dropped to the ground. And then we went beating up fifty people. And then he took his car and drove it to Mexico. And got $50,000 and then humped his wife.” He’ll change every story to make it like you’re a hero, you know. He glorifies fights.

Oftentimes, people fantasize just as much about the storytelling as the actual

fighting. Rick once described it so well that I jotted down our conversation immediately

(and then typed it into fieldnotes that night). We were at a public park on July 28, 2001,

putting on martial arts gear and preparing to spar. He told me that he had been transferred

to a new post in the military. I listened while strapping on my gloves.

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Rick continued, “Sometimes I want to get in a fight on my new ship.”

“Oh yeah?” I casually prompted him to continue, still messing with my

equipment.

“Yeah. So everybody’ll know I ain’t no punk, you know? Like I think about how

it would be cool if I got in a fight with some really big guy and I won. So that people

would like talk about me and stuff,” he said laughing.

Storyability

As Harvey Sacks (1992) pointed out in his lectures on conversation during the

1960s and 1970s, some activities are particularly “tellable.” Tellable activities are those

which listeners readily accept as worth talking about. Neither tellers nor listeners act as if

there is much need to justify any particular telling. In fact, when listeners discover a

telling has been withheld they may demand to know why.

Telling and tellability can take many forms, but one could say that fights are

particularly storyable. Storytelling figures prominently in the lives of fighters and violent

groups (see e.g. Horowitz 1983; Klein 1971). After a fight in my field site the participants

usually told all of their good friends about it at least once, but usually over and over

again. Distinguished careers and events make it possible for fighters to experience deeply

storied selves (see also Adler & Adler 1989). Fight stories become a way to achieve local

celebrity. As Ryan explained of one fight:

#138. Ryan Goes on a Rampage—Dairy Delights. Ryan: I literally became a living legend. When I was in school, the living legend was a guy who was there six years ago. He was in the big fight between my school and Westin at McDonald’s ... And this was like lore. This dude was on

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crutches and used his own crutch to beat the shit out of a dude from Westin. He was the badass. I became that dude. I was the badass.

I ran into the Wrong Walter several years after the beating described in Chapter 1.

He told me about several more violent catastrophes he had since experienced.

“Damn, Walter…” I commiserated, “You’ve been through a lot.”

He agreed, “That’s what I’m saying…. Someone should write a book about my

life.”51

There is a powerful homology between fights and fight stories; the doing and the

telling are structurally similar. A first noteworthy similarity is between the circumstances

under which fights are enacted and told about: in the same kinds of situations, in front of

the same kinds of people, and often in front of the exact same witnesses and participants.

At parties and casual get-togethers storytellers would hold the floor much of the time.

Audience members would circle, drinking beer, laughing and interrupting to prod for

more, much as they do during actual fights. Storytellers would get carried away by the

moment, reliving the action, for example, by strutting several strides to demonstrate how

one confidently approached an opponent and threw a coordinated combination of

punches, or by asking a volunteer to pose as a mock antagonist upon whom to perform a

headlock. One story was likely to give rise to a second and then a third and so on. An

interesting situation arises when all of the speakers and all of the listeners were actually

present during the fight. This is no obstacle to telling a good story—in fact, quite the

opposite. Such occasions are not about conveying new information but establishing

51 From my recollection.

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“membership”: shared meaning, esprit-de-corps, and solidarity within the group (see

Chapter 8). Friendship groups are their own audiences.

A second dimension of homology is the overlap between the narrative structures

of telling dramatic stories and performing dramatic fights. Certainly the final stories can

be far from “factual” accounts. But some concerns are shared. When people fight, they

often do things to make good storytelling details. They perform for future storytellers, for

present audiences, and also for themselves, appreciating their own conduct much as

audiences do—by observing the self-as-object (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934). Fight stories

have culturally rich narrative structures (Labov 1982, Morrill et al. 2000; cf. Schegloff

1987). Storytellers describe villainous and heroic characters, underdog struggles to

overcome adversity, and surprising plot twists. And during actual fights, fighters

frequently attempt to construct their opponents as villains, they are sometimes willing to

fight as underdogs, and they discover novel opportunities to creatively enact dramatic

details.

Sensitive to the dramatic implications of fights, participants are immediately

aware of creative opportunities for aesthetically pleasing turns of phrase and techniques

of violence. During a fight at Nacho’s Tacos, a favorite local Mexican fast food

restaurant, Leigh realized that she was in a position to reenact a scene from the movie

Kingpin. I had heard the story first from Jennifer, whom Leigh was “rescuing” when she

jumped into the fight. I asked Leigh to tell me about it while we were driving around with

her boyfriend at the time, Rick:

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#14. Jennifer and Leigh Fight at Nacho’s Tacos.52 As I drove with Leigh and Rick in my car she told me about a fight at

Nacho’s Tacos. She was on top of “this girl punching her and holding her down on the table” when she saw a bottle of hot sauce on the table and thought it would be funny to pour it in the girl’s eyes. “I’d seen it in a movie,” she told me

Rick chimed in gleefully: “Kingpin!” Leigh laughed, “Yeah, Kingpin!” She went on to explain that she picked it

up and poured it in her eyes.” I asked if she was trying to hurt her or did she just think it would be funny,

or what? Mostly she just thought it would be funny to pour hot sauce in the girl’s

eyes, she answered.

On another occasion, according to Norton and two corroborating witnesses, he was

quick-witted enough to quote a Wyatt Earp line from the movie Tombstone. Tray had just

smashed some guy in the head with a heavy candle. The guy was standing in place, blood

pouring from his scalp. Everyone was waiting to see who would made the next move

when Norton quipped, “Are you gonna fight or are you just gonna stand there and

bleed?” I once watched Andrew paraphrase a line from the movie Reservoir Dogs (Case

#5; see below): “If you talk like a bitch, I’ll slap you like a bitch.”53

Reenacting bits of movie narratives is one sure way to construct oneself as a

dramatic actor in a fight. But the more routine interactional moves in fights can be

equally dramatic. As Lonnie explained of one event (Case #10), “it was actually quite

quotable… I think he said, ‘I’ll kick anybody’s ass.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you try to

kick my ass?’” Fighters are constantly aware of the audience gaze and the likelihood that

their words and actions will be remembered and recounted.

52 Fieldnote, April 26, 2003. 53 Retrospective Observation.

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Narrative Motivation

In passing, Sacks (1992: 776) suggested a highly generalizable motivational

theory of human behavior. People sometimes do things in order to talk about them later:

At least one can imagine that people will come to do things that, say, they have in the first instance no experiential reason for wanting to do, but by virtue of that others are doing and telling—or telling and doing—and they are not, and are thereby failing as conversationalists.

Group fights are almost always followed by excited group storytelling, during

which dramatic displays of character and solidarity are rejoiced. The day after TJ and

some friends had a group fight (Case #101, above), several of them got together to talk

about it: “The next day was kind of celebratory. We all got together pretty early and had

some beers at my apartment in the afternoon…. we basically talked about the fight for the

next thirty-six hours.” Having previously participated in or witnessed these storytelling

festivals, it is quite understandable that some people would be willing to sacrifice a few

seconds of bodily safety in exchange for a brief touch of glory.

For the fighters I knew, this motivation was no secret. The sentiment was

expressed openly at Snoddy’s college graduation party, where Jerry, Luke, Nathan,

Marianne, Steve, Tray, Karen, Shelley, and maybe a few others were sitting around

talking. We’d already been at the party telling stories, laughing, eating, and drinking

beers (just a few, for once) in the sun for a few hours when there was a lull in the

conversation.

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As I recorded it in my fieldnotes54, Jerry was the one who broke the silence. “We

need more stuff to talk about,” he said. The problem, he explained, was that “none of us

get in fights anymore.” Everyone laughed. “It used to be everyone would get in town and

tell each other who they beat up and stuff. We need to start getting in fights again.”

THRILL

The evidence indicates that people experience fights and looking for fights as

socially rewarding in at least three related ways: by constructing membership, by

revealing character, and by creating stories. Returning to the original theme: Where is the

“fun”? How and when do people experience these occasions as gratifying?

The main emotional gratification of fighting is thrill. The thrill itself is a euphoric

appreciation of the symbolic consequences of fighting. The timing of the emotional

experience is complicated but revealing. Emotions change quite dramatically over the

course of looking for a fight, actually fighting, and then having completed the fight.

While looking for trouble people do sometimes appear to “have fun.” They build and lose

excitement as opportunities appear and disappear. During the fights themselves, however,

excitement and thrill are usually eclipsed by rage and/or fear focused on the present (see

also Athens 1979; Collins 2008; Katz 1988). In fact, the most intense euphoric thrills are

felt during the moments immediately after successful fights. I recall having one such

profound experience in 1999, when I was twenty years old, a few months before deciding

to conduct this research (Case #5).

54 May 12, 2001.

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I had been at a small house party with TJ, James, and Brad, about a dozen men we

didn’t know, and a few women with whom James and Brad were acquainted. At a certain

point we began to sense that the other men at the party were trying to antagonize us and

we prepared to leave. Earlier that night we’d been looking for trouble, but given the ratio

of friends-to-potential rivals, I started hoping nothing would happen. On our way out,

though, Brad “accidentally” bumped into one of the strangers. An argument followed and

soon we found ourselves surrounded by the rest of the party—eleven men, by my count.

One of the men was calling Brad a “nigger” (he is Latino) and others were using the

phrase “White Pride” (i.e. claiming to be racist gang members, probably more to be

provocative than because they had any real loyalty to the gang). Brad was challenging

them to “fight me like a man.”

At least four of them took off their shirts more-or-less simultaneously and threw

them in the bed of a pickup truck. I interpreted that move just as TJ did: that “this is

something they do pretty much every day. Like, ‘Okay, boys, it’s time to put our shirts in

the back of the truck like always when we beat ass.’” Soon Brad’s first opponent had

beaten him to the ground and was straddling him.

I was fairly certain they would all descend on us at any moment. Although scared,

I stayed and tried to cheer on Brad, who appeared to be losing badly. His opponent

actually got exhausted and had to take a break from punching him in the face. Up to that

point Brad had hardly fought back at all, but all of a sudden he reached up from the

ground and dragged his opponent’s head down, then managed to get on his opponent’s

back, and proceeded to repeatedly pound him in the back and neck with his elbow. It was

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the most surprising comeback I’d ever seen in a fight, and I felt suddenly energized.

Finally, the guy started moaning and wailing. Brad released him. The guy stumbled

away, hunched over and lamenting, “There’s nothing I can do to that guy.” (TJ, James,

Brad, and I recalled that exact phrasing in fieldnotes and three independent, tape-recorded

interviews.)

Within seconds several opponents charged us. TJ, Brad, and I were all

simultaneously fighting with someone different. (James abstained.) After a flurry of

violence I managed to incapacitate my opponent and then looked around for his friends,

who I expected to be just feet away charging me. One of them stood back and shouted at me

a few times. But they didn’t rush me. They weren’t even approaching.

I looked for TJ and Brad and saw that they were still standing and that their

opponents were also retreating. In fact, the entire crowd was retreating. The whole mob of

eleven men—the same mob that seemed like it would surely beat us half to death—was

actually running away from us. It was unbelievable. I could feel the tide turning, rising up in

my chest and going to my head: this terrifying shirtless collective force came crashing

against us and together we had dug our heels in, stood our ground and actually driven it

back, actually sent it rushing back to wherever it came from. TJ, Brad, and I looked at each

other and burst into unrestrained laughter right there. We started hugging each other and

jumping up and down. Just the three of us—chasing away eleven men! It was immediately

obvious what a deeply important moment had just passed.

Still bruised, bleeding, and with bones broken we drove to another party to boast.

From there we made excited phone calls to as many people as possible as fast as possible.

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A few days later a friend of ours, Linda, actually held a sort of “party in our honor,”

inviting all of us over to her house along with a few of her other fighting friends. We all

drank a lot of beer, and her self-defined violent elite friends listened to our stories and

examined our props (e.g. my broken hand and the X-rays). They congratulated us, shook

our hands and patted us on the back, giving us “props” for our good showing. Shameful

as it is to admit now, it felt utterly glorious at the time.

Euphoria and Mortification

Post-fight reactions illustrate a dramatic range of emotional experiences, from

crying in shame to jumping in euphoric thrill. The most pleasurable experience is

euphoric thrill, the overwhelming sensual experience of recognizing the symbolic

implications of one’s fine performance.

During an episode of group violence introduced several pages above (Case #101),

TJ was kicked into the fetal position and Rick beaten and kicked by the same group.

When they were reunited, TJ explained, “Rick is just covered in blood. From his head—

just the whole side of his head, his shirt, the side of his pants.” Nonetheless, “He was like

euphoric it seemed like.” Rick had taken his beating well, fought back hard, and knew

what a good story this would make. As TJ recalled:

Rick was pretty happy ‘cause he said he took a couple of the guys out…. Let me put it this way. We get out of the car when we get back to my apartment, and Rick walks up to this car and starts humping it. He just starts grinding his pelvis into it. Not like sexually like he was trying to get off or anything. He was just like, “Ooh, yeah!” Like that’s an expression of how he felt.

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Euphoria and frantic storytelling were the most typical and also the most

gratifying reactions to group fights in my dataset. There is certainly an automatic

biological basis of arousal—after violence one’s body and brain are still flooded with

endorphin, adrenaline, and cortisol, among other physiological effects. Arousal may be a

virtually universal, automatic reaction. But the emotional tone, whether positive in thrill

or negative in horror, is not automatic.

Reactions could vary toward opposite extremes, depending on how the fighter

symbolically interpreted the event. Technical “losers” might feel euphoric and technical

“winners” might feel mortified. Importantly, the same individuals felt much differently

about different fights and, at times, they even felt differently about the same fight as the

audience changed.

A dramatic illustration is Chad’s reaction to the New Year’s brawl that Bob

recounted above (Case #16). Immediately after the fight he felt the usual euphoria. But

then, moments later, upon seeing the event through his girlfriend’s eyes, he became

ashamed. He had jumped into an exchange between Will and “two Marines.” Chad didn’t

seem to want to go into detail about the fight itself, but according to friends who were

present he knocked both of them out. Talking in greater detail about the post-fight, he

said:

[His girlfriend] saw me fight and was totally disgusted. And after I got in the fight I had that look like, “Yeah, I’m so cool! I won!” But then I saw her eyes and the way she looked at me. It made me really disappointed in myself. So that was the first time where I ever felt ashamed.

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I collected accounts of technical victors actually crying upon realizing the

symbolic meaning of at least three different fights. One of them was a committed career

fighter, a man who eventually became a professional criminal and who occasionally used

violence in the course of his work. But during one incident he felt mortified by the

meaning of the fight. (Following his request for anonymity below, I call him Person Y.)

Person Y is enormous and claims to have briefly been a college athlete. After dropping

out of school he worked as a bouncer. One night a drunken man struck him with a

harmless blow:

#30. Person Y at the Frat Party. Person Y: I grabbed him by the shirt and walked him out in the middle of the street. I made a big fucking mistake. He’s like, “Dude, I’m sorry. Just go ahead and do it.” Literally there were like twenty guys following behind me. My girlfriend. I held this guy about arm’s length and I fuckin’ hit him as hard as I could. And I broke his jaw. You could hear it crack. He dropped. He was laying in the street. I felt so bad, I grabbed my girlfriend, I went to my house. Don’t ever tell nobody. Twenty years old, I cried. I felt so bad for hurting that guy…. I cried like a baby.

Instead of defending his character, Person Y realized he had gratuitously injured an

overmatched opponent, one who was “asking for it” only in a literal sense.

The potential for glorious euphoric success is matched by the risk of equally

mortifying moral failure, making fighting a risky proposition in multiple ways.

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Chapter 8. Solidarity in Question

The fight as a social occasion is constituted by various social roles and it often has

varied, conflicting meanings for those who fill them. To illustrate, I describe a single case

and its aftermath in detail.

On December 21, 1999 I tape-recorded a short but startling stretch of storytelling.

The recording is 41 seconds long. Though concise, the fight story turned out to be a

densely meaningful, illuminating moment. To explain the significance of those 41

seconds, I must first recount events that took place over the previous seven months,

beginning with the fight itself.

It was one of several I witnessed during the nine months between graduating from

the University of Wisconsin and starting graduate school at UCLA. I was passing the

interval in Tucson, taking classes casually and working as a janitor, temporary laborer,

and cafeteria worker. I spent summer nights and weekends hanging out with old high

school friends and acquaintances.

The fight took place at a party in May 1999, before I had seriously considered

documenting these events for my dissertation. During the course of the fight several

members of the friendship group took a complicated and potentially antagonistic variety

of roles. In the following days and weeks the meaning of the event seemed to seriously

threaten the group’s solidarity. In October—shortly after starting at UCLA and beginning

to reframe this social world as a field site—I wrote down my recollections in

retrospective field-notes (from which excerpts and quotes below are drawn). In December

I made the first of many trips to tape-record interviews and ordinary conversations, such

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as the one I present below. Besides the tape-recorded conversation, I also collected

interviews about the fight from Steve, Rick, and TJ.

CASE #6. “STEVE, KATE, JENNIFER, AND LEIGH BRAWL”

I was at a nighttime house party with several dozen friends, friends-of-friends,

acquaintances and their friends, former classmates and their friends, and total strangers,

probably including a few who just happened to wander by the house and decided to check

out the action. The hosts were TJ’s girlfriend Tara and her college-student roommates,

Barbara and Margaret. The trouble started between, on one side, Steve’s fiancée Kate and

her friends Jennifer and Leigh, and on the other side, four women who were strangers.

There was considerable drunkenness and loud behavior that night. Jennifer,

Leigh, and Kate were making enough noise to actually annoy many of the other partiers,

which is really not easy to do in such company. They were laughing and screaming

together in a small segregated group, as they would sometimes do during group outings

with Steve’s friends. I remember that it struck me as strange, but as far I could tell they

weren’t actually having a coherent conversation, mostly just making a string of gleeful

noises. The residents of the house kept saying they were scared that the neighbors might

call the police to complain. But despite much urging, the three noisemakers refused to

quiet down.

In the backyard Jennifer stumbled into a brand new propane grill and they both

went crashing to the ground. Jennifer, Leigh, and Kate screeched with hilarity. After that

I devised a surefire solution. I turned on the garden hose and threatened to spray them if

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they kept being so disruptive. But they promptly called my bluff by continuing to scream

and run about. It was very frustrating.

Chad, always the practical jokester, decided to cast Jennifer in one of his

masterpieces of reality-based situation-comedy. He figured it would be funny to convince

Jennifer that another young woman at the party was “talking shit” about her. Specifically,

the young woman was supposed to have made the outrageous allegation that Jennifer has

“a big bung-holio.” Jennifer took the insult very seriously and retaliated by making a

number of unkind comments within easy earshot of the woman, such as “I don’t like that

bitch. Yeah, that retarded-looking bitch,” while staring right at her face. Jennifer’s

perceived antagonist seemed too frightened to quarrel, but four other women took up her

cause.

Within seconds there developed an outright festival of name-calling, mutual

challenging, and other shit-talking between the two groups of women. A crowd of

partygoers got in the middle of the argument, literally. Since Jennifer’s side was closest

to the front door and they were being loud and annoying anyway, the crowd steered them

outside, along with Steve. I imagine they may have felt humiliated and betrayed by their

friends’ decision to push them out, but that possibility probably escaped most of the

mediators at the time. For various reasons, it can be harder than it sounds to solve such

drunken calamities sensitively.

Just when the crowd was starting to disperse from the doorway and violence

seemed to have been averted, though, Leigh stormed back inside cursing and

vituperating, her head tilted to the side and face scrunched up in the perfect image of utter

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indignation. Hostilities resumed promptly. The faction of four women whom I did not

know rushed outside, followed by most of the other partygoers.

Steve took a quick hop onto the hood of the four women’s car. It was a weird

thing to do, so everyone looked at him. After complaining about the driver’s parking job,

Steve proceeded to completely smash in the windshield with a pair of powerful right-

footed stomps.

As quickly as humanly possible all seven women ran at each other and started

punching, kicking, growling, scratching, pulling hair, and beating each other with handy

weapons. Later on everyone agreed that it was considerably more vicious than most all-

male fights. TJ said he had “never seen girls fight like that.”

Steve continued stomping around in terrifying fashion, eyes wide open, poised to

strike. In my memory his limbs and torso seemed to somehow elongate, his hands and

feet to enlarge to exaggerated proportions. Steve’s friends started swarming around him

and trying to enclose him in a big circle, hoping to distract and prevent him from joining

the fight. It seemed entirely unclear to me that the swarm could actually contain him. In a

quick moment I decided that, though I had known him for years, Steve looked too scary

to approach, so I tried to run over to a scuffle involving Leigh instead.

Threat to Solidarity #1

Something unusual happened along the way. Rick saw what I was doing and he

grabbed me around the waist. He was laughing, “Let them fight. It’s funny.” As I learned

later, he did the same thing to Jerry.

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Rick’s anti-peacekeeping role turned out to be quite consequential. I was not

particularly offended. But Jerry was always more serious about his role as a peacekeeper

in the group. A politically liberal philosophy major at the time, studying ethics and

metaphysics and such things, Jerry would routinely get into heated violence-versus-

nonviolence debates with Rick, who was a carousing military sailor at the time. Jerry

would rarely chastise his friends for actual fighting. After all, he valued their

relationships and appreciated the excitement like everyone else. But when Rick held Jerry

back from holding Steve back it was a different story. By physically stifling Jerry’s

conduct—indeed, stifling his entire personal philosophy—Rick had crossed a line.

Several months later, as I tape-recorded, the two were still doing the interactional work of

rebuilding solidarity.

I escaped Rick’s clutches and grabbed Leigh around the waist, in just the way

Rick had grabbed me. Leigh’s opponent was backpedaling with a thin line of blood

trailing down from her hairline. She was clearly in retreat, but when I grabbed Leigh the

woman threw up her arms in a last challenge. Leigh shouted, “Come on, bitch.” Leigh

was average height (shorter than her opponent) and quite slim, but considerably stronger

than I would have guessed. Grabbing her was effective not so much because it

immobilized her but because she seemed to accept it as a suggestion to stop. Nonetheless,

she made one final forward lunge, dragging me behind her while kicking her opponent in

the stomach and swinging a twelve-ounce glass Zima bottle at her head. Then she

stopped for good and immediately started laughing out loud. Her opponent walked

somewhere else.

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A stocky white woman in her forties and a bathrobe stood in the street, apparently

talking to 9-1-1 on her mobile phone. She was shouting that there was a “gang fight”

right in front of her house and a whole crowd of people were fighting.

No, I thought. She was quite wrong. Only a few of us were actually fighting. Most

of us were trying to break it up—or, I guess, trying to stop people from breaking it up.

Threat to Solidarity #2

The competing roles in the situation became more complicated yet. To understand

what happened next, one has to recognize that memory is fallible. Those of us who were

present made competing claims about the following moments. In fact, as far as I can tell

based on my dataset, the participants had more trouble reconciling their inconsistent

perspectives on this fight than on any other. The next three paragraphs are based mainly

on my own recollection, which I readily admit is confused at certain moments and,

factually, open to doubt. Below I return to alternative accounts of the events.

The action died down for a while. Then one woman charged Kate aggressively.

She was saying something along the lines of “Are you the bitch that was talking shit?”

Steve grabbed her around the waist and hurled her away, sending her tumbling down the

street. One of the women, who I took to be same woman that went tumbling down the

street, appeared later to have broken an ankle, so I assumed it was caused by the toss. My

recollection of the exact sequence of events has changed over time, but I now believe that

after Steve tossed the woman Gilbert and Keith challenged him to battle. Gilbert and

Keith were loose friends of Steve and the rest of his friendship group. Years earlier

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Gilbert had dated Steve’s fiancée, Kate, for some time. For whatever reason, the two men

now sided with the faction of four women with whom I was not acquainted.

They said something to Steve. Steve strode toward Keith and struck him once in

the head. Keith immediately appealed for help from Steve’s friends, who clustered

around Steve and maneuvered him and Kate, Jennifer, and Leigh into their car. As soon

as they drove away, Gilbert and Keith started to bluster about seeking revenge. Chad told

them that he wouldn’t allow anyone to follow. He brandished a shiny steel or nickel-

plated revolver in support of Steve (and possibly fired it up into the air). Even so, neither

Chad nor Keith and Gilbert appeared genuinely angry. I interpreted brandishing the pistol

to be an opportunistic, dramatic display rather than a serious threat (not to mention

providing Gilbert and Keith a face-saving explanation for letting Steve escape).

A few police officers arrived at the house and questioned all of us in cursory

fashion. No one gave them any useful information, either because we didn’t know or

wouldn’t say. Around then, Steve actually called the house and apologized to the woman

whose windshield and ankle were broken. He offered to pay for the former. The woman

accepted the apology. Steve didn’t mention the ankle because, as it turned out, he didn’t

believe he had touched her. She did not seem to expect an apology for that. The next time

Barbara, Margaret, and Tara had a party they made a request of TJ (according to him):

“Could you try to make sure your friends don’t, like, kick the shit out of anyone in our

street this time?”

Clearly, this was not how the ideal group fight should go. It was a complicated

situation for Steve’s friendship group. Some members were trying to fight, others were

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breaking it up, one was even stopping people from breaking it up, and as I remembered it,

one may have attacked potentially inappropriate targets. According to Steve and Jerry

(and possibly others), Steve never actually touched anyone at all. Rick and I were

convinced that Steve had physically engaged Keith and thrown one woman down the

street. Opinion among the others was divided. At first, Rick had no idea that Steve would

deny this version of the event. When Rick mentioned it in passing Steve became visibly

irritated. Jerry accused me and Rick of outright lying, or at least recklessly exaggerating.

They had a point. Memory is fallible and I’m not positive about certain details.

But whatever really happened, the sociologically interesting point was that members of

the group disagreed about it so severely.

Afterwards some of Steve’s friends were unsure what to think. Violence against

women would be a very serious offense under most circumstances, but the current

circumstances were dramatically disputed. Some kind of “remedial action” (Goffman

1971) probably would have satisfied everyone who thought an offense had occurred, but

both sides flatly disbelieved the reality of any offense on their part. Each side faced the

same problem: How do you stay friends with someone you consider a liar? With someone

who also happens to be unjustly accusing you of being a liar? Mutually resolving the

“reality disjuncture” (Pollner 1975) proved so intractable that it started to seem like the

only solution might be to end friendships that had lasted for years and survived many

previous violent encounters.

The disputants temporarily solved the problem by no longer discussing it, at least

not directly. The two factions ended up talking about it only quietly among themselves.

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Jerry talked about Rick when Rick wasn’t around. Rick talked about Jerry when Jerry

wasn’t around. (And I imagine people talked about me when I was not around.) They

gave one-sided speeches denying each other’s versions of reality and discrediting each

other personally. Eventually the coalition of “believers” decided that Steve was really just

defending his fiancée and that if you reframed certain facts you could actually view it as

almost noble. But the “nonbelievers” were excluded from these discussions. Everyone

avoided open conflict, so the relationships endured for the time being. But this was no

perfect solution. It all felt uncomfortably like gossip. Then, seven months after the fight,

something interesting happened.

A QUESTION OF SOLIDARITY

Four days before Christmas 1999, Jerry, Rick, Joe, and I were sitting around the

kitchen table in Justin (Joe’s older brother) and Will’s apartment. Everyone was in good

spirits, getting drunk and laughing about old times. The conversation turned to the events

of the May party. I thought there might be an interesting quarrel so I quickly turned on

my tape-recorder. As it turned out, though, I predicted wrong. Instead of arguing, Rick

and Jerry tried to align with each other. Specifically, they tried to establish some mutually

agreeable version of the May 1999 events. It was an important moment, since their

relationship was so visibly strained.

Everyone in this storytelling scene had also been present at the fight, except for

Lauren, who entered only briefly. In the transcript below I describe her involvement and

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the others’ reactions to her because it provides evidence of the storytellers’ intended

audience: each other.

To understand what the conversation means to the people having it, I explore it in

much finer detail than the rest of my data. I borrow some techniques and insights from

micro-sociological research, particularly Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis

(on storytelling, see especially Goodwin 1984; Jefferson 1978; Sacks 1972; Schegloff

1987). To see how people construct meaning together, the researcher examines what

people say, turn-by-turn and moment-by-moment—the actual stuff of social

relationships, social solidarity, and social reality. A pause lasting a fraction of one second

can be deeply meaningful and emotionally significant, even consequential for the long-

range future. (Too many “awkward silences” at the wrong times can end certain

relationships.) In these 41 seconds Rick and Jerry negotiate an agreement about events

they have been disputing for months, and indeed, even reestablish the entire meaning of

their relationship.

When the recording starts, Joe, Rick, and I are all listening as Jerry begins telling

the story. I remain quiet throughout, perhaps because I am self-conscious about my

researcher role. Below is a transcript of the conversation. Parallel brackets on consecutive

lines indicate simultaneous talk (“overlap”). Inhaling implies “pre-laughter”:55

01 Jerry: ((talking rapidly)) Dude, I was all- I was all trying to- 02 [to like stop- 03 Lauren: [((Lauren enters the kitchen and says something inaudible)) 04 Do you want a ((inaudible))? 05 (1.0 second pause) 06 Joe: Uhhhm no. No no no no I'm fine.

55 Note: The transcript must be in Courier or Courier New font, 10 point or less, to be displayed correctly.

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07 [Thank you. 08 Jerry: [I was- I was- I was all trying to stop J[udge Steve. 09 Rick: [((laughter)) 10 Jerry: And all of a sudden like I noticed I'm moving 11 backwards. [And I'm like, “What the hell!”] And Rick's] 12 Rick: [ ((loud laughter)) ] 13 Joe: [ Yep. You're damn right] 14 ((Joe speaks slowly in overlap, Jerry continues rapidly)) 15 Jerry: like laughing [and carrying me around, ((inhales)) 16 Rick: [((quick laughing exhale)) 17 Jerry: ((in a deep voice))“Dude, Jerry, you [gotta 18 Joe: [((inhaling)) 19 Jerry: let this stuff [go.” And then, “You gotta just let 20 Rick: [ (( laughing )) 21 Jerry: ‘em fight it out. [Cause you can't get involved.” 22 Rick: [“Let ‘em fight it out! 23 Let ‘em fight it [out!” I was like, “It’s no big deal.” 24 Jerry: [ (( laughter )) 25 [And I- I- I was like, “Okay (.) NO! 26 Joe: [((laughter)) 27 Jerry: NO! [NO!” And then he kept- he just kept on looking at me.] 28 Rick: [ ((chuckles quietly throughout)) ] 29 Joe: ((laughing, quietly then louder, while no one speaks)) 30 Jerry: We're like goons and sh- [((loud laughter)) 31 Rick: [((loud escalating laughter)) 32 Joe: For his book. ((quietly chuckles, sighs)) Ohhh. Ohhhh man. 33 [Anyways though. Yeah. 34 Jerry: [((sighing)) 35 So what am I Rick? 36 (0.5 second pause) 37 Rick: Je- Jerry's the yin to our yang. 38 Jerry: ((laughs)) YEAH.

To begin, Jerry is excitedly describing how he tried to break up the fight. Sharing

new information seems not to be his intent. Since they all witnessed the event and spoke

about it afterwards, his actions are not news to anyone present, except possibly to Lauren,

his girlfriend (see also Goodwin 1984). But notice what happens when Lauren enters the

kitchen. At lines 03 and 04 she interrupts the story to ask if Jerry or Joe would like

something to drink (her voice is very faint). Once she speaks, everyone puts all talk on

pause for a full second—noticeably longer than ordinary pauses in conversation—until

both Jerry and Joe have declined her request. Lauren makes no effort to join the

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storytelling and leaves the room. Nor does anyone make an effort to include her in the

conversation. Excluding her is not merely a gender effect, since men and women do tell

their fight stories to each other. Instead, she is not invited to participate in the storytelling

because she is irrelevant to what the storyteller and audience are trying to do: construct a

shared perspective on potentially disputed events. In fact, she may not have been simply

irrelevant, but potentially dangerous. If she were to start asking about factual details,

ignorant of which ones were particularly sensitive, then trouble could easily resume.

Jerry moves on to a description of Steve. Recall that this was a matter of open

disagreement between Jerry and Rick. Possibilities for how to describe any given person

are practically infinite, so Jerry’s choice of words is important (see Sacks 1992). He

avoids mention of the disputed woman-throwing incident. Instead he proposes a fairly

non-controversial definition of Steve’s involvement as “Judge Steve,” apparently alluding

to the 1995 Sylvester Stallone action movie Judge Dredd. (Interestingly, Stallone is

Rick’s favorite actor. I cannot say whether Jerry knew this, but if not, it is quite a

coincidence.) Rick accepts this version and shows affiliation with Jerry by laughing along

in overlap (line 09).

Jerry continues by suggesting a humorous account of Rick’s intervention into

Jerry’s intervention, “All of a sudden, like, I noticed I’m moving backwards!” which

Rick approves even more heartily with louder, escalating laughter (lines 10-12). Jerry

begins quoting and doing a funny impression of Rick (lines 19-21): “Dude, Jerry… Let

‘em fight it out…” He shows a certain confidence in their beleaguered relationship to

assume that he will come off as comical rather than mocking.

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Rick stops laughing and starts showing his approval with a second conversational

practice. He takes over as the next speaker, now making the story a shared production

and performance. Rick actually repeats Jerry’s exact line twice and then elaborates on it

as Jerry laughs along (lines 22-24): “Let ‘em fight it out! Let ‘em fight it out! I was like,

‘It’s no big deal.’” When he does this he is not just repeating; he is collaborating and

aligning with Jerry.

In his next turn Jerry uses a similar practice to incrementally add to the story. He

continues Rick’s continuation (line 25): “And I was like, ‘Okay. (Pause) NO!’” Notice

here that Jerry begins with the word “And” in order to make his own turn grammatically

contiguous with Rick’s—that is, finishing or at least extending Rick’s sentence, a sign of

mutual cooperation.

The story’s content is less important (and perhaps less coherent) than its

interactional form. Together, they use the three turns at talk to construct one story: First

Rick was like “Let them fight it out, let them fight it out, it’s no big deal” and then Jerry

was like “Okay—No!” The collaboration is what’s most meaningful for their relationship

(see Goodwin 1986; Goodwin & Goodwin 1987; Jefferson 1978). They are now acting as

a single collective unit—Emile Durkheim’s (1897/1952) very definition of a sociological

phenomenon.

Moments later the excitement and laughter are dying down. Indicating that the

story is over (at least for now) Jerry and Joe briefly turn their attention to my tape-

recorder (“We’re like goons and shit,” “for his book”). Rick and Jerry share another

stretch of loud, simultaneous post-storytelling laughter, indicating to each other that they

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endorse and appreciate this account (lines 30-31). The endpoint of the story is important.

They do not stop telling the story at the climax or finale of the fight; instead they stop

before reaching that moment, immediately after reconciling their views and establishing a

cooperative relationship in the telling.

Finally, Jerry and Rick share one last moment of solidarity-building. In a literal

sense, Jerry asks Rick to summarize his own identity (line 35): “So what am I, Rick?”

But in practical terms he is asking for much more than that. Jerry’s question asks how

Rick views the upshot of this conversation and where their relationship stands now. It’s

an unexpected and deeply vulnerable moment. Rick has the option to resume any number

of recent disagreements or to distance himself from or humiliate Jerry.

The question seems to catch Rick off guard. It takes him a long moment (half a

second) to come up with an answer, after which he has one false start (“Je—Jerry’s...”).

But once he gets it out, Rick’s answer turns out to be quite subtle and kind (line 37):

“Jerry’s the yin to our yang.” Interestingly, by answering in the third-person (rather than

second-person) perspective he mitigates the naked vulnerability of the moment,

ostensibly treating it as being for the tape-recorder’s benefit. Rick doesn’t deny that they

have some obvious personality differences, but actually highlights them.

His specific choice of the yin-yang symbol is important. As a child and teen Rick

was a serious student of Japanese martial arts, casting a connotation of spiritual

acceptance over the metaphor. Even while acknowledging their differences, Rick uses the

symbol to describe Jerry and himself (as wells as others like him with the word “our”) as

complementary parts to a whole. He implies that, without the other, each would be

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incomplete. But together they form a unity greater than the sum of its parts. Rick

reaffirms the continuing value of their relationship. Jerry is reassured, “YEAH.” In the

language of Durkheim’s (1912/1995) classic theory, Rick and Jerry construct their

relationship on a foundation of “organic solidarity.

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Chapter 9. The Practical Guide to Constructing Physical Fights

How do people select opponents and find reasons for a fight? Why does a dispute

become violent right now? During violence, do opponents act only on psychological

impulses or do they continue to interact in socially meaningful ways?

From the perspective of the people I studied, “real” fights are continuous stretches

of competitive, emotionally serious, hand-to-hand violence (see Chapter 5). The

definition serves as both an interpretive lens for making sense of action and a practical

guide to organizing action (see Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984; Polanyi 1958, 1966;

Sacks 1992; Schutz 1962; Weider 1977). As fighters see it, a stretch of interaction is a

“fight” only while the following three conditions are met. One might think of this as the

fighter’s practical guide to constructing physical fights.

In order create and sustain a fight:

1. Disputants agree to fight as a solution to a character challenge. The conflicts

preceding fights can begin in a variety of ways. What they share in common is not

a specific topic of dispute but a specific (a) transformation of meaning and (b)

sequence of interactional moves. Disputants provoke one another to define the

situation as a ritual challenge to character rather than simply a substantive

offense. In order to establish the present interaction as a fight, one opponent must

propose to solve the character challenge with mutual violence and the other must

accept. Typically they make the agreement by “talking shit,” as they call it, but

they may also agree tacitly through gestures. During this process they re-construct

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the argument as a mutual “dare” to fight. One way or another, they view each

other as “asking for it.”

2. At least one opponent transcends the ordinary fear of using violence. Except

during special moments, almost everyone is reluctant to actually initiate a violent

attack (Collins 2008). An important turning point is the moment when the

situation transforms from dramatic performance to authentic crisis. Disputants

achieve a “fight-or-flight” feeling. They come to recognize the present moment as

the “last chance” to manage an emerging crisis (e.g. to prevent further

humiliation, to punish an offender, or to defend oneself from attack). They feel

that action must be taken now. In order to fight at least one opponent must

overcome the impulse to “flight” and initiate an attack. They do so by becoming

overwhelmed by rage, panic, and/or thrill, often in combination with a strong

sense of a social obligation to fight.

3. The opponents use practices of competitive violence. The meaning of the violence

is always contingent on which practices are being used. Despite the frantic,

unreflective quality of violent action, fighters manage to use specific practices of

mutual combat, such as making a vulnerable target of one’s own body, using

back-and-forth techniques of attack, and stopping when one side admits defeat.

Members consider a violent interaction a “fight” only so long as the opponents

convey that they are trying to win, that is, to defeat each other against competitive

resistance.

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Individually, no one or two of these conditions is sufficient to make a fight. Disputants

sometimes verbally agree to do violence but do not actually follow through. Competitors

may exchange mutual violence playfully rather than seriously. A violent actor may

overcome the emotional and interactional obstacles to violence, but do so only in order to

survive, dominate, or punish with no evident concern for competition.

It is important not to overstate the degree of organization in fighting. No universal

law dictates that once begun anyone must complete or sustain a fight. Like social life

generally, fight situations are never completely scripted. Interaction always requires

creative, spontaneous engagement with the details of one’s immediate situation. Thus

fights may always “turn into” something else. Mutual fighting is only one compelling,

practical solution to an existential challenge. Participants may discover new challenges

and find alternative forms of violence or nonviolence more compelling. As I explain,

upon gaining the upper hand, single combatants sometimes abandon competition in favor

of unilaterally beating opponents. Coalition members sometimes pursue group solidarity

by collectively “jumping” a single target, thus ending the stretch of competition. To

appreciate the orderliness of fighting is to recognize its limits.

1. AGREEING TO SOLVE A CHARACTER CHALLENGE WITH VIOLENCE

In my dataset, fights were enacted in the context of interpersonal conflicts, but not

just any kind of conflicts. Fight conflicts pose a challenge to character for each party.

Achieving this definition of a conflict is a specific transformation of meaning, from

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viewing the situation as a substantive trouble to viewing it as a fateful existential

dilemma: a dare to “do something,” to exchange violence. The challenge has two sides: a

discrediting, humiliating threat to self should one “back down,” and an aggrandizing

opportunity to “stand up” for oneself.

Further, fight conflicts include a specific sequence of interactional moves: one

party proposes to fight and another accepts the proposal. People may make proposals

explicitly or implicitly with provocative gestures and aggressive invasions of personal

space. Likewise, recipients might accept proposals indirectly (e.g. shoving) or directly

(e.g. “Either quit talking shit or hit me.” [Case #62]).

Character Challenges

People who look closely at homicide find that serious violence frequently follows

disputes that seem utterly trivial on their surface (Katz 1988; Luckenbill 1977;

Monkkonen 2001; Polk 1999; Strauch et al. 2001; Wolfgang 1957; see also Gorn 1985).

To understand violence one must confront both its absurdity and its gravity. People kill

each other, for instance, after arguing about parking spaces or French fries. But the

content of the conflicts is misleading. There is always something important at stake when

people use violence (see also Girard 1977); in competitive fights, it is the combatants’

sense of self (see Goffman 1967). Disputants come to feel that they have been insulted,

been dared to escalate the conflict, and that their character is on the line, above and

beyond their concern for any specific offense or disagreement.

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Case #60, based on interviews with one participant and four witnesses, illustrates.

When they were twenty-two years old, Jerry and Chad got into a fight after arguing over

a carne asada burrito and guacamole. They were drinking and partying with a number of

friends at Justin and Will’s apartment late at night, having already gotten into one

barroom brawl earlier in the evening (Case #4). Jerry and Chad drove to Nacho’s Tacos,

Tucson’s beloved late-night Mexican fast food restaurant (and favored fight spot). Chad

has a sensitive stomach and very particular tastes, so he wanted his carne asada burrito

with everything on the side, especially the guacamole. Chad’s long-time friend Bob

explained that “that’s how he likes it. He won’t eat all the guac’ and stuff.” Jerry placed

the order, so Chad insisted that everything had to be on the side. Jerry made some fuss

and they argued about whether or not the burritos always came that way.

Upon returning to the apartment, Chad sat down on the couch and opened his

Styrofoam box of food. He inspected it for a moment. The order was wrong. The

guacamole was in the burrito. In the burrito! After he told Jerry!

Chad started “yelling” at Jerry, as Justin put it. According to Jerry, Chad “thought

I like ordered his food wrong. And I thought I ordered it right and they [Nacho’s Tacos]

messed up. So we started arguing about it.”

Standing tensions in their relationship may have been important. According to

Jerry they “sort of have a history.” He explained that they are “two of the biggest guys in

the group. So we’re kind of competitive … like, before we’ve come sort of close to fighting.

Just over stupid stuff.” Though they hadn’t actually fought “for real,” they had engaged in

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playful tests of strength, including what Jerry called “wrestling matches where everyone

watched.”

The previous day they had spent at least twelve hours confined in a car together on

the drive to Tucson from San Francisco, where both lived at the time. Jerry was studying

philosophy at a private university and Chad was working full-time as a plumber.

According to their friends, Chad felt Jerry had been acting academically superior, which

wouldn’t have been an entirely unusual complaint during Jerry’s “metaphysical phase.”

An important turning point in the argument was the moment when Chad and Jerry started

to view it as personally insulting, probably in light of these previous tensions. Caroline

recalled that Jerry was saying something along the lines of “Don’t tell me how it comes”

and Chad was yelling things like “I’m not stupid” (emphasis added).

Jerry attempted a face-saving move. To simply “walk away” would have been too

humiliating, so instead he announced, “Well, I’m leaving. ‘Cause otherwise I’m gonna

have to kick your ass,” and then walked out of the apartment. Jerry’s move was a more

complex solution to the dilemma than it might appear at first glance. Jerry was willing to

exit the situation if he could save face by having the last word, but his last word was an

indirect proposal to fight. By leaving after making the statement Jerry put Chad in a “last

chance” crisis (the second condition, below): either accept the proposal to fight promptly or

suffer the ongoing humiliation of the insult.

Chad took a quick moment to consider his next move, silently looking at his

burrito while Jerry walked out. What to do?

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What Chad came up with was to pick up the burrito, storm outside, and shove it

right in Jerry’s face. This was also a subtler move than one might think. It symbolically

reversed Jerry and Chad’s relative standing in the situation. Jerry had used the burrito to

humiliate Chad and challenge his “face,” in the metaphorical sense. Now Chad was

humiliating Jerry with the same burrito, stuffing it back into Jerry’s face, literally. Jerry

treated this as an agreement (or at least a counter-proposal) to fight, responding by

grabbing Chad in a headlock. Chad broke free and punched him in the face several times.

They were eventually separated by friends.

To understand the meaning of pre-fight conflicts, a particular observation is

important. Fights follow conflicts but they do not attempt to “resolve” the explicit topics

under dispute. Once disputants begin fighting they tend to permanently suspend the

matters about which they have just been arguing. They do not continue to debate specific

offenses. Afterwards winners do not announce solutions to substantive disagreements.

The violence itself openly acknowledges that the specific argument is closed and, in most

cases, effectively ends any possibility for resolving the substantive matter.

Instead of attempting to resolve conflicts, fights try to solve existential dilemmas.

Once character has been challenged, each side may feel that a “last stand in defense of

the self” is required (Katz 1988). It may be difficult to “back down” without feeling that

one is demonstrating cowardice and weak character. As regular fighters see it, doing so

would be to “punk out,” “like a bitch.” Fighting, or at least proposing to fight, is a

particularly attractive solution because it transforms the situation from a potentially

humiliating one into a potentially redeeming one: a dramatic opportunity to test one’s

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character and to display nerve, willpower, and self-confidence—the same personal

qualities that are under threat. In fact, as long as they perform honorably, fighting may

actually be the only practical way for both sides to leave the contest seeing themselves as

“winners” (in the moral, if not technical, sense of the word).

Finding Trouble

As I explained in a previous chapter, many sample members would “look for

trouble” in order to cultivate membership, “test” character, and make good stories.

However, the immediate reasons to fight can only be discovered in the situation.

They preferred to fight strangers rather than friends, since fights between friends

would often result in hurt feelings and emotional apologies. But trying to fight with

strangers poses special practical problems as well, namely, choosing which strangers to

fight with, figuring out what to fight over, and coming to feel that the fight is

authentically motivated by the conflict. One step toward solving these problems was to

go out carousing with a group of friends, or “partying,” as my sample members called it.

Carousing, by definition, involves action-seeking, troublemaking, and creating disorder

(see Collins 2008; see also Chapter 7).

Instigators rarely approached targets and immediately threw a punch or walked up

and proposed cold. Like picking up a sex partner, it takes more finesse than that. Instead,

they would invite potential opponents to collaborate in conflict. Invitations took the form

of subtle variations on ordinary situational behavior such as eye contact, bodily contact in

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small spaces, and rude jokes or comments. Such invitations were ambiguous enough to

ignore or decline at little cost. As TJ explained:

#190. TJ Bumps a Guy at Sharky’s.56 TJ had bumped into someone at Sharky’s “kinda’ hard,” but tried to make it seem unclear whether or not he meant to hurt him or was just trying to get by. A couple steps later the guy turned around and was looking back at TJ. So TJ gave him a “come on outside” kind of smile. He never came out though.

Ambiguous invitations are most successful when they target someone else looking

for trouble, or at least open to it. Hernandez was a 19-year old tag-banger.57 Like many

youthful troublemakers, he used his appearance to communicate that he was open to

trouble. He wore the classic, adolescent hip-hop tough guy uniform (not to be confused

with other hip-hop styles, like the player/ladies man type): extremely baggy pants that

hung low on his hips and large t-shirts or jerseys that reached almost to his knees. He

would strut with an exaggerated gait, feet pointing out forty-five degrees, knees bending

rhythmically, head titled back confidently, and shoulders dipping and swaying with

attitude. One afternoon while “all pilled-up” on Valium,58 he and a friend walked down a

public sidewalk in central Tucson on their way to get sandwiches at Crispy’s Subs.

Hernandez noticed a stranger extending a provocative invitation. For members of fighting

cultures, it is possible to forge an agreement to fight without saying a word (though

Hernandez does translate one of his gestures into its verbal equivalent; see also

Luckenbill [1977]):

56 Adapted from fieldnotes, July 16, 2000. 57 Like a “gang-banger,” but without turf. Tagging is graffiti. 58 An intoxicating prescription anti-anxiety drug, popular in Tucson since Mexican Roche-brand pills could be easily smuggled over the border at the time.

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#44. Hernandez Walking on the Sidewalk. Hernandez: … he was doggin’ [staring at] me and my friend…. [Then, on the way back from Crispy’s] he’s looking at me again … I go to put my hands up, like, “What? What the fuck? Stop looking at me all rude like!” He runs across the street and shit, tries to throw a swing at me. I duck. Once in the stomach [Hernandez punches him] and he’s all [gasping], “Huuuh!”

Challenges like “dogging” strangers—or among southern California gang-bangers,

“telling” someone “Where you from?”—are meant to invite opponents who share a

similar culture and are also interested in mutual combat (Garot 2007).59

More often than not, such invitations fail. As TJ describes, one night Brian made

“a good effort” on behalf of his group of friends to find suitable opponents for a brawl.

Over the course of several hours he made several “good tries” before achieving success:

#101. Rick, Brian, TJ, and Joe Get Themselves Jumped. TJ: A couple times some people would be leaving, and so he’d just go stand in front of them and just stare at them. And they would just have to squeeze by him. That was the most subtle thing he did…. these other guys were leaving…. He just starts picking up rocks and throwing them at them…. But they just ignored him…. [Later on] all these big guys were angry because they wanted to beat someone up…. And Brian’s just standing there staring at them. And this big black guy starts walking toward him and said, “What’s your problem dude?” And Brian takes a look at him, and takes a drag of his cigarette and flicks it at him…. then he said, “I don’t know, man. It looks like you’re the one that’s trippin’.” And the guy was like, “Oooh! That’s it!” and ran over at him.

59 The Tucsonans were unfamiliar with this practice. Case #84 illustrates how cultural understandings of disputing practices are important in collectively defining the situation as a “fight.” Hernandez was once “hit up” by gang-bangers while he and Jimmy were on a road-trip to southern California. They were parked at a convenience store when a youth approached from another car. The youth said, “Where you from, cuz?” Hernandez failed to recognize this as a direct challenge, answering “I’m a tourist. I’m from Arizona.” I would speculate (based on my personal familiarity with such challenges and their issuers, gained over several years living in Los Angeles neighborhoods with high-profile street gangs) that the issuer took Hernandez’s response to be a sarcastic insult. Only when his opponent threw a punch did Hernandez figure out that “where you from” had been a proposal to fight. Though slow on the uptake, he was quick to accept the proposal once he realized what was happening, returning a vigorous barrage of punches. Waiting nearby was a carload of the gang-banger’s friends. Hernandez was “surprised they didn’t get out and try to jump me when they saw me punching back.” Jimmy, who was just exiting the store, picked up a trashcan and threw it against the car’s windshield, after which Hernandez’s opponent returned to the vehicle and they sped away.

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In one common routine, instigators exploited the situation in an ironic way. The

instigator initiates a conflict either by gratuitously committing offenses or by treating

targets as responsible for creating situational disorder—conveniently, the same disorder

endemic to carousing scenes. One party accuses the other of wrongdoing, orders the other

to take remedial action, or demands an explanation. In order to get angry, disputants drop

the substantive matter and begin to quarrel instead about ritual or remedial matters

(Goffman 1971), that is, to feel insulted and humiliated by how the other is arguing:

#1. Brawl at the Midtown Club. Charlie: And then this frat boy bumped into his girlfriend and tripped. She spilled her beer on one of my friends. Then he told one of my friends to apologize. And my friend wouldn’t do it. So they started to argue.

What began as disingenuous indignation might easily become genuine anger over a few

turns of “talking shit.”

A case described by Tim, a member of a skinhead friendship group, illustrates. He

and two friends had been hanging out for a couple of hours at Sharky’s when three “frat

boy faggots” came in and started getting drunk and playing around in a rowdy way, as

young men do while carousing:

#10. Tim at Sharky’s. Tim: And they knock one of these big, lit-up Coors signs off the wall, right? And I’m all drunk so I’m like, you know, this’ll be funny. I go, “Hang that sign back up.” The guy’s like, “Fuck you, I didn’t knock it off.” … I go, “Was it your friend … Did you knock that off… Then it was you. Hang it the fuck back up.” And he goes, “Fuck you, I’m not fucking hanging anything up…. You fucking faggot.” … I got in his face, said, “We’re going outside. I’m gonna beat your fucking ass.”

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These disputes had a bootstrapped character. In order to fight, members had to

creatively find a problem with a stranger, one that would make an authentic reason to

fight. Thus, the reason to find a conflict is to be able to fight, but once the conflict is

found it becomes the reason to fight.

Provocation

In a literal sense, fight situations allow various interactional “ways out” or

opportunities to avoid or exit the conflict. Typically, however, the longer one stays in a

dispute the costlier it is to exit. Aggressive disputants frequently complicate exit by trying

to provoke targets into staying. They use insults and challenges to impose social and

emotional costs on exit, such as loss of face and humiliation. Unwilling to pay these costs,

many disputants agree to violence—accept the dare—only after being ensnared by intense

provocation.

One of the most familiar provocations is to impugn masculinity with feminizing

terms like “pussy,” “bitch,” and “faggot”:

#1. Brawl at the Midtown Club. Charlie: Then he started calling us pussies. So my friend slapped him and said, “Now who’s the bitch?” #5. TJ, Andrew, and I Brawl.60 “Come on. Fight me like a man…. If you fight like a girl, I’ll slap you like a bitch.”

“Essentializing” insults—that is, person-labels like “asshole”—generally attempt to

denounce, humiliate, and denigrate the target’s fundamental moral worth (Garfinkel 1956;

60 Retrospective Observation.

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Katz 1974, 1999). They dare the target to “do something.” Among them, feminizing terms

have a special sting for men. They provoke by challenging the target’s right to claim

masculine character and to control his public self, symbolically transforming him into a

lower social type. Thus he can be disrespected and degraded with impunity, and his

suffering can be made a source of pleasure for others.

For instigators, the value of humiliating provocations is not only that they incite

anger and retaliation, but that they conceal their own coercive nature. Members of my

sample varied in their willingness to coerce but virtually all of them tried to avoid

committing overtly one-sided, predatory violence. As many active fighters see it, violence is

consensual so long as an opponent agrees to fight, even if it takes extensive and/or coercive

provocation to achieve “consent.”

When targets were reluctant to accept a proposal to fight, instigators often found

feminizing proposals to be effective solutions. Andy recounted using this strategy. He was

in a high school computer class with Hank, a jock whom he considered annoying. Hank was

messing with Andy’s chair somehow, so Andy seized the opportunity to ram the chair into

his knees. When Hank complained that he was hurt and would have to miss football

practice, Andy taunted him. They initially agreed to fight but Hank tried to back out later:

#33. Andy vs. the Football Player. Andy: And he was like, “That’s it, we’re gonna fight after school.” And I was like, “That’s fine by me.” … [Later] He came up to me and he was like, “It’s okay, we don’t have to fight. It was a misunderstanding.” And I was like, “Whatever bitch. I’m gonna be there. If you’re not there then you’re a pussy.” And then he showed up and he kicked my ass.

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Talking Shit61

In the language of the people who do it, challenging character, provoking, daring,

and agreeing to fight are forms of “talking shit.” It overlaps substantially with a category of

talk known to the legal community as “fighting words,” so dubbed by the U.S. Supreme

Court in 1942 (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire). Due to its incendiary potential and intent,

the court ruled that fighting words are not constitutionally or otherwise legally protected

speech (see Mannheimer 1993). But to understand the disputants’ perspective one must

appreciate that talking shit is not simply a form of conflict and provocation but also a

dramatic performance. It is an important moment in the process of disputing in several

ways.

First, talking shit restructures the public nature of the event. Talking loudly, making

threats, and issuing challenges, the disputants make an irresistible display of themselves.

Witnesses feel compelled to focus on the argument, lest they miss out on the action or even

receive unwelcome attention themselves. Moments before getting into a fight themselves,

Rick and TJ described the excitement of watching a bout of shit-talking:

#101. Rick, Brian, TJ, and Joe Get Themselves Jumped. Rick: And then a whole bunch of people were talking like, “Oh, there’s gonna be a fight!” … So we were like, “Oh, sweet!” [With enthusiasm.] “They’re gonna beat up that guy!” TJ: So everyone runs out there. A bunch of random people…. there was a crowd of about twenty or twenty-five people watching.

If no one tries to break up the fight, the audience typically forms a circle or semi-circle:

#34. Bennie and I Have a Showdown.

61 Parts of this section are revised and expanded from “Taking a Beating” (Jackson-Jacobs 2004b).

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Retrospective Observation: We walked about two hundred yards into the desert where the neighborhood kids had a fighting spot [called “the pit,” which had an elevated ring of desert gravel around it]. Everyone [besides me and Bennie] took a seat [on the ring, forming a circle]. I handed my shirt and wristwatch to Bert, tied my shoes, and tightened my belt. Bennie and I faced off. He said, “What’s up?” (A challenge to fight [when asked with aggressive intonation and nonverbal gestures].)

Second, talking shit is a commitment to a fateful gamble. By publicly taking the

“line” (Goffman 1967) of violently arguing, each disputant claims a steadfast character and

commits to a course of action that will lead to violence. While still talking shit the actor

maintains the ability to act reflectively and self-consciously manage his identity. Yet, at the

same time, he is beginning a course of action in which he will surrender exactly these

capacities. The actor is claiming that he can perform not only with verbal composure but

also that he will be able to demonstrate strength of character by fighting with honor. The

gamble is all the bolder since the actor risks showing himself to be “all talk” if, once his

opponent actually attacks, he succumbs to the impulse to run.

Third, talking shit is social-psychologically essential to performing mutual combat.

Often the actor “wants to” fight someone, but has neither the proper bodily disposition nor

the emotional energy necessary for a violent outburst. As William James (1884) famously

wrote, running provokes fear. Likewise, talking shit summons anger. Simply reciting a

script of fighting words can help to conjure the combative spirit.62 By looking into

someone’s eyes and saying “What the fuck are you looking at?” or “What’s your problem?”

one can muster a certain amount of anger, even if there is no “objective,” independently

62 Neuroscientific experiments find that going through the motions may provoke the feelings and physiology of emotions (Damasio 2003)—cutting edge scientific technology and experimental methodology corroborating James’ insight, more than a century old.

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existing conflict about which to get mad.63 Gesturing wildly, flicking cigarettes, and shoving

opponents, fighters work their bodies up, feeling increasingly imposing and capable of

seriously attacking. Furthermore, by delivering an insult one inspires self-defensive fear in

oneself: by provoking the opponent’s rage, one provokes in oneself a violent readiness to

defend against that rage.

Fourth, talking shit to an opponent is, counter-intuitively, a way to construct oneself

as an aggrieved underdog or even a persecuted victim. One way is by literally claiming a

grievance or demanding an excuse. Another is by encouraging the opponent to retaliate with

massive verbal or physical escalation, creating the sense that one is “fighting back,” thus

absolving one of the moral culpability of “attacking.” Many fighters prefer to be struck first

for just this reason.

Members of fighting cultures consider talking shit a prelude and implicit agreement

to mutual violence. Yet, interestingly, they still frequently negotiate explicit agreements to

fight, as in the following proposal-acceptance sequence:

#26. Justin Fights Lyndon at Burger King. Retrospective Observation: Justin and Lyndon were agreeing to fight—“You wanna do this?” “I’m down,” etc. They started squaring off.

The rituals and the drama of negotiating the agreement can be quite elaborate. During

adolescence, classmates would sometimes arrange times and places to fight hours or even

days ahead of time. Agreements might involve proposing ground rules (“one-on-one”),

locations (“to the street”), and whether or not weapons will be used:

63 As an exercise, try it with a trusted partner. Don’t forget to finish with a solidarity-building gesture such as a hug, handshake, or joke.

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#5. TJ, Brad, and I Brawl. Retrospective Observation: Brad slowed down so that the front group of four could catch up. I pleaded with Brad, “There’s way too many of them.” They heard me say this and [one of them] replied, “I don’t give a fuck. We can do this shit one-on-one.” #97. Hernandez’s Crew Jumps a Crip. Hernandez: And then Wayne accidentally bumped into one of them and they started talking shit. And he was all, “We could take it to the street.” #68. Aaron vs. The Cowboy. Aaron: …I had these spikes on, on my hand [a spiked ring]…. And he was like, “You better take those off.” And I’m like, “No, fuck you!” And he goes and grabs a bottle and smashes it. So he’s got this broken bottle—he’s chasin’ after me with it. And I’m like, “All right! All right! I’ll take them off!”

Establishing agreement (in some form) is necessary for a fight. However, the fight

might still be prevented in a variety of ways or the violence might still take a form other

than fighting. If they have not yet done so, fighters must still provoke an urgent crisis for

one another—that is, the “fight-or-flight” feeling that one must act immediately—and

then transcend their reluctance to use violence. As I explain, agreement to fight and crisis

moments are two related but distinct conditions for constructing a fight.

2. TRANSCENDING FEAR IN AN URGENT “LAST CHANCE” CRISIS

There is an interesting moment in the process of fighting, but it is not always

obvious. Even after people have agreed to do battle, even when a crowd is circled and

cheering, the opponents may still not start fighting. It can take several minutes for

someone to throw the first punch:

#31. Drake’s Showdown. Drake: Oh, there was a whole bunch of people there. A whole crowd. Curtis: Did you guys talk shit to each other?

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Drake: Not really, we kind of stood there for a good fifteen minutes just waiting for somebody to make the first move.

The crowd may even begin to jeer and taunt the non-combative combatants. Then, in an

instant, everything changes. A first punch is thrown and the punches start flying at a

frantic rate. What explains the difference?

As Collins (2008) has observed of violent acts ranging from fistfights to riots to

military combat, virtually everyone feels a considerable degree of what he calls

“confrontational fear/tension” when preparing to actually transform a situation with

violence, regardless of individual personality. At times people are inhibited by their fears

of injury or informal and formal social control. But above and beyond these concerns

there is a more pervasive reason why people feel reluctant: the rituals, practices, and

experience of ordinary interaction are strongly biased in favor of nonviolence. Ordinary

interaction involves a fundamental preference for nonviolence.64 In order to actually

perform serious violence the social actor must experience the situation as beyond the

realm of ordinary interaction (see also Garfinkel 1956; Sacks 1992).

64 The term “preference,” as I use it, has a technical meaning in micro-sociology, one that is quite different from its meaning in micro-economics, psychology, and non-technical speech. As I use it here, preference does not refer to individual dispositions or tastes. It refers to structural qualities of interaction itself. The concept of “preference organization” refers to a relationship between alternative courses of action (agreement/disagreement, formal/informal social control, violence/nonviolence). One alternative is said to be preferred if interactional procedures presume it as the default option or are biased in favor of using it. An alternative course of action is dispreferred if choosing it requires special interactional procedures, circumstances, and justifications. Even if someone personally prefers the structurally-dispreferred alternative, she must still overcome the procedural obstacles to using it. Sociologists use a few kinds of evidence to document interactional preferences. First, people do the preferred activities quantitatively more often than the dispreferred. Second, people tend to use dispreferred actions in qualitatively special ways and under special circumstances. Third, people hold each other accountable and know that others will hold them accountable for taking the dispreferred course of action. On preference organization in conversation, see Jefferson (1980), Lerner (1996), Schegloff et al. (1977), and especially Sacks (1987) on the preference for agreement. On the preference for informal over formal social control in the ethnographic literature, see Black (1982), Davis (1983), and Emerson (1981).

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People do use violence, but not just any time, and not just when emotions erupt or

they “lose control,” as is commonly presumed. People use violence during moments that

have a specific emotional tenor and symbolic meaning. They must recognize the

moment’s urgent demand for action, experienced as a “fight-or-flight” feeling, and one

must opt for “fight” over “flight.” This transition happens in all fights, but it is easiest to

see in one revealing phenomenon (because the transition is drawn out in time): meeting in

“showdowns.”

Meeting in Showdowns

As in duels, people sometimes get into disputes in one situation and agree to fight

in another. Several things must happen to achieve a showdown. At least two people must

go through the process of challenging and agreeing to fight, but some present obstacle

prevents them from fighting immediately. In my data there were two kinds of obstacles.

On school campuses, students often expected that teachers would break up their fights

and discipline them. At other times, they disputed over the telephone or through third

party gossip, meaning they were spatially separated. Disputants must negotiate a time and

place to fight, either directly or through third parties, and finally, they must meet.

Oftentimes, the disputants have lost any animating anger or excitement by then. In fact,

as this phenomenon reveals, it is possible for two people to fight even when neither is

angry. A distinctive quality of showdown-style fights is that, in order to fight, opponents

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must work to revive the previous conflict or provoke a new one, and then come to

experience it as a present crisis.65

Disputants find that by the time they meet they have an obligation to their

audience to fight. During a group interview, Joe (a fighter) and Rick (a classmate at the

time) described the audience’s involvement over several hours of one dispute. Brandon

had been picking on a classmate in physical education class that morning when Joe

voiced his opposition.

#35. Joe vs. Brandon. Joe: … it was just a smell there in the locker room that something was gonna happen. [Everyone laughs.] “After school” … Rick: “After school! Meet me at ‘the wall’!”— [Everyone laughs.] Joe: So, it was, you know, set in stone. It was granted … eventually it spreads … like a nuclear explosion. There’s no way of getting around it— Rick: Everyone knew you were gonna fight so you just had to … Joe: By lunch time, everyone knew. I mean people who didn’t even know me knew. Rick: It was like, “I heard Joe Nash is gonna fight Brandon James at the wall!” [Everyone laughs.] Joe: And then my brother [Justin] … he’s always friends with Steve Garrison and all the so-called popular people at the time. So, you know, everybody’s talking shit to him [Brandon], “Joe is gonna beat your ass!” … So, you know, the day ended and we went over to “the wall”… And, of course, there’s masses of people around there. And that’s when I realized, you know, maybe this is not the greatest idea in the world. If I were to lose, this would just be horrible, horrible…. I had faith that I would prevail. But at the same time, you know, it’s just that nervous “what if” factor.

The original challenge to character may no longer matter. Instead, the new challenge

is to motivate oneself or one’s opponent to throw the first punch. At times the audience

forces one or both opponents into a “last chance” crisis moment: take the fateful step of

65 Strictly ritualizing the beginning of duels is a clever, functional solution, accomplishing crisis based on procedural transformations of the situation, independent of any other conflict.

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throwing a punch now or risk losing one’s nerve, backing down, and suffering

humiliation in front of everyone.

I was involved in one of these fights when I was 15 years old. A 17 year-old named

Bennie believed I had thrown wet biscuit dough on his old white boat of a Cadillac. He was

wrong, but I agreed to fight anyway in hopes of developing toughness and a reputation. We

planned our showdown days in advance. When we faced off he did not mention the biscuit

dough or his car a single time. Instead he tried to provoke me into a crisis by insulting and

shoving me, challenging me to throw the first punch:

#34. Bennie and I Have a Showdown. Retrospective Observation: I told him repeatedly, “Make the first move, it’s your fight.” After a few minutes his friends started to taunt him. Bennie shoved me. I just looked at him. He shoved me twice more. He then stood about three inches from my face. After a few seconds he punched me in the left cheek. I put my hands up and punched him alternately in both eyes.

Once Bennie actually punched me the crisis of indecision was resolved and replaced with

another crisis. We became entangled in the characteristic urgency of back-and-forth

punching and wrestling. Someone is attacking, so one must fight or flee now.

Although there are many more near-fights than actual fights in other contexts (e.g.

barroom arguments), I never saw or heard of people meeting in a showdown without

using some violence.66 In nine showdown-style meetings there were six competitive

fights and three one-sided beatings. I attribute the frequency of violence to the crisis

provoked by the audience. If opponents fail to motivate each other or themselves, the

audience eventually does it for them, either by simply watching or by jeering.

66 I did not document near-fights as thoroughly and I did not sample violent events in a numerically systematic fashion, so quantitative inferences are only suggestive.

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From Reluctance to Urgency

The emotions in fighting are more complicated than one might imagine. Rage is

common but far from universal. Fear is also common, but again, not in the way one might

expect. Anxiety most often focuses on the meaning and the symbolic consequences of

violence (e.g. Joe’s “nervous ‘what if’ factor” in front of an audience, above) rather than

physical injury or punishment. Based on the dataset, however, there is a common

emotional experience.

In order to establish a fight proper, the opponents must first become overwhelmed

by a “fight-or-flight” sense of urgency. Then at least one of them must overcome the

impulse to “flight” and initiate an attack. It is possible to have a fight in which only a

single blow is thrown (in which case the third condition, below, must still apply), but it is

much more common for both opponents to attack, having made the same transition. They

describe the feeling in a variety of primal and natural terms (see also excerpts from Cases

#7, #98, and #103, below):

#48. Scott vs. Harvey. Scott: It was just like instinct. You know, like that rush…. like, “What’s going on? What, what do I do?” And you just try to do the first thing that comes to your mind. So I was like, “Grab him! Push him away! Do this! Hit him! Do something!” (Italics added.)

In order to fight rather than flee, one way or another, the disputant must transcend

any reluctance or fear about using violence. It is possible to conquer one’s fear through

rage or, ironically, with more intense fear. Oftentimes people fight while in a self-

defensive panic:

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#76. Chad’s First Big Fight. Chad: he’s pushing me a bunch of times. And I was so scared, you know, scared shitless. And I’d never really hit anybody in the face before…. I don’t know what came over me. I was so scared, I knew this guy was gonna swing at me and hit me. I ended up hitting him. #7. Steve Fights in Nogales.67 Describing a teenage fight, Steve said he “panicked” and slammed his opponent’s head on the concrete. “It was purely instinctual.” He described feeling as if the other person was willing to kill him. “It’s just this total fear.” So he always tries to take the other person out first.

Fighters mentally rehearse beforehand, but over the course of a career in fighting

nearly everyone experiences what Chad once called no-backbone moments. People

sometimes back down and suffer humiliation. They hang a friend out to dry, too scared to

jump into a losing battle, and must live with the shame. Nonetheless, there are moments

when fighters do “stand up” and act bravely.

At times, they conquer fear by acting on a sense of duty. In the following incident,

Chad was on the ground being stomped by a rival friendship group of young men at a

house party when Will, Powel, Steve, Bob, Justin, Rick, and possibly others tried to help.

Will described his own experience of transcending confrontational tension/fear:

#98. Brawl at Steve, Jordan, and Jake’s Party. Will: And all of a sudden we just see all these people rushing in there.… And like I just started jumping in the crowd…. Curtis: Were you afraid or— Will: I was scared. It was like, angry, scared violence. It was a huge crowd of people. You know if you get in there with your friends you’re gonna get your ass kicked anyway. You just go ahead and do it anyway…. I was kinda’ like pounding, swinging. You know, a lot of fear, it was really scary. And a lot of adrenaline. And there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to do it. The part that wants to keep yourself safe.

67 Fieldnote: March, 2000.

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People sometimes overcome their fear and reluctance about using violence by

appreciating the fight as a rare and exciting opportunity. As TJ explains below, he had

spent the night looking for and anticipating trouble. So when it arrived he focused not on

the danger but the thrill. Rick and Brian were already surrounded by a crowd of

opponents. I asked him, “Were you afraid? Or what was your emotional state at this

point?” He answered:

#101. Rick, Brian, TJ, and Joe Get Themselves Jumped. TJ: It wasn’t that I was afraid…. I think I was actually kind of excited. Like, “Okay, it’s really gonna’ happen!” I didn’t think about the fact that we were probably going to get annihilated.

Fighters must experience some competing emotional force to transcend their reluctance.

As TJ says, excitement allowed him to ignore the fear of annihilation that he might have

otherwise felt.

When fighters recounted feeling angry, their accounts often suggested tinges of

exhilaration as well. In the case below, Will, Bob, and a few friends were drinking and

commiserating at the Dub-Z. Will’s mother and Bob’s sister (also a close friend of Will)

had both died that week. The singer of a band playing at the club was acting “obnoxious”

and “asking stupid questions” about the deceased. An argument ensued. Will walked

outside with his antagonist following a few steps behind.

I asked, “What were you feeling at that moment, like emotionally?”

#103. Will and Steve’s Post-Funeral Brawl. Will: Just like adrenaline rush, like, “Make the wrong move, fucker.” You know? I was angry…. everything was just fucked up at the time, and I was just ready to fight. And I just wanted to beat the shit out of somebody. So what ended up happening—the guy reached for me. He grabbed my shirt and he started ripping my shirt. And I started hittin’ him in the nose.

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However, even after initiating violence, a proper fight is still a contingent matter. What

happens during the violence is the most crucial determinant of whether and for how long

an interaction is a fight or something else (a beating, a jumping, or a shooting, for

example).

As Katz (1988) and others (Foucault 1977; Girard 1977) have noted, interpersonal

violence has a sacrificial character, particularly when motivated by rage. Should one

disputant treat another as an offender and punish him in the name of justice, then the

interaction may have the quality of a “righteous slaughter” (Katz 1988). Fights are also

motivated by a sacrificial sentiment, but the sacrifice takes a different form. Most

importantly, in order to fight one must sacrifice oneself.

3. PRACTICES OF MUTUAL VIOLENCE

In ordinary interaction one has the sense of directing one’s own conduct, of being

“in control.” In crisis situations the body seems to act of its own accord or to be compelled

by external forces—urgent danger or primitive animal instincts. People feel “carried away”

by uncontrolled emotions. Yet they continue to act in socially meaningful, symbolic ways.

The surprising degree of social awareness in fights challenges the usual perspective that

violence (and other non-reflective behavior) is purely psychological, impulse-driven, and

beyond the scope of social order. Like other “techniques of the body,” such as dancing and

swimming, ways of fighting are socially learned, practiced, and interpreted, making them

amenable to sociological analysis (Mauss 1933/1973).

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Serious violence, even in combination with a mutual agreement, is not sufficient

to construct a fight; the combatants must perform it competitively. Fighters use several

practical techniques to sustain the sense of competition, such as making targets of their

own bodies, fighting hand-to-hand, and stopping upon victory.

Making a Target of One’s Body

Much of the work of creating a fight is to establish mutuality. It begins with

arguing and it continues in combat. To prevent one-sided violence, it is common for

opponents to directly invite attack, especially at the beginning of a fight.

When Hank and Andy fought, Andy not only challenged Hank to punch first, but

actually collaborated with him to make sure the punch landed. They had just squared off

after school, preparing for their showdown. I asked Andy what he was saying. He

answered:

#33. Andy vs. The Football Player. Andy: Just like, “Are you gonna swing, bitch? Are you gonna swing?” He swung and I ducked it…. and then he swung again and I ducked it again. And then he said, “Quit moving so I can hit you.” And I did it. And he hit me right in the nose and broke it. I was just standing there like this [hunched over]. And he was like, “Oh shit, are you okay?” He was like worried about me.

Fighters make vulnerable targets of their own bodies in other ways. The

commonly used provocative “arms out” posture (arms raised and legs planted to the

sides, torso facing the opponent) makes offense impractical for oneself but easy for one’s

opponent. Fighters “get in each other’s faces” literally and figuratively. They slap, point,

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or poke at each other while making threats. The excerpt below illustrates a variety of

ways fighters invite aggression by invading each other’s personal space:

#1. Brawl at the Midtown Club. Charlie: my friend slapped him and said, “Now who’s the bitch?”... And he started to get in our personal space. He was getting in people’s faces and saying, “What’s up now? We’ve got fifty people here! What are you guys going to do?” … And the fat dude got right up in his face. So my friend head butted him pretty hard in the forehead. (Italics added.)

Back-and-Forth Violence

Most members of my sample strongly favored fighting at close quarters without

weapons. Several phrases capture the symmetrical quality of unarmed, competitive

violence: “hand-to-hand,” “toe-to-toe,” “face-to-face.” As boxers know well, whenever

one throws a punch one also leaves an opening for counter-attack. Thus fights rarely end

without a considerable give-and-take of violence.

In fact, combatants do not just encourage back-and-forth violence. They relish it.

There is little competitive satisfaction in beating an unskilled opponent (although there

may be other satisfactions). A “good fight” means overcoming vigorous resistance.

Kenny recounted feeling disappointed when his opponent failed to put up serious

opposition:

#49. Kenny vs. “Hippie Camera Fag.” Kenny: He was like, “You want to fight?” … and he grabbed onto me. And we, like, rolled down the hill a little bit. And I just started punching him in the head … He just stopped doing anything pretty much when I hit him. His head was just moving all around … he was on the ground and I stopped for a little. And he’s like, “Uuuh, that’s enough.” And then he just fucking laid down. And I left…. Curtis: So was it a good fight? Kenny: I thought it sucked. I was pretty disappointed cause first he grabbed me and like—he was bigger than me and had more leverage and strength, so that I thought I

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was gonna have to wrestle with him for a little while. But I just hit him in the face right off and he didn’t do much after that.

Likewise, taking a beating need not be disappointing (see also Jackson-Jacobs 2004b). In

Chapter 5 I described cases in which people lost fights but still interpreted them

positively. As in competitive sports, there is satisfaction in “going down swinging.”

Further, back-and-forth fighting creates the conditions for an all-consuming

“zone” of creative physical artistry. The immediate present requires total concentration.

There is little time to strategize or consciously reflect on the opponent’s range of

potential moves. Yet somehow one’s body executes extraordinary feats of athleticism.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi introduced the term “flow,” in its technical sense, to

academic psychology (see Csíkszentmihályi 1990; Hunter & Csíkszentmihályi 2000). It

refers not only to the individual experience of being directed by—and achieving a

spontaneous, non-reflective engagement with—the immediate situation. Particularly

relevant to fighting is the concept of collective “group flow”—for instance, in sports

(more colloquially, “being in the zone”). In this sense, among ordinary activities, fighting

may be most similar to intense sexual and athletic interactions. As in sex, dancing, or

soccer, the actors continuously adjust to and shape each other’s movements.

It can be profoundly gratifying to discover that one is capable of performing far

more gracefully than one ever imagined. Chad, who recounts most fights with regret and

self-deprecation, still marveled at having the following experience during a group fight

several years earlier (corroborated by witnesses):

#11. Chad’s Superhuman Fight.

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Chad: … it was me against the world.... I just ran and started hitting people. And all of a sudden there was all these people on the ground. And everyone else is way the hell away…. That was my superhuman, battle-galactic thing.

The supernatural metaphors (“superhuman, battle-galactic”) in Chad’s account

illustrate one aspect of the sensuality of fighting. Once the fight begins, fighters

experience a kind of “metaphysical transformation” (Katz 1988) in the situation, a point

of no-return beyond which one must abandon conscious reality as it is ordinarily known.

Freddie vividly recounted a similar experience of self-discovery, also framing it in terms

of an alternate, dream-like reality. It was only his second fight ever. Freddie “thought it

was so cool”:

#117. Freddie and Friend Skateboarding. Freddie: … in your dreams when you’re going to fight someone and you can’t hit them worth shit … and the punches aren’t doing anything to him. And that’s how I always thought it was going to be. But it wasn’t. It was like the most perfect dream hit ever. I just felt it. It didn’t even hurt my hand I hit him so square.

For most practitioners, punching to the face is not a devastating technique, only

rarely incapacitating the target. A number of more injurious means of attack could be

deployed with similar ease, but they rarely are (e.g. kicking the groin, gouging eyes,

striking the throat, biting extremities). One hundred years ago this was in fact how many

Americans fought (Gorn 1985). The safety of contemporary fighting relative to other

violence is based on a considerable degree of trust, solidarity, and restraint between

opponents, which may be why the winner of a fight tends to be the most aggressive

combatant. In fact, the “best” fighters are either unusually quick, powerful punchers or

they use the kinds of vicious techniques that others fail to consider.

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Punching the face does, however, produce a deeply symbolic threat and an

immediate, humiliating provocation (see Anderson 1999). The face is the primary

location of perception and where the self is most publicly exposed in social interaction.

Striking to the face assaults the opponent’s senses and demands attention. Fighters rarely

try to inflict maximum harm. They try to win in a symbolic form of violent competition.

Below, Raj savors the memory of punching a stranger in the face. Notice the

practical details of his performance. Importantly, he used the more martially effective

technique first (“wracked” his opponent “in the nuts”) to set up the more symbolically

satisfying technique (“jacked” his opponent “in the head so hard”). His comments

indicate the depth of aesthetic sensuality in hand-to-hand violence above and beyond

concern for technical utility. Raj appreciates the physical sense of self and other

constructed in the punch—the “power” of his knuckles, deltoids, and pectorals reflected

off the flesh of his opponent’s jaw, ear, and cheek:

#21. Raj Socks a Stranger in Troy.68

Raj told me about a bar fight in New York. A stranger was staring at him so he asked if he “had a problem or something?” The man then sucker-punched Raj. As he described it, he just wanted immediate revenge. So he “wracked him in the nuts” with his knee right away. The guy bent down, holding his groin. So Raj “just jacked him in the head so hard.” The punch “was perfect,” he declared. The guy “just went down right then.”

Later I asked Raj what the best punch he ever threw was. “Probably that one [above],” he told me. It felt “so solid.” He showed me

his fist and ran his other palm along all the knuckles. All of his knuckles “landed so flat.” It landed “right here” where his jaw met his ear. From that angle Raj recalled he “could feel my pectorals and my deltoids working together. Just everything connected all at once.” He described how he followed through with the punch and how he could feel the man’s flesh resisting “the power of the punch.” “But it was no match for the power,” he concluded. “It was just so satisfying.”

68 Fieldnote, September 16, 2001.

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Stopping upon Victory

There are four possible ways for a fight to end: (1) a third party “breaks it up”; (2)

both sides tacitly negotiate a retreat upon reaching a stalemate or draw; (3) one side stops

upon establishing victory (i.e. when the loser admits defeat); or (4) the violence begins to

take another shape (e.g. a beating, “jumping,” or shooting).

When one side gains an advantage, it becomes possible to pursue a unilateral

attack, but doing so means ending the fight. To sustain the sense of competitive violence,

the winning fighter must stop attacking shortly after the loser admits defeat, either

verbally or with a tacit gesture of submission:

#22. Brady & Anthony Showdown. Retrospective Observation: Brady kicked him twice in the leg, knocking him down. Brady pursued him for several steps, but Anthony scooted away on the ground, holding his hand up to signal defeat. #31. Drake’s Showdown. Drake: I was punching his face for a while and then he kinda’ buried his face straight down, then I started punching his kidneys. And then he was like, “That’s it. I quit! I quit!” And I’m like, “All right, cool.” I just got up. There’s no reason to add insult to injury, you know?

Depending on their prior relationship (if any), the winner and loser may even share a hug

or handshake, marking the end of the fight and creating solidarity in a show of

sportsmanship. These fights finished sharply.

There is, however, no clear cutoff for deciding what constitutes stopping “soon

enough.” In some fights, the winner relies on third parties to intervene and then stops

willingly once they do so. Such cases highlight an important point.

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The actors’ intentions and the meaning of ongoing violence (indeed, of any

interaction) always remain contingent. To be accurate with labels like “fight,” “jumping,”

or “beating,” one must apply them to specific stretches of interaction. What happens at

Time 2 may retrospectively cast new significance on Time 1, but it does not change what

the interaction at Time 1 meant when it was happening. Toward the end of a fight the

question should not be “Will this turn out to have been a fight all along?” but “How long

will it remain a fight?”

TRANSITIONS TO OTHER VIOLENCE

In fact, winners and coalition members sometimes do end up unilaterally beating

fighters well beyond the point of “victory.” Doing so transforms the opponents from

“fighters” into “victims” and “attackers.”69 Approximately 16% (21/121) of the fights in

my interactional-level dataset transformed into some form of unilateral violence,

including jumpings, one-side beatings, and gun-violence.

As I hinted in Chapter 8, people infatuated with guns sometimes see a fight as an

opportunity to brandish or shoot them off. At other times, victors remained enraged even

after defeating the loser. Simply “winning” wasn’t dramatic enough to symbolically

demonstrate just how offensively the target had acted. Individual attackers who continued

beyond victory followed the process of “righteous slaughter” described by Katz (1988).

Viewing targets as having offended and humiliated them, they attacked in a spirit of

sacrificial punishment (see also Foucault 1977).

69 Two social actors may switch their identities as “victim” and “attacker” an indefinite number of times during a violent transaction, as Luckenbill (1977) has noted.

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During one group fight several men had chased Rick, frightening him into

running away in a panic—a humiliating act for an experienced fighter, martial artist, and

military serviceman. When Rick caught one of his pursuers alone, he savaged the man in

a rage, “beating” and knifing him punitively rather than competitively. During two tape-

recorded interviews, one by telephone and one when we returned to walk through the

actual location, he described the feeling in somewhat different but equally revealing

words:

#101. Rick, Brian, TJ, and Joe Get Themselves Jumped. Rick: As soon as he got to me I beat him to the ground. I had the knife in my fist, and I just used it to slash his arms…. he just started cowering. He was screaming and shit. But I was like, “I’m gonna teach this guy a lesson about thinking with testosterone and not handling his alcohol.” (Italics added.) Rick: He fell down right here [Rick pointed dominantly to a spot on the ground, clearly excited]. And that’s when I was like, “Oooh, I’m fuckin’ gonna waste this dude right now. This dude’s fucking dead.” (Italics added.)

This case and others also fit Collins’ (2008) concept of “forward panic.” A weaker party

overtakes a previously stronger party and the attack becomes overkill. One might

paraphrase the sentiment: You made me scared; now you suffer!

When fights transform into “jumpings” the emotional experience is usually quite

different. The attackers typically appear more exuberant than enraged. The sacrifice is

made less in the name of offended values than in the name of group solidarity, though the

two are related. When one member gets into a fight, the rest of the group may find the

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“collective effervescence” of a jumping more compelling than the excitement of

spectatorship (Durkheim 1912/1995).70

In the following encounter, Powel was at a house party when someone shoved a

friend of his. Viewing it as an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity and participate in the

excitement, Powel punched the young man in the face. Then the rest of Powel’s friends

“jumped in.” He described the intoxicating feeling of membership:

#96. Jumping at Jeremy O’Reilly’s Party. Powel: [We] just started jumping this guy. And that was as a group. And it just felt like power, you know. “We don’t have to stand for nothing!” You know, “We stand as a group! Tear people down!” And that was the first time. And I think that really glued the whole mess of us…. “Yeah! Yeah! Don’t mess with us!”

In Powel’s jumping there was only a minimal semblance of a competitive fight

before the unilateral attack (the victim shoved a disputant), but in other cases groups of

third parties only decided to jump in once a fight was well underway.

Hernandez described a situation in which the initial, one-on-one fight ended with

the loser running away, at which point the winner’s coalition gave chase. Hernandez and

his friends were smoking a joint at a large house party when “a bunch of Crips”

approached and started an argument, which Hernandez’s crew was only too happy to

escalate:

#97. Hernandez’s Crew Jumps a Crip. Hernandez: And one of them bumped in there, and said, “Let me hit that shit.” And fucking, we’re like, “Here, you can try it.” And he’s all, “What the fuck is this?” And some shit. And then Wayne accidentally bumped into one of them and they started talking shit. And he was all, “We could take it to the street.” … So they’re going one-on-one, they’re hitting each other … next thing I know, dude, the dude

70 These qualities are also central to the phenomenology of group beatings in gang contexts, or “gang-bangs” in Sanders’ (1994) terminology.

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gets up and starts running off…. And we run after this dude…. That was when like five of us just jumped him, dude…. Punching him on the head, kicking him in the face…. I had blood all over my shoes, dude…. I never have really fucking kicked somebody that hard … I mean, I jumped on this guy with both feet as hard as I fucking could.

The jumping by Hernandez’s crew reveals something that may not be obvious. Audience

members are important actors in organizing the violence from beginning to end. They may

support a one-on-one fight by circling and watching, turn it into a group fight by exchanging

blows with other partisan third parties, or supplant it with a jumping by collectively

attacking a weaker target. The combatants are not the only social actors with a hand in

constructing a fight.

CONCLUSION

As the evidence shows, there is no guarantee that what starts as a fight will end

that way. If there are no such guarantees, then what is the point of identifying the last

moments of the fight—investigating fights at all—rather than exploring violence as a

single category? Isn’t the practical construction of “a fight” simply a matter of

“definitions”?

In fact, explaining how people define things is part of explaining why people do

things—that is, when they use the definition as a practical guide to action. For instance,

part of the reason to stop upon victory is to intentionally enact violence in the form of a

fight. The fighter is specifically trying not to bully, beat, or otherwise attack unilaterally.

In other words, the fighter is trying to be a “competitive winner” rather than “sadistic

predator.” What makes this feat so sociologically impressive is that it is virtually

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impossible to consciously reflect one one’s behavior during heated violent exchanges,

demonstrating that social sensitivity may run just as deep as psychological impulse.

The account I give here may not fully explain why some people choose to

perform one-sided, predatory violence. However, it suggests tools for identifying when

they do so, investigating variations between those moments, and developing a causal

explanation. If one is to understand the actor’s reasons for doing violence one must first

honor the meanings of and conditions for achieving distinct forms of violence.

Because we rely so often on the perspectives of outsiders—institutions, witnesses,

or victims—with a stake in the social control of violence, we risk misunderstanding its

diversity and complexity.71 From the outside, all violent acts may appear to be equally

senseless and destructive forms of predation. From the inside, however, fighting is a

meaningful and creative form of competition.

71 Conventional labels often fail to match the experiential boundaries of violent acts. Criminal justice procedures provide consequential examples. (None of this is to deny that there may be good organizational and political reasons for such practices.) At times, homicide prosecutions and statistics treat many distinct categories of violence as if they were the same (impassioned homicides, drive-by shootings, rampage shootings, and so on). Statistical, prosecution, and arrest procedures oftentimes encourage labels that are not faithful to the actor’s perspective by applying one charge per event (for instance, if the most serious offense includes all of the elements of lesser offenses). Single labels ignore the possibility that there may have been multiple meaningful acts committed one after another (e.g. fighting competitively followed by beating punitively after the loser signals defeat). Notably, different labels for violence impose different obligations on social control agents; “fights” do not have “victims,” meaning there is no obligation to pursue justice (see, e.g. Davis 1983; Emerson 1994). The same applies to person-labels like “victim,” “offender,” and “mutual combatant.”

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Chapter 10. The Open-Ended Careers of Youthful Fighters

At twenty-three years old Chad regretted his high school persona. As he was

saying in Chapter 4, “I still picked on the weak.” He continued, “It’s hard to picture

myself as that person. People still come up to me, you know, ‘Hey, you used to beat me

up and call me names.’ I can’t believe I was that person.”

By then Chad had stopped expressing pride in the fistic talents for which he was

so admired in adolescence. He continually reminded me of his wish to be done with it for

good:

I really look at throwing a punch as not even a fucking option anymore…. I look at fighting now and I think I’m too old to do that shit. But there’s more to it…. Domination. And pride…. a combination of bad things that really make the society worse.

Throughout my fieldwork I could detect a gradual shift in how the core group

viewed fighting. New fights became progressively rarer. By ages twenty-two to twenty-

four it became uncommon to go out carousing to large house parties or wild nightclubs.

By their late twenties most had ceased to fight almost completely—though, as I explain,

there was no sharp endpoint.

It would have been easy to say that they simply “aged out”—that they “settled

down” or “matured,” or that they just “got tired” of all the action. Although the major

changes roughly corresponded to standard age categories of delinquent careers, growing

up fighting was not simply a story of “aging in” and “aging out.” During high school they

fought for celebrity and status against acquaintances within the closed, stratified culture

of the campus. Once they were old enough to go out partying, they began to “look for

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trouble” and pick fights with strangers. Years later, as they neared “official” adulthood,

nearly all of them stopped looking for trouble.

There was no clear point at which one could confidently say that a person’s fight

career was over, just as there was no particular moment when one could call the passage

to adulthood complete (cf. West 1978).72 Nor did the frequency of fights seem to decline

along the smooth, predictable course of the “age-crime” curve (Hirschi & Gottfredson

1983). Fight careers, like growing up, were open-ended.

The process of “aging out” is sometimes taken as a natural statistical fact,

requiring no further explanation (Hirschi & Gottfredson 1983). A somewhat more

detailed perspective is that the mechanism of change is a particular turning point, or

combination of turning points, such as entering the labor force or finding romantic

partnerships (e.g. Laub & Sampson 2003; Sampson & Laub 1992; Uggen 2000; cf.

Hagan & Foster 2001). However, for the fighters in my sample, there was no single

relationship that always influenced them to change their views or patterns of fighting.

Significant others in the members’ lives, such as parents, romantic partners, and

coworkers, had mixed and ambivalent reactions to fighting. Such relationships may well

have a significant probabilistic association with withdrawing from fighting. However,

because the direction of their effects was variable enough to be invisible to this kind of

research, I looked for more proximate causes.

Networks, “Weak Ties,” and Audiences for Storytelling

72 West’s fieldwork among Canadian youth provides a striking and informative contrast. “The short term careers of serious thieves” ended promptly at age eighteen when youth were transferred to adult court.

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To explain the changes in the members’ participation in and attitudes toward

fighting, I focus on their changing audiences beyond the core group of friends from

adolescence. In the sociology of violence the concept “audience” most often refers to

those witnesses immediately present at the time of violent interactions (e.g. Luckenbill

1977). Here I use it in a different sense. Instead, I focus on the members’ broader

audiences for sharing personal information and constructing identity, often in the form of

storytelling. Importantly, each age-graded change in social life corresponded to a new set

of acquaintances that might be referred to as networks of “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973).

Recall that since adolescence storytelling within peer groups was a central activity

in establishing relationships and defining one’s self and one’s friends as fighters:

Fieldnote, September 16, 2001. As Raj explained, he met Steve, Bob, Powel, and others at a party. They started drinking. “And we were just sharing stories,” he told me. About different “shit they’d done, trouble we’d gotten into.” (Italics added.) Chad [discussing the day he met Steve]: We started hanging out. Smoking cigarettes, telling stories. (Italics added.) During adolescence the campus culture had imposed a large, loosely connected

network of people who knew about one another. It provided the opportunity for some

members to achieve “celebrity,” as Powel mentioned above (see Chapter 4).

When Powel spoke about how hard it was to leave high school, notice exactly

what it is that he found so hard. During high school, recall, he had “kind of a celebrity

feeling…. Everyone knew who you were.” Then, after high school “it was all gone,” he

told me.

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“But you were still hanging out with the same people?” I asked. The answer that

followed was deeply revealing.

“Yeah,” he said, “but just the core group…. Like a closer kind of a deal. And

things were just different, you know. It was hard to take.” (Italics added.)

The “celebrity” was gone once the larger high school audience disappeared.

Powel was not saddened by losing his “closer” friends—since, after all, he kept them—

but rather by losing the anonymous mass of fellow students who, he reminisced, “always

knew who you were,” even if he didn’t know who they were.

The core group did not lose their close friends after school; instead they lost the

large network of “weak ties” that propped up their identities as people who mattered in

the institutional context of a high school campus (Granovetter 1973). After high school, if

the sample members were to sustain their notoriety, they would need a new audience.

And for a time they were able to find a surrogate for campus culture: the “bar” and “party

scene.”

In their early twenties it was still important to the sample members to have a wide

network of people whom they did not necessarily consider close friends, but whom they

would know by name and could catch up with at bars and parties. Some would be old

high school acquaintances; others would be new friends they had met while out drinking.

They might know some of these people’s phone numbers or even visit them at home on

occasion. But it was also important to keep a network of relationships that were more

distant.

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As Nathan described, he distinguished between “real friends”—which I took to

mean his close, primary friendship group—and the broader network of weak ties he

associated with only through the bar scene (see also Chapter 6). In the excerpt below he

begins by describing his relationship with a young woman who tried to call him on the

telephone before “going out” that night. He then continues to talk about other looser

friends he knows only from a particular bar he frequents regularly:

Nathan [talking about Amanda]: she’s like a bar friend, not a real friend. We talk to her at the bar, but we don’t want to talk on the phone with her…. [Talking about being at the bar with his girlfriend, Marianne:] So I waited [to play pool] and I talked to some of the regulars…. there was this gay couple Ralph and Gerald. And this guy Wade. You know, just bar buddies… Well, once we went to the gay couple’s house to watch a movie. That was about a month ago. (Italics added.)

Over the years, though, the sample members’ networks of relationships changed

again. Many of them became more immersed in school, work, and romantic relationships.

Not only did these new kinds of relationships consist of more restricted audiences for

telling about their troublemaking activities and smaller groups with whom to find trouble,

but oftentimes the core group felt uncomfortable disclosing their past experiences with

them.

The final irony of growing up fighting was this. In the past, the core group had

supported each other through the transitions from childhood to adolescence to late youth.

They had grown up together and developed a special intimacy, investing years of their

lives in this community, watching each other change every step of the way. Now, as they

faced the dilemma of trying to find adult identities, they needed each other’s support as

much as ever. But their core group itself turned out not to be the key to their new

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collective identities as “adults.” The key was to develop broader networks of “weak ties,”

networks which became less densely connected to core group as they left high school and

partied less often. Finally, the broader network changed qualitatively: most of the sample

members sought out conventional adult relationships in which their past lives, as

disclosed in storytelling, would be discrediting. As it turned out, the final answer was

something completely new. The collective solution was actually to disband the group, or

at least the group as it had once existed.

As I wrote in my May 12, 2001 fieldnotes, Jerry, Will, and I were talking about

Harry, who had just finished culinary school. Jerry thought he might be leaving the

group for good. Jerry commented that he hoped Harry was “doing well,” and that he

finally found something he could be happy doing. He concluded that “you have to” let

him go off and do what he’s going to be able to enjoy. “And just hope he comes back

eventually.”

Will concurred, speaking from his own experiences, saying that sometimes you

need to just get away for a while and “focus.” You need to get away from your friends

sometimes or else you just end up “doing the same shit all the time.” You tend to depend

on your friends too much.

Jerry agreed. It was too easy just to keep hanging out and drinking and not doing

the stuff you need to get done to move on with adult life.

Will explained that that’s what he had to do. He needed time to get away. That’s

why he had disappeared for a while to get his bar-tending career going. He got his life

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organized “and now I’m hanging out again. Sometimes you just need to get away for

some perspective.”

There are two different outcomes to the youths’ open-ended careers in fighting

worth noticing. First, they tried to avoid fights upon reframing fighting as incompatible

with their current identities (cf. Levi 1981).73 The change consisted of establishing new

identities within “adult” social relationships and redefining fighting as “juvenile” rather

than “youthful” (as Chad and Steve told me in separate interviews, they felt “too old” to

still be fighting).74 Second, those who actually abstained from fights, voluntarily or not,

did so during periods when they revised their daily routines and relationship patterns so

as to refrain from carousing.

As the members’ audiences of weak ties changed to include people such as

classmates, co-workers, new “adult” friends, they began reframe fighting negatively. As I

found, what led the young adults to withdraw from active lifestyles as fighters was

coming to view fighting as an obstacle to some new identity to which they aspired,

whether that identity involved adult roles, some sense of a moral self, or more often, a

combination of the two.

To explain these changes, I focus on their changing networks of relationships and

the distinctive concerns and anxieties of this time of life. Many watched their closest

friends disappear from active participation in the old social scene, one-by-one—over

periods of months or years—taking with them the violent ritual that had reaffirmed their

73 As a convicted hitman told Levi in an interview, he had to reframe murder as “just a job” in order to persist in professional killing. 74 Chad: Tape recorded interview, August 2000. Steve: Fieldnote, March 31, 2001.

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solidarity so many times. Although it provoked considerable anxiety, the youth gradually

established more numerous, denser ties to adult society, and discovered new pressures on

managing their identities.

THE ANXIETY OF THEIR AGE

Late youth was no longer just a phase of unfettered freedom. The Tucson friends

had begun to feel another undeniable, competing force: the growing sense of uncertainty

about the future and their position in the life-course. Opportunities for establishing

relationships had been so strictly limited during adolescence that campus life was

practically the only stage upon which to define their identities. “Official” adulthood

posed a multitude of new, complex relationships—some obligatory, some elective—as

neighbors, full-time employees, and members of clubs and voluntary organizations. They

faced new privileges and responsibilities—paying taxes, renting apartments, managing

credit, and buying cars, to name a few.

The transition to adulthood is one of those institutionalized challenges that

everyone faces at this time and place in history, so no one thinks to attribute anyone’s

personal troubles to it (see also Mills 1959). Many people find unbearable the sheer depth

and intensity of the bureaucratic obligations in all spheres of contemporary adult life,

especially those individuals whose past contacts with bureaucracy disproportionately

involved formal sanctions and stigmatizing labels. Most of my sample members did

achieve a tolerable degree of social survival, but they were not uniformly successful.

Some of them became addicts, got locked up, fell deeply into debt, developed serious

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mental illnesses, or just picked up and left one day to start over somewhere else. A

number of the core group’s members, friends, and siblings killed themselves.

Their most common age-based anxieties focused on the appropriate nature of

face-to-face interpersonal relationships, especially with their “weak ties” to adults. It was

not clear, for example, how to interact with unfamiliar adults. How did adults see them?

Did they view them as virtual criminals, as the school officials always had? What about

non-delinquent peers? Did they view them as competitors, as incompetent adults, as

immature grown children?

As I reported earlier, Snoddy’s college graduation party was an especially dense

source of data.75 The existential concern was clear during this symbolic ritual of

transition.

For several days before the party everyone was discussing the topic of alcohol, a

trivial topic that symbolized something much deeper about their changing culture. Most

of those at the party were going to be “grownup” adults—Snoddy’s aunts, uncles, and

family friends. His mother had offered to buy him a keg of beer but he had declined, not

wanting his friends getting drunk in front of his family. Even so, on the day of the party it

turned out there were some tubs full of ice and beer bottles. Although Snoddy’s friends

were twenty-three or twenty-four years old, many refrained from drinking at all and the

others only drank one or two beers—not unlike most adults, but very uncharacteristic for

these young friends, indicating the extent of their self-consciousness.

75 May 12, 2001.

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That afternoon the friendship group was sitting down in a segregated cluster in the

backyard, apart from the “real” adults who walked around mingling and talking with each

other. As I wrote in my fieldnotes (from which my description below is drawn), I could

detect “a great deal of self-consciousness about the adult family members around.” No

one knew quite how to act at this kind of party.

Everyone was talking about high school drug use and youthful fighting, telling

various old stories. Steve told the group he thought it was “funny” how everyone was

telling stories about “drugs and stuff” as if no one could hear, even as they were making

obvious gestures that revealed their topics of conversation. He parodied the conversation.

“Yeah, and then we took some—” he said, pausing to slowly and deliberately touch his

index finger to his tongue, as if placing a hit of LSD on it, and then whispered—“acid.”

As if no one could tell what they were talking about, he mused.

Everyone laughed at Steve’s caricature of their secret gestures and conspicuous

euphemisms.

Tray played off of Steve’s remarks with his own caricature of violent stories. In

his story we were all at a party. He “had a—,” he said, gesturing silently with his hands

as if cocking a pistol. He started “to shoot my—.” Again he made an elaborate

demonstration of pointing the gun and pulling the trigger. Everyone laughed.

Steve asked if everyone thought we were always going to be like this. He

continued. Are we ever going to be able to have “normal conversations” and “talk to

adults?”

Everyone laughed at this too, but generally agreed not.

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Doing “Being Adult” while Being Young76

By their early twenties, there were many of these uncomfortable times when the

young friends could not quite figure out what to do with themselves. They sensed that it

was time to end their old “juvenile” routines. But what kind of a life were they to live?

What kind of biographies would they create for themselves? Would they be able to bring

their friends along?

I called Steve on his cell phone around four PM on a hot June afternoon in 2001,

the month after Snoddy’s graduation party.77 Steve told me to come over to Will’s

apartment complex. When I got there Nathan, Steve, Lucy, Tray, Will, and Bob were

standing outside in the parking lot.

We stood around the parking lot trying to figure out something to do that didn’t

cost money. They had already gone swimming, so that option was out. The cheap movie-

theater had raised its price from $1.75 to $3, so we decided against that.

We could just all get drunk, Tray suggested, laughing.

Bob agreed. We could always do that.

Steve vetoed the idea. He wanted “to do something,” not get drunk already. This

is “ridiculous,” he said. Wasn’t there anything we could do?

Social life had always consisted of narratively-organized group activities—

routines which accumulated meaning and excitement over structured turning points, from

76 The quotes and description in this section are drawn from fieldnotes. 77 Fieldnotes, June 13, 2001.

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beginning to end—such as going out carousing, going on trips to Mexico, and starting

fights. Indeed, one might say that any culture literally is a collection of such stories, some

dramatic, some mundane. We considered a whole series of options organized around

more “wholesome” narratives.

We figured it was too late to go to the zoo or Mount Lemmon, the national park in

the mountains north of town. We talked over going to the park, but no one seemed

interested in any physical activity like playing basketball or throwing a Frisbee.

Steve joked that we all needed to enroll in a cooking class or something.

Will asked if we were all unemployed. Everyone agreed, “Yup.” In terms of

employment, we were a distinctly non-adult bunch of twenty-two and twenty-three year-

olds. At the time Steve was drawing income from student loans and occasional part-time

jobs and living with his girlfriend Lucy, the manager of a retail store (who had left the

parking lot by then). Bob was officially on the payroll of his father’s dental practice, but

did not actually do the job for which he was paid. Will was between jobs, receiving

unemployment benefits from the state of Arizona. Nathan was being supported

completely by his girlfriend. Tray’s girlfriend was supporting him too, but he was also

receiving food stamps and a few hundred dollars per month in Supplemental Security

Insurance for psychiatric disability. I was living on a summer research fellowship and

working occasionally at temporary jobs here and there.

Will asked what other unemployed broke alcoholics do during the day time and

everyone laughed.

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“What do beer drinkers do when they’re not drinking beer?” I echoed his

sentiment, alluding to the non-alcoholic beer commercial that asked what beer drinkers

drink when they’re not drinking beer.

Bob commented that someone needed to write a book on that, to give us some

ideas.

Tray chimed in: If such a book were ever written, when you opened it you’d find

that it was “just blank” inside. Everyone laughed and then talked on this topic for several

minutes.

After we’d been in the parking lot for half an hour Bob announced he was going

to Burger King where we could buy a cheeseburger and “sit.” Finally, something to do—

in fact, the kind of thing that adults do, although we did not think of it that way at the

time. Instead, going out to eat seemed either like killing time or a throwback to

adolescence. Our comments revealed this sense of age-graded insecurity and ambiguity.

Tray reminisced with a laugh about sitting, smoking, and staring people down

“like we did in high school.”

A bunch of twenty three-year olds sitting around Burger King, staring people

down, Nathan mused, updating the imagery. He paused a moment and then mimicked

what we would do, abruptly belting out a challenge that teenage wannabe-toughs use to

intimidate each other: “What!”

We were forming something “like an illegal congregation,” Steve said about all of

us still loitering in the parking lot together. He continued, sarcastically commenting that

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he was sure this was “really normal behavior” for twenty-three year olds. He concluded

that we must be “developmentally disabled or something.”

We finally went to Burger King and bought a few cheeseburgers and sodas. It did

not occur to us that we were actually “doing something” at Burger King by sitting

together, joking around awhile, and trying to think of something to do. We went outside

and stood near the back of the restaurant, smoking and talking about how pathetic we

were.

We used to be “Big Pimpin’,” Bob lamented, referring to the title of a popular

hip-hop song about partying, scoring with women, and generally living the high life. But

now we were “just lame.”

As we stood there an employee, a guy aged seventeen or eighteen, came around

the corner holding a bunch of garbage bags and walked through our group to throw them

out. We all remained silent until he was out of earshot. Then, without exchanging a single

word, we all broke into simultaneous laughter. All it took to embarrass us was one person

walking by and seeing what we were doing. And it had been an employed teenager at

that.

“Quick!” Bob laughed, “Let’s get out of here before someone else sees what

we’re doing!” We gave in and decided to go to Sharky’s, a favorite dive bar.

The scene was characteristic of our growing self-consciousness about our

uncertain identities and ambiguous life-cycle position. These anxieties were totally new

to this time of life and quite disorienting. For the first time we actually became

embarrassed upon considering what people might think of young men our age “just”

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hanging out. In the end, our solution was to embark on the open-ended narrative of

“having a few drinks”—a narrative that established the group as being older than twenty-

one, yet still youthful and exciting.

As I came to see it in retrospect, this scene illustrated the self-fulfilling ambiguity

of becoming an adult. We were, in fact, most closely approximating “adult” leisure while

doing “nothing.” However, since we had no clear idea of what adulthood actually

involved, we completely failed to recognize this point. By going to a bar to avoid

appearing childish, we only demonstrated that we were still trapped in self-defined post-

adolescence and deviance. And further, being trapped there blinded us to the options for

escape right there in front of us.

“Half-Time Junkie.”

The sense of anxiety was not just an abstract idea that another year of life should

mean a greater degree of maturity. Instead, it was based on escalating, if uneven,

commitments to various adult relationships, such as those of work, school, and family. A

series of conversations with Steve seemed particularly relevant to the theme of competing

identities and relationships. It was about nine months after we were embarrassed to be

seen by a teenage Burger King employee.

Between ages twenty-three and twenty-five Steve became more involved in

activities at the university, just as his friends were also trying to establish various new

“adult” relationships of their own. He was not only a science major, but had also joined

extra-curricular engineering clubs and even begun to work as a scientific research

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assistant. Each time we spoke it seemed like he was increasingly concerned about the

consequences of his personal life for his future, including the potential long-term effects

of his teenage drug use and what his current partying might mean to his academic

associates.

On a March 2002 weekend I went out for a few drinks with Steve and Lucy,

describing our outing in the fieldnotes excerpted below. While driving downtown and

then walking around we talked about school, work, and what each of us had done over

previous weekends. Steve explained that a few weeks ago he and Powel had gotten

drunk, scored some crack-cocaine from a homeless man, and then smoked it.

“That’s crazy, man!” I said, surprised since Steve had recently become so serious

about his studies. “You just got out of school and went and got all wasted and smoked

some crack?”

“Yeah, exactly.” Then he seemed to suddenly recall that they also got in a fight

that night. As he explained, Powel had started it. Powel was one of the smallest members

of the core group, but he was known as an instigator. He had approached a group of men

that Steve said looked like college football players and who were antagonizing some

smaller stranger. In a moment of bravado, quite possibly thanks to his drug and alcohol

consumption, Powel punched one of them in the face, but then immediately got scared

and ran away. Powel left Steve to defend himself until he returned a moment later with

some police officers. Steve, Lucy, and I laughed at Powel’s absurdity (shameful though it

was, we could empathize and see the humor in it).

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Later that night Lucy, Steve, and I took a booth at Tempo. I commented that

although the fights were slowing down, new ones kept happening every now and again.

Steve agreed, finishing my thought, “Yeah, when’s this gonna end?” A moment

later, he explained the anxieties he felt about trying to balance his extra-curricular

partying life and his dedication to school. “It like makes it hard for me to talk to the other

students at school…. What am I gonna say, ‘Yeah, this weekend I smoked crack with a

bum and got into a fight?’” All three of us laughed at the image.

A little over one week later I went out with Steve for drinks again and we had a

remarkably similar conversation, although this time he elaborated further. We were

standing around drinking beers at Sharky’s when I casually asked him what he had been

up to since we last hung out.

He and Nathan had gotten drunk and smoked crack again, he told me, laughing

slightly. It’s really ridiculous, he told me, “I’m like a half-time junkie or something.” As

he explained he would go to school and study all week, and then every weekend go out

and smoke some crack. At least he didn’t get in a fight this time, he laughed. Although

the conversation had a humorous tone, as discussions of personal troubles usually did in

this culture, Steve also communicated that he considered his situation to be an authentic

dilemma (cf. Pollner & Stein 2000). He explained that the worst thing about being “a

half-time junkie,” though, was that he had “trouble interacting with the other people in

my classes.” He returned to the same image he had used in our last conversation,

lightening the mood a little by joking that he knew he was the only math and engineering

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major who smoked crack. He let out a couple of short chuckles, but nonetheless I

understood that he meant to convey a sense of real concern.

He continued, speaking more seriously now. He could talk to them about school

and stuff. But sometimes if he told a story or something, he told me, he had to stop and

think, “I better not say this” because there was always drugs or violence involved. And he

knew that they just couldn’t understand. It’s just weird, he concluded, to be a serious

student one day and then act like a junkie the next.

What seemed to bother Steve most was not the prospect of bad grades (they were

impeccable), nor was it simply the fear of being stigmatized. Steve had taken such a

circuitous path, worked so hard, and overcome such obstacles in his aspirations to reach

the university and to prove his academic talents. But now he was worried that he might

not clear this one last obstacle, the contradiction posed by his incongruous lifestyle. His

lifestyle might still prevent him from adapting emotionally to the adult world of

academia. Importantly, he was now fretting over exactly the same contradiction that the

active fighters had once found so appealing: straddling adult respectability and adolescent

deviance. Characteristic of this transition to full adulthood, Steve’s youthful career in

troublemaking was losing its charm.

Coincidentally, there was yet another violent incident just a couple of hours later

(Case #179). We were sitting inside of Nathan and Marianne’s second-floor apartment

when Nathan ran in to alert us that Tray had punched someone at a bar downstairs and

that a brawl was imminent. Without saying a word, Steve and I jumped to our feet and

ran down the stairs and out onto the crowded Fourth Avenue sidewalk. We spotted the

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commotion and ran toward it. Tray, Justin, and Jake were aggressively challenging a pair

of much smaller men, who were trying save face by standing their ground and talking shit

back.

Although unspoken agreements to “back each other up” in fights were a source of

solidarity in the past, I now derived the same feeling from another source. Steve and I

didn’t need to agree out loud: we trusted each other to help break up the fight and, since

doing so could be dangerous, to defend each other. I grabbed Tray around the waist.

Fortunately Tray was too drunk to be dangerous, but was still desperate and large enough

to drag me down the sidewalk behind him, repeatedly elbowing me in the head and

threatening me (he apologized moments later). Meanwhile, Steve was busy distracting

Justin, who relented immediately, and Jake, who was also angrily threatening me for

intervening and challenging passersby. Within a couple of minutes things had settled

down.

It felt good to prevent violence, to keep my patience with Tray, and to act with

solidarity alongside Steve. But I wondered if Steve wouldn’t feel differently. Reflecting

on our conversation, I realized that this would be just one more story that would make

him feel alienated from his classmates.

REFRAMING AND REFRAINING

Part of what made it possible to persist for so long in fighting alongside

conventional activities was the moral ambiguity of fighting, not unlike Americans’

ambivalent feelings about parents beating children (see Davis 1991; Gelles & Straus

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1988). American culture in general considers fighting tolerable—at best admirable and

useful, at worst less destructive than other forms of violence (see Jackman 2002; Stebbins

1996). Like fighters, many people view fighting and other action situations as character-

building experiences. Toughness especially is a deeply valued personal trait in American

culture (see Wilkinson 1984). The sample members certainly kept their fighting secret

from some conventional acquaintances, but at times they revealed it without stigma.

As I mentioned in Chapter 4, the men’s dating and cohabitating partners, even their

wives, were often attracted to their tough, popular, partying allure. In contrast to the typical

criminological presumption, “settling down” with a woman did not necessarily deter

fighting. Some women encouraged their boyfriends to fight and spoke proudly of their

martial prowess, like Lauren, who said she enjoyed feeling “really protected” around

fighting men. And the men certainly did not influence active female fighters to give up

fighting. Some of the women fought with the same vigor as the men, although in general

they did so less frequently and derived less personal satisfaction from it. Two nights

before their wedding, Steve and Kate actually fought alongside Justin and Caroline and

several other male friends in a barroom brawl against a group of strangers that included

one woman (Case #4).

In another unusual incident, Brandi and Brittany, who were friends of Powel,

helped him beat up a stranger (Case #241). Powel had left his cellular phone at Sharky’s

and, by the time he realized it, someone had stolen it. Brandi and Brittany called the

phone and feigned interest in meeting the guy, even though they had the “wrong

number.” The guy was still talking to them when Powel spotted him and tried to take

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back the phone. The guy tried to get away but Powel chased him down. Brandi explained

that it was the first violent exchange she had gotten to watch up-close. She was ecstatic as

she told me the story78:

Her eyes lit up, she grinned fiercely, showing her teeth, produced a squeal, and rapidly rolled her fists as she demonstrated how Powel had overwhelmed his opponent. With utter admiration she reported, “I’ve never seen energy like that! He just attacked him! He like just jumped on him and was hitting him so fast all over there was nothing the guy could do!” Again she squealed, “I loved it!”

I could draw no firm conclusions, but it seemed that, at least early in their

relationships, most of the women were, in part, attracted to their fighting. I would

suggest, however, that if romantic relationships interfered with fighting it was a long

process—meaning short-term and adolescent romantic relationships did little to deter

fighting. If anything, in later youth the women were less committed the adult men’s

adolescent party group, partly because they were newcomers.79 The men may have been

tiring of the group’s heavy party routine by their late twenties as well, and so they may

have become more receptive to their romantic partners’ suggestion that they redistribute

their leisure socializing in favor of domestic life over carousing.

There was, however, at least one romantic partner who was always viewed

fighting unfavorably on principle. Chad’s long-time girlfriend Brenda was vehemently

opposed to any violence from the beginning of their relationship. When she witnessed

one of his fights (Case #16), Chad recalled that he felt “disappointed in myself. So that

78 Fieldnote, June 25, 2002. 79 Though not a “gang” by most people’s definition (including the members’), this progression from adolescent to adult troublemaking crowd is reminiscent of Thrasher’s (1927) account of the transformation from childhood playgroups to adult or teenage street “gangs.”

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was the first time where I ever felt ashamed.” She considered fighting one element in a

broader culture of masculine violence and misogyny. Chad was influenced by Brenda’s

attitudes, but his change did not begin with their relationship.

In fact, Chad was the first member of the core group to seriously try to end to his

career in fighting. He was already starting to question the hyper-masculine attitudes he

had held at age eighteen. As Chad explained, he started to become outraged by

homophobia and became interested in learning more about feminism. He was first

exposed to these ideas through his musical interests.

At the time he dropped out of high school, Chad and his friends were fans of punk

rock music and sometimes performed in their own bands. Chad saw a band called

Propaghandi for the first time during one of their regular trips to the Downtown

Performance Center. Their music was the kind of upbeat “new punk” or “pop punk” that

the Tucson friends liked. It had the simple sounds of 1950s rock songs, only played at

double the speed and volume, and with irreverent, excited lyrics. Propaghandi was known

for having several gay band members. According to Chad, they were “anti-violence and

anti-homophobia. Just very politically correct.” As he explained, “It really changed me.”

Chad’s friends were also into punk rock, so they were open to this new change in

attitude. Jerry, who himself fought only rarely, and Toby, who did not fight at all, moved

to San Francisco at age eighteen to attend a Bay-Area private university. Having heard

stories about the liberal culture, Chad moved as well. Since hardly anyone knew him in

San Francisco, and he would no longer encounter strangers who knew his reputation

before even meeting him, Chad used the move as an opportunity for an identity

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makeover. He viewed the move as a success. From this point on he continued trying to

avoid fights (though with variable results, as I explain below):

I liked San Francisco cause I kinda’—I got to exude a personality— … It was an unpainted picture, you know. I was a person they didn’t know … They’re not scared…. It wasn’t a fighting society…. If I had wanted to fight I would really have to look pretty hard to find one…. San Francisco isn’t like big parties where you see hundreds of people like you do here. But I can get in a political conversation and it’ll never go to fists.

As Chad explained, finding new anti-violent contacts made it possible for him to develop

a new identity that he found more personally fulfilling.

Some of the members did make turning points in their lives upon meeting women

or working with conventional adults. However, such relationships were not always

transformative. As a blue-collar worker, Chad’s coworkers and even his bosses were still

involved in heavy drinking and fighting as adults. For military members like Rick,

fighting and partying were expected until at least well into a man’s twenties. What

mattered most was not the specific kind of social relationship, but a particular shift in the

member’s self-image and view of fighting, depending largely on the tone of new

relationships. Chad began to redefine himself as politically- and socially-responsible

and, eventually, “too old for” fighting. As he did so, he came to see fighting as something

“bad for society” and juvenile.

Negative Experiences

The important changes were (1) to pursue a new identity for oneself in the context

of new relational networks and (2) to view fighting as incompatible with that identity. For

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most the decision involved a strong theme of becoming an adult, but they also described

avoiding fights as a moral decision. It would be inaccurate to try to distinguish sharply

between these two perspectives since they formed the single concept of “responsible

adulthood.” In other words, reframing fighting negatively was not simply a change in

attitude toward fighting, but also a change in one’s sense of positive values. As I

explained in Chapter 4, as adolescents all of the fighters aspired to membership in a

deviant crowd and had a positive experience in fighting. Now, toward the end of their

careers, they aspired to new identities and frequently viewed fights as negative events.

Just as fight careers began with an important “first big fight,” many of the young

adults began to reframe fighting upon having a negative experience. Will was involved in

such a fight with a stranger in 2001, at age twenty-three (Case #71).80 Will, Steve, and I

were driving in my car to the Dub-Z for a few drinks, talking about work and school

experiences when Will blurted out that he got in a fight with “a retarded guy.”

I asked what happened and he continued, explaining how bad he felt. But, he

lamented that he didn’t even know that he was “retarded.” The incident began, he said, in

the parking lot behind his apartment. He was behind another driver who was driving

“really slow.” So, Will explained, he started tailgating him. The guy stopped his car and

got out. Will continued, explaining that he got out of his car and the guy ran up and

punched him in the face. When Will punched him back, the man did something strange.

He said he had to “call the police now.” Will acted out his reaction, waving his arms with

exasperation, “No! Don’t do that!” He jumped in his car and drove off. A few days later

80 Fieldnote, April 27, 2001.

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someone told him that there was a group-home for “retarded and mental people” behind

his apartment complex. Will repeated how badly he felt about hitting the guy once he

realized who he was. He reflected, “All the things I’ve done that I gotta’ live with. I

punched a retarded guy!”

As Will’s comment above implies, it was not always a single fight that began to

change their minds, but an accumulation of fights. From the beginning of my research I

could see that some members felt this way, at least some of the time. However, others

still would brag about any involvement in violence, describing it with an air of pride and

embellishment.

I tape-recorded a conversation in which these two views of fighting clashed in

December 1999, more than a year before Will’s fight above. Will was still twenty-one

and actively fighting, as was twenty year-old Bob. Kate, also twenty, found Steve’s

fighting admirable. At that time, Steve was the only one of the four opposed to fighting

and who wished to define himself as a non-fighter. After Chad, he was one of the first

members of the group to reframe fighting negatively.

We sat outside Jerry’s parents’ house, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and

talking about the old days. Bob and Will began discussing an event that had happened

four or five years earlier. Bob had gotten into a fight with Hernandez at a house party

when they were fifteen, before becoming friends (Case #110).

Bob explained, “I held him down, I was like, ‘Let’s go outside and have a drink….’

He’s like, ‘Yeah. Fine.’ As soon as I let go of him, he hits me and he runs down the

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driveway. And Steve’s pulling up in Danny’s truck. And I’m running down the driveway,

and my nose was bleeding.”

Kate, Steve’s fiancée, turned excitedly and asked Steve, “Did you fight?” Steve said

nothing.

Bob answered for him, “Yeah, he did!” Then, to Steve, “You fucking threw him in

the cactus right by my house!”

Will corrected Bob’s account. “No he didn’t. He threw him into the truck! Swung

him around and he’s all—Boom!” he exclaimed, mimicking the sound of Hernandez

banging against the body of the vehicle. “I’m all ‘Oh, God!’” Recounting how Steve

shouted angrily, Will continued, “He’s all, ‘Get out of here!’”

Steve became visibly embarrassed, shifting in his chair. He conceded, “That’s pretty

embarrassing. You know?”

Steve had always been known as the one of the toughest members of the group, and

it brought his friends no end of delight to recount his glorious triumphs in battle. Since I

began the research, however, Steve always tried hard to dissociate himself from this identity.

Despite some of the others’ continued appreciation of such past events, they were a source

of continuing embarrassment for Steve.

Sometimes I felt great sympathy for Steve’s predicament, and at times I also

viewed him as a challenge to sociological explanation. He and his friends genuinely cared

for each other, so he wouldn’t leave them, but he was constantly dismayed by their

misplaced admiration. He had so many other attractive qualities to admire: intelligence,

physical beauty and athleticism, compassion, unwavering loyalty to friends, and

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compulsive dedication to hard work. In one sad reversal of stereotypes, his girlfriends

would encourage him to be violent, though he only wanted to stay home with them and

quietly avoid trouble. In another, his friends would start group fights and then praise his

heroic performances, only making him feel exploited and guilty.

“It’s not fair,” he told me in June 2002. He never started the trouble, but he was

always the one who had to stick up for everybody. “I really don’t think it’s fair that

people do that to me.”81

When Steve admitted to fighting, he almost always disparaged his own conduct

and took pains to explain what he viewed as his moral failure. More than a year after the

discussion with Bob, Kate, and Will above, Steve jumped into the pre-wedding brawl. He

moralized on his participation:

#4. Fight at the Wooden Nickel.82 Afterwards, Steve remembered thinking that he couldn’t believe what had just happened. “I’m twenty-one and I’m still getting in fights.” In high school, he said, he already thought it was wrong and stupid to fight. But now that he was twenty-one “it’s even worse.”

Typically, Steve framed the activity both as immoral and inappropriate for a person his

age: “now that I’m twenty-one it’s even worse.” Yet, as I explained above, Steve was still

continuing to fight years later, at least in 2002, when he was twenty-four years old and

worried about his identity as a student at the university. Likewise, Chad continued to get

into intermittent fights for years after first professing a desire to quit. Why didn’t they

stop completely?

81 Fieldnote, June 17, 2001. 82 Fieldnote, March 31, 2001.

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The Continuing Sensual Appeal

From time to time while doing this research I would speak to “psych-”

professionals (psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists) who adamantly argued

that people with violent careers as extensive as Chad’s must be “psychopaths” or

“sociopaths”—that is, profoundly lacking in the ability to empathize with other humans.

One finds such claims throughout the academic literature on violent individuals (e.g.

Buss 1966; Yablonksky 1963, 1997). However, held up to the evidence, the expert

opinions themselves seem to be based on a profound inability to understand the same

people they try to explain.83

Beyond high school, Chad’s concern for others never struck me as insincere—

though, being a fallible human, his resolve did waver at times. In August 2000, as we

spoke at his apartment, he explained his current perspective and aspirations:

Next weekend I’m starting my training at the Rape Crisis Hotline…. I’ve been getting more and more into reading feminist literature…. And why we accept that there is a rape every three minutes, and there’s an act of violence against women every eighteen seconds. And why do we let this go? … I’m done with violence—I can truly say that…. You know, it’s not saying all these people [who still fight] are bad. It’s just saying they’re bad for me…. That’s my philosophy anyway.

Of course, life is more complicated than attitudes. I was surprised when I saw

Chad next, at about nine pm on December 14, 2000 (Case #24).84 I had just driven into

83 As Levi (1981) explained, even professional hit-men, though their violence requires a “cold” attitude, may feel pangs of empathy at times. Violent actors’ ability to creatively rationalize and justify their violence is sometimes treated as evidence of sociopathology—a strange interpretation, since rationalization indicates at least some degree of understanding of and concern to uphold mainstream morality. 84 I documented the following dialogue in fieldnotes.

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town from Los Angeles. I arrived at the Dub-Z, the regular hangout around that time, to

find Chad holding an X-ray up to the light and showing it to a group of friends. I

immediately recognized what was going on (recall from Chapter 7 that I myself once held

up such an X-ray with great pride). He had broken a metacarpal in his right hand—a

“boxer’s fracture” as it is called. When Chad saw me his expression dropped a bit,

apparently as he remembered what he had said in August.

“What happened?” I asked, meaning “How did the fight go?” since, realistically,

there is only one way to sustain such a fracture.

He had broken his hand trying to break up a fight. It was stupid, he told me, and

reiterated that all he was trying to do was “break up a fight.”

“Uh huh,” I said suspiciously. I did not intend to shame him. After all, I had

suffered the same injury in the same way the previous year. But his explanation was so

evasive that I couldn’t help questioning it.

“Seriously,” he insisted. He was just trying to break it up. He wasn’t even

fighting, he protested.

I asked him how you break your hand trying to break up a fight. Obviously he had

punched someone, I said.

“Yeah,” he conceded, but they sprayed him in the face with mace and threw a

cinder block against his back. That explanation did even less to clear things up, so I asked

him to start from the beginning.

Chad explained that his boss had gotten into an argument with some strangers

while the two of them were having a few drinks at a bar. The argument turned violent in

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the parking lot when the opponents tried to drag Chad’s boss into their car, so Chad went

to retrieve him. Even then, Chad said, he still did not intend to use violence offensively.

But that was when the opponents started attacking him as well. As he described it, he

switched mindsets quickly.

He was trying to pull his friend out of the car “and this guy maces me again,”

Chad explained that he decided, “Fuck it. I’m not going to take that shit.”

In some ways, the “fuck it” feeling of relapsing into fighting is similar to another

experience that is familiar to non-fighters as well: being spontaneously seduced back into

a passionate encounter with an ex-spouse or a former lover that one has previously sworn

off. Likewise, the “fuck it” mentality is a common moment in the transition from

abstaining to returning to drug use (see Duneier 1999). The emotions upon which one

thrived in the past come charging back into the present as if they had never left.

Chad’s counterattack was quite brief but, as he explained, long enough to break

his nonviolent streak as well as his hand. He threw a swing but the guy ducked and Chad

hit his skull. After that Chad and his boss ran off “‘cause I was blind in like two

seconds.” He concluded the story: “And all this after I just gave you that speech on

nonviolence and all. I don’t know.”

I took Chad’s exasperation as a genuine expression of the struggle he was facing

at that time in his life, one he shared with many of his friends. They were also starting to

change for the same reasons as Chad: to avoid the difficulties that fighting caused within

their new relationships, because they found it morally objectionable, and because they

felt “too old” for it. Moreover, having tested themselves in their youth, having

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transcended much of their adolescent self-consciousness, they were losing the urgent

desire to constantly reestablish their fighting bona fides. However, they had lived for so

long in the open-ended world of youth, and still had such strong attachments to it, that it

was only natural for their determination to falter.

To explain the discrepancy between avoiding fights and abstaining from fights, I

feel it important to emphasize a terminological point. It is common in social science to

talk about what people “can” and “cannot” do, rather than what they “do” and “do not”

do. There is a temptation to ask, “Why can’t they stop fighting?” Such language,

however, presumes an answer: failure of self-control. Further, the language of “self-

control” implies several moralistic biases: of right over wrong choices, of long-term

planning over immediate experience, and of rational thought over feeling and emotion.

Sociological research should, instead, treat these distinctions as substantive phenomena

and empirical variations. As the young adults’ accounts illustrate, they continued to fight

in situations during which they felt “seduced” by the immediate, sensual attractions of

fighting, despite their long-term, reflective view of fighting (see Katz 1988).

Even after carousing became rare, members would still do it occasionally, at least

during a transitional period. The resurgence of such fighting experiences was especially

evident during these continued outings to carouse. In group fights, one party must

necessarily be the first to act violently. Some members, like Bob and Powel, continued to

act as “instigators” even as others, like Chad and Steve, denounced fighting. When one of

the instigators got into a fight, especially if he got himself “jumped” by a group of

strangers, his anti-fighting friends were likely to come to his aid. They might begin by

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trying to “break up” the fight, but then find themselves fighting wholeheartedly a moment

later, carried away by the immediate qualities of the violent situation.

The brawl Steve mentioned above happened two nights before his and Kate’s

wedding (Case #4). Bob had been “jumped” by several men outside the bar when his

friends, including Chad and Steve, came to his aid.

Chad described how his own experience of the situation transformed: “it escalated

from defending Bob to tormenting people.” His involvement began when, as he

explained, “I saw three people hitting Bob.” Early on in the group brawl, Chad recounted,

“I was still at the point where I could just break it up.” But then, he recalled, his

experience of the situation changed. “I lost my mind. Somewhere in it I got hit. And I

started hitting people too. At random all the time. It wasn’t no longer breaking up any

more, I started hitting people.”

Chad fought with much less frequency in his twenties. When he did get into

fights, nearly all of them started in the way he described above—that is, while trying to

defend a friend in distress. Though he had thrust himself into the scene earnestly trying to

“just break it up,” the old sensual attractions reemerged.

Upon regaining his senses, Chad felt “that was stupid and totally pointless. That

was after I had said that I would never do it again and never get in a fight. And then I did

that, in less than a year.”

As Jerry related, both perspectives on fighting were expressed during the post-

fight celebration. Everyone regrouped at Justin and Will’s apartment. As I quoted him

earlier (Chapter 7), Jerry explained that everyone was impressed with and proud of each

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other’s performances. But then, he explained, “some people are starting to hint at how

dumb it is that we always fight when we get back in town. Like Chad. ‘Cause Chad was

starting to say, ‘God, I don’t believe we got in a fight already. One day before Steve’s

wedding.’” Although youthful solidarity won out over adult responsibility in this case, the

fight also illustrated the important competition and transition between the two.

Making a personal commitment to change was not sufficient to actually abstain

from fighting. Those who still hung out with their youthful friends, especially when

carousing, continued to find themselves in potentially violent situations. The conflict

between Chad’s and Bob’s perspectives on fighting was evident during another outing,

this time to the Dub-Z. By then Steve and Kate had separated and she was seeing Andy,

who was never a fighter himself. Andy’s friend Mickey, however, was a fighter. Bob

started out the evening having a friendly conversation with Kate, but then began insulting

her and trying to provoke a fight.

As I recorded in my field-notes:

#219. Bob and Mickey at the Dub-Z. I turned around and saw Bob arguing with Mickey about Steve’s wife,

Kate, who was now having an open affair with Andy. Andy was standing to the side watching.

“She’s a whore,” Bob was saying about Kate. “She married Steve and fucked friends. She’s a fucking whore.” Mickey was getting angry and saying something back. The two were posturing aggressively while Andy continued to stand and watch.

I asked Chad, “Are we going to do anything, or should we just let Bob get his ass kicked?”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Bob does this shit every night. What does he expect to happen if he calls Kate a whore in front of her boyfriend?”

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In the end, Chad and I did drag Bob away. Chad mercilessly berated Bob for starting a

fight over nothing. In a previous interview I had asked Chad what he was planning to do

in such situations.

He answered ambivalently, “Break it up. Call the police. Bob gets himself in a lot

of situations. I’m not gonna be there for the rest of his life. Of course if someone’s

beating him up, I’ll break it up. But I’m not gonna get in fights.”

“Breaking it up,” however, was often dangerous, since combatants might view

peacemakers as appropriate opponents and start punching them. Among my sample

members, the only sure way to abstain from fighting was to refrain from carousing

altogether.

Chad lamented that Bob “always gets himself into that situation by wanting to go

to parties and by wanting to hang out with people that are gonna fight…. That’s just the

way we live. I mean we can’t go a night without it anymore.” Chad explained his

perspective, “you can’t be nonviolent in Tucson. You can try, but the only way you’re

going to be successful is if you just don’t hang out at all. There’s no two ways about it. If

someone wants to fight you, they’re gonna fight you. That’s it.”

Desisting from carousing was not an entirely deliberate decision for everyone. It

depended also on the group’s collective changes. Chad and Steve both made conscious

efforts to stop their routines of regular partying and to commit to a more diverse range of

adult relationships. They started refusing to go to parties or bars where they knew their

friends would pick fights. Like several other friends, both attempted to adopt more

domestic lifestyles, though simply having romantic partners was often insufficient to

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discourage violence. Instead, the most proximate obstacle to continued fighting was the

disruption to partying routines.

THE END?

Chad and Lucy eventually married and had a daughter together. Kate and Andy

also married and had two children. Both couples withdrew from regular partying. By

then, other couples like Brittany and Will and Justin and Caroline had been living

together for several years and were spending much more time hanging out at home than

carousing. Nonetheless, Will and Justin still went out looking for trouble on rare

occasions, though not often enough to have much success.

Other friends had different reasons for dropping out of the old routines. Some

became more interested in getting high on marijuana, methamphetamine, or pills than in

drinking at bars and parties. Powel pursued a Christian lifestyle and moved out of state.

Some, like Snoddy and Raj, became more interested in pursuing professional careers than

regular partying. Jerry finished law school and took a job outside of Arizona that

prevented him from returning regularly. Especially for those who never graduated from

universities, money could be tight at times, so work took precedence over partying.

The core of the friendship group had formed in adolescence and they were slow to

make new friends. As they saw it, real friendships take years to establish. Each loss of a

member, even for a few nights a week, severely impacted their ability to sustain a nightly

carousing crowd. Eventually it became impossible. By their mid-twenties, big nights out

were much rarer and included six or eight men at most, rather than fifteen or twenty.

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Those who remained interested in fighting also had their partying routines

disrupted by this long process of attrition (see also Halle 1984). Rick would still look for

trouble given the opportunity, but such opportunities came rarely. He continued hanging

out with some of his old friends, but only at get-togethers and in small groups going out

to “have a few drinks.”

By contrast, some of the members drifted toward “street”-oriented lifestyles. Bob,

Walter, and Joe became involved in a network of criminal methamphetamine users

involved in more serious violence. The old group considered them “missing in action,”

still sharing interested gossip about them, but no longer seeking out their company,

staying in contact only in rare phone calls and chance meetings. Bob’s sister was

murdered by some of the street-criminals whom they all knew. He became consumed by

revenge, started carrying guns, and eventually served prison time for shooting up an

occupied house. Joe was beaten, kidnapped, and tortured by Walter and some others who

believed he owed them a drug debt. He continued hanging around in the same circles and

was kidnapped again a few months later, this time at gunpoint. The second time he

escaped from his captors’ apartment and ran into a church. He devoted himself to

Christianity right there, heart still pounding, then moved away to an “undisclosed

location” and went on a mission to Latin America for year. As far as I know, he never

returned to Tucson.

In some ways the careers of the members who went “missing in action”

resembled those of youth growing up in more stereotypical criminogenic contexts. One

important overlap with serious criminal youth described elsewhere (e.g. Anderson 1999;

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Sullivan 1989; Wright & Decker 1994, 1997) was the blurring of delinquent youth

cultures and more committed adult criminal cultures. However, two important differences

were that North Tucson friends actively sought out such criminal contacts and that they

had the resources to “get out” when they so chose. Several of them suffered serious

consequences, including substantial periods of incarceration and serious victimization.

Yet, when they called upon their families and old friends for help, they found the means

to return to conventional life. Bob, for instance, after serving a sentence in a state

penitentiary managed to secure a job in his father’s dental practice, get married, and buy

a home with all the trappings of middle-class affluence. As ethnographers of

impoverished inner city neighborhoods have noted, youth in trouble often develop a

“sense of frustration and anger because they felt themselves to be locked into a cycle of

events that was leading nowhere” (Wright & Decker 1994: 36). This is understandable,

given not only the lack of financial resources, but that the poorest American youth often

find that the horizons for developing new identities and relational ties are often limited to

narrow zones of the city, even to particular neighborhoods or city blocks (Anderson

1999; Fagan & Wilkinson 1994; Sullivan 1989).

The core group no longer existed as it had a few years earlier. By their late

twenties their friendships had indeed succumbed to the pressures of daily life in

adulthood, one way or another. They discovered that there was a natural endpoint to their

larger community of adolescent relationships, one that was quite different from the

natural history of family and spousal relationships. While family bonds can adapt to

nearly any of the standard life-course transitions, their friendships could not. No matter

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how intimate and rewarding, a time came to choose between the social relationships of

youth and the personal transformation to adulthood. To simply call it “aging out” would

dishonor the ambivalent, wrenching changes that constituted the transition from

adolescence to adulthood. If exiting adolescence was “like losing a brother,” as Powel

once said, then becoming an adult was like losing a lover.

As the fourth decade of their lives begins, some still hang out with small groups

of their old friends and a few others still get together for reunions. Luke and Karen’s

house is still the site of regular hanging out, occasional get-togethers, and annual

Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. But as Luke told me, he no longer sees most of

his old friends “because of geographics” or because “we just have different interests.”

Nevertheless, he explained an attitude that was typical of the group. “I don’t have any ill

will toward any of those people. I still consider them friends. I’d have a drink with

them.”85

They fought to keep their community alive for as long as they could. But they

seemed to know long ahead of time how things would turn out. As teenagers several were

in a punk rock band that played a song called “People Change.” It seemed silly then, but

as I reread the lyrics now, their tone seems somehow prescient. Some of their friends still

know the lyrics by heart:

First thing in the morning, there’s this guy who used to be a little Hessian but now he’s gone GQ,86 And I think he likes it so there’s not much I can do.

85 Fieldnote, June 24, 2002. 86 “Hessian,” used as a colloquial term for a teenager in heavy metal music style; GQ, short for the men’s fashion magazine Gentleman’s Quarterly.

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People Change, I don’t think I like it, but it’s always been the same. There’s no Peter Pan or Never-Never Land. We’ve all gotta grow up unless you’re in a band….. People Change, but I think he likes it, so fuck off let him be the same. Just remember Peter Pan left Tinkerbell crying, and inside we’re all dying. And I hope I mean the same to you.

Although most have stopped partying with the old crowd, the friendship community is

still important to them, if only retrospectively. One can only speculate how long they will

continue fondly remembering and retelling the riotous tales of growing up fighting. Some

say they will still be telling the same stories to their grandchildren.

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Chapter 11. Conclusion: Affluent Fighters and the Professional Ideology of the Sociology of Violence

This research has developed two different kinds of novel findings. The first is

simply to have discovered a surprising social form that contradicts prevailing stereotypes

(see Katz 1997): the existence of affluent, white, suburban youth involved in physical

fights. The second set of findings is substantive, contributing to our understanding of the

various forms of violence in social life: how fights worked at the interactional level and

how careers in fighting unfolded in my sample. I begin this conclusion by first looking

back on the argument I have developed so far. After first summarizing my causal

arguments from previous chapters I return to the theme of the sample members’

surprising demographic novelty relative to the existing literature. In doing so, I reflect on

the place of my fieldwork within the sociology of violence. This topic reveals some

underpinnings of our conventional wisdom about violence, that is—in Galbraith’s (1958:

18) fine insightful phrase—“the relation between events and the ideas which interpret

them.”

WHY? A CAUSAL THEORY OF FIGHTING

To answer “why,” people often try to find “the” single cause.87 However, for any

phenomenon there are always an indefinite number of causes and—less often

recognized—a potentially infinite number of versions of the question “why” (see also

MacIver 1942/1964). Consequently, there is an irreducible level of creativity required of

87 Often with moralistic overtones, as in: “the cause” of moral decay is broken families; “the cause” of crime is the scourge of crack cocaine or gangs; “the cause” of childhood obesity is bad parenting.

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any researcher to pursue causal questions. I highlight points of “specified ignorance,”

questions to which my data would not support firm inferences, but are worth asking

nonetheless (Merton 1987; Epstein & King 2002). Indeed, one value of causal inquiry is

that it reveals Rquestions that cannot be answered immediately.

When asking why people do things, the question usually means: “What is the

person’s motivation?” Like causes, motivations are more complicated than they are

sometimes imagined to be. As I have explained, it is useful to view the motivations for

fighting—as for all of human interaction—as multi-layered. Any causal explanation must

strike a balance between parsimony and detail. I have struck the balance by bracketing

the kinds of data I collected, focusing on the interactions that lead to fights and careers in

fighting from adolescence to early adulthood, thus excluding any independently existing

causes at many levels of biology, psychology, demography, and history. Yet my

explanation should be compatible with those levels of explanation.

In the following paragraphs I follow two lines of “whys.” They respond to the two

most accessible sources of variation in the occurrence of fights: (1) Why do fights happen

at some moments but not others, and (2) Why are some people more committed, frequent

fighters than others?

I do not claim to offer final answers, but I do offer several new lines worth

pursuing. Each why begs another; one cause is always preceded by another. This is no

obstacle. In fact, it is the basis for all ongoing investigation, at all times reaching in

multiple directions, opening new lines of inquiry and adding to the depth of

understanding of any phenomenon. No single data source can be extended indefinitely,

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but the mandate is to push one’s inferences as far as the data support (see Epstein & King

2002).

To start: Why fight here, now? There are at least two obvious versions of this

question: What makes this stretch of interaction a fight, and what are the fighters trying to

accomplish by fighting?

As I described in Chapters 5 and 9, what defines a fight is emotionally serious,

mutual violence, with competition as a salient motive. Two necessary causal

preconditions for a fight are that a conflict of some sort exists to ostensibly motivate

violence and that each actor agrees to the violence. Fights in my dataset concluded with

the end of competitive violence, when both opponents withdrew upon recognizing a

stalemate, when one signaled defeat and the other accepted, when the audience

intervened to stop the violence, or when one side began to use another noncompetitive

form of violence (e.g. to shoot or “jump” a victim). As the last possibility indicates, fights

are one common pathway into more serious violence, such as beatings and shootings.

Of course, these causal elements invite other questions, such as: Why don’t the

opponents choose to do something else in this situation (besides fighting or besides

disputing in the first place)? The answer is part motivational, part situational.

As I explained earlier, people pursue or accept opportunities to fight because they

find it attractive in various ways. Fights hold various thrills. They promise prestige and

membership, are ways to develop and reveal “character” (“self-revelation contexts”), and

they promise good stories that reflect positively on one’s identity (“narrative

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gratifications”). But people tend to pursue these thrills only under certain circumstances,

and there are other ways to pursue such thrills. So: why this way, now?

Among adolescents audience gaze was particularly important, often tied to the

pressures of establishing status in campus or neighborhood social orders. My sample

members, like many American youth regardless of socioeconomic status, felt motivated

to impress by picking fights or accepting challenges to fight (see also Anderson [1999],

whose description of “campaigning for respect” accords with these observations).

Later in youth, my sample members fought in casual settings around peers,

especially carousing scenes. As I described in Chapter 7, members of carousing scenes

participate largely in order to create a collective sense of excitement and moral freedom,

situations designed for trouble and spectacle, and designed to exist beyond any

individual’s sole responsibility (see also Collins 2008).

As the fighters saw it: How many opportunities are there for sheer euphoria,

especially collective euphoria? If there are any at all, they usually involve things like

organized sporting events, sex, dancing, or partying. Like fighting, each one has a

ritualized, solidarity-building character and a narrative process with a start, middle, and

climactic conclusion. This culture was organized around weekend partying that would

build predictably to just such a collective euphoric climax (or at least create a sense of

excitement that one might happen). At this point, I would like to remind the reader that I

suggested keeping an open mind about the relationship between socioeconomic class and

fighting—that is, not to conclude that there is something special about affluent youths’

fights nor about their reasons for fighting. Indeed, I would suggest that what I have

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conducted is, in some ways, less a study of upper-middle-class white fighting than of

fighting in carousing culture. As other authors have found, “looking for trouble”

transcends race, class, nationality, history, and even age and sex (see e.g. Anderson 1999;

Collins 2008; Farrington et al. 1982; Sullivan 1989; Tomsen 1997; Winlow 2001;

Winlow & Hall 2006).

Narrowing the field down to those individuals who find “trouble” thrilling, we

must still ask an important question. Why do some people specialize in fighting in the

first place? After all, they could just as easily choose sexuality, drugs, or driving fast to

express their outlaw identities and catch cheap thrills. First, note that like smoking

marijuana, many “first times” are nearly impossible to predict with research in the

qualitative tradition (Becker 1953; Jackson-Jacobs 2001; Waldorf et al. 1992). For

fighting and marijuana smoking, like many activities, they are too subject to serendipity

and the contingencies of everyday life. Discovering the reasons for “first fights” was

virtually impossible given my dataset; reasons could be a bully pushing too far; a

classmate’s bad attitude; a hard look. Hence, I do not try to predict participation in “any

fights at all.” I predict “Becoming a Fighter”: making the commitment to fight regularly

and define one’s identity in terms of fighting.

As I described in Chapter 4, members of my sample began their careers in

fighting at times when (1) they were aspiring to membership in the deviant crowd on

campus and (2) upon discovering gratifying new selves in important fights known to their

peers. Part of what they found gratifying was the prestige from the deviance and rebellion

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of fighting. But not all adolescents who get into fights aspire to deviant crowds or find

fighting gratifying.

Why some aspired to deviance at all is a question I did not investigate thoroughly,

a point of what Merton (1987) called “specified ignorance.” Those who fought once or

twice but did not persist viewed their experiences of fights differently. For instance, they

could not salvage a sense of moral victory in technical defeat. Again, it is not obvious

why some could and some could not do so. What is clear is that some who found fighting

distasteful nonetheless successfully specialized in other kinds of deviance—drug

use/dealing, sex, music, general mischief.

It also seems to be no accident that careers in fighting typically began during

important, transformative moments in early adolescence. Especially common in my

sample were members who had just moved to a new town or school or had just suffered

some kind of humiliating “social death” in campus culture. The glory and “collective

effervescence” of fighting mean all the more to adolescents who are anxious and self-

conscious about identity. After victimization or other discrediting experience, one can re-

salvage a powerful, admirable, masculine self through violence (cf. Athens [1992] on

belligerent predators-to-be).

Why did some of these people but not others remain open to fighting after high

school? As I described in Chapter 6, those who persisted in fighting after high school

continued to view fighting as thrilling and continued to participate in carousing as a ritual

of solidarity with youthful friends. Both of these elements of their lifestyle were

contingent, particularly upon defining one’s identity as “youthful” and remaining averse

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to conventional adulthood. I can offer only suggestive answers to how, exactly, this view

and the associated social routines changed. Importantly, the frequent fighters also

maintained ties to adult society of varying strength. Fighting was symbolically important

to them to the degree that they straddled both youth and adulthood; this identity served as

a negation of complete conversion to adulthood but also as a negation of complete

confinement to childhood. In the following sense they are like other dabblers (see

Jackson-Jacobs 2004): apparently, the process of developing more complicated adult

relationships and responsibilities served as a sorting process. Some members began to

revise their views of themselves, becoming “more adult.” They began to aspire to

membership in professional, occupational, and family groups which held their own

gratifications and where fighting, partying, and other deviance would be discrediting or

impractical. A few of them, however, became increasingly committed to “street” life and

crime (at least temporarily or in cycles). For these individuals, as well, fighting became

less important; those sample members who became serious criminals were involved in

more predatory, instrumental violence—shootings, stickup, kidnappings, and beatings for

serious drug addicts, drug dealers, and one of two bookies (the other was consistently

nonviolent).

Those who “got out” became more interested in domestic leisure than public

carousing and developed greater respect for “conventional adult” identities and less for

“rebellious youthful” ones. But, rather than viewing violence as immoral, they came to

view it as incompatible with current lifestyles: “Wrong for me,” Chad used to say. They

continued to view it as an important part of their identities, but with a very specific

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qualification. They reframed fighting as part of their “life experience.” It made an

important contribution to current selves, but only from past experience.

VIOLENCE AND THE SOCIOLOGISTS WHO INTERPRET IT

When I began presenting this research to professional audiences I encountered

one important obstacle to understanding violence: the mythology surrounding it in

popular and academic cultures. Though the mythology presents methodological

problems, the mythical nature of violence for its practitioners is also part of its empirical

reality. So, narrative had to be an important concept in my explanation of fighting. On

this point, the lines between theory, method, and empirical reality blur. To take a step

back from the fights themselves, or even from stories about fights, consider the reactions

I encountered from academics and other professionals as I worked on this project. It was

a lesson in popular mythology.

Most of my professional acquaintances reacted with horror and disbelief at my

research findings. The young Tucsonans struck them as shockingly brutal. University

colleagues were frequently astonished that conventionally successful, affluent youth

would be involved in violence. Some were dubious that they existed at all, much less that

there might be more like them. My colleagues and sample members did share

biographical similarities. Many of them grew up in the same kinds of neighborhoods and

pursued advanced degrees and professional careers. But despite their socioeconomic

proximity, they were distanced by a subtle cultural gulf.

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Just as interesting, many of my sample members did not believe in the other side,

either. A number of Tucsonans were thoroughly baffled to find out that I knew people

who claimed to have never been in a fight. Some accused me of outright lying.

Paradoxically, both sides did in fact know the same people in whose existence they did

not believe; they just didn’t know it.

To a second, smaller group of my colleagues, the young Tucsonans seemed a

rather benign crowd. After hearing about my research a handful of university faculty

members related their own or their children’s fight stories to me. Yet their other

coworkers rarely heard such stories.

Both views—as brutal or as benign—may be equally reasonable. To be clear, my

point is neither to demonize affluent troublemakers nor to normalize the suffering

involved in violence (see Becker 1963; Matza 1969; Katz 1997). Instead, I pose these

divergent reactions to fighting in order to illustrate a sociological puzzle and turn the gaze

back on my own profession:

How can two such intertwined, overlapping sets of people be unaware of each

other’s very existence? I raise the question not because I can fully answer it, but because

it reveals that the mythology of our culture has hidden various troubles and forms of

“action” right in the midst of mainstream society. Multiple forces must be at work to

achieve this level of professional and everyday disattention. Likely among those forces

are the everyday moral and situational segregation between conventional and deviant

activities, the relative ease with which the powerful and wealthy are able to successfully

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manage the line between the two, and the prevailing cultural narrative that deviance

resides in groups already excluded from the mainstream.

What does this say about sociology as a profession? Given my own

background—my personal exposure to fighting and other violence while growing up in

largely affluent, suburban contexts—I was surprised by my colleagues’ reactions.

Presumably they were familiar with studies of homicide and gang violence, so their

horror could not have been about the level of violence per se. Instead, my interpretation

was that they were horrified by the transgression and violation of their stereotype of the

typical young violent actor. Their disbelief seemed to focus on the incongruity of “good

kids” (even some girls and women) doing something so “uncivilized.”

The lesson for the sociology of violence—such as it is—may be that we have yet

to fully separate our empirical concerns from policy and everyday evaluations of

violence. Moreover, we are unreflective about how our own sensibilities (what scares us,

what we expect to see in violence) shape our conceptions about violence and our research

agendas. The best prospect for empirical research to transcend popular mythologies is to

self-consciously seek out precisely those regions that they obscure.

The Gray Areas between Violence and Non-Violence

As anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) has argued, objects that seem

“anomalous” and hard to classify according to conventional schemes—“liminal,” in her

language—make us uncomfortable, so we find ways to look elsewhere. There is a

methodological lesson here. Within the realm of violence marginal cases include fights

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among affluent youth, but also boxing, sibling violence, animal cruelty, bullying,

corporal child punishment, and a potentially indefinite list of others. Most academic and

media attention go to the most destructive, easily defined, extreme forms: stickup,

homicide, street-gang attacks.

We must discipline ourselves to look exactly where our impulses tell us there is

little to see: those kinds of violence that are lesser known, less distressing, perhaps not

even “violence” at all. One way toward clarity is to stop looking away from the gray

areas and instead to try to figure out why we view them as such.

Methodologically, part of the problem is the impulse to view violence as a

category apart from the rest of human behavior. Sharply bounding violence from the rest

of social life makes it easier to understand, or at least more comfortably comprehensible.

It makes it more sensible to pose highly general, single abstract causes for all of

violence’s variants—economic incentive, emotional outburst, conflict management—

since, after all, violence is just one category of behavior. The language and logic of

criminal justice may offer the most obvious example: criminal statutes attempt to clarify

precisely what does and does not count as criminal violence; agencies like the FBI’s

Uniform Crime Reporting system publish (and news-media and the public

disproportionately consumes) highly abstracted, neatly quantified annual rates of “violent

crime” overall.

It may be a natural enough way to think; violence as we usually imagine it is

alien, offensive. Before trusting that imagination too far, though, let us consider an

alternative. The job of sociology is specifically to not look away from areas of overlap

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and continuity, however rare and subtle they may be (see Matza 1969). The “natural

attitude” toward violence need not be so, and definitely not so for professional

researchers (see Schutz 1962 on the “natural attitude”).

From the beginning I often wondered why someone hadn’t already written a

book-length study covering the same general topic as the one covered here. Thematically,

the closest may be Wilkison’s (1984) book American Tough, which details the

ambivalent feelings rooted deep in American history and culture (and perhaps world

culture more generally) about toughness. At times it is glorious and virtuous; other times

it is cruel and inhumane.

Fighting itself, though, has been the topic of little sustained investigation. This is

all the more surprising given its numerical frequency and symbolic importance to so

many people. Especially in youth culture, fighting seems to be a widespread and critical

means of sorting people into social positions and narratively constructing the meaning of

life (see also Morrill et al. 2000).

But fights of the type I studied provoke for some people the ambiguous

discomfort that Douglas (1966) recognized in things that are both of consequence and

difficult to categorize. Fights are not “pure” violence, as we think of it, so it makes some

people anxious to look too closely at them, for it calls their worldview into question.

At once fighting epitomizes some of our culture’s most laudable values even as it

represents exactly what our modern, bureaucratic civilization seeks to overcome. In this

sense fighting is at the frontier of aesthetics and morality in contemporary life (although

people might disagree over whether the frontier lies at the front or rear of that social

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space). Fight situations have structured opportunities for spontaneous acts of self-

sacrifice, glory, the struggle for justice, and self-reliance. Fathers teach their sons to face

their fears and fight bullies. Movie and television storylines glamorize virtuous fights

(especially those in which justice prevails and all the rules of competitive combat

[Chapter 9] are dramatically observed, at least by the hero).

At the same time fights can be brutal and easily slide into sadistic cruelty (recall

that what begins as a fight can turn into a one-sided “righteous slaughter” [Katz 1988] or

an exhilarated group “jumping”). Fighting is violent, as most people understand the idea

of violence, and frequently abhorrent by the standards of popular sensibilities. But most

people also accept that there are times to fight for what one believes in—to defend

oneself or the weak, or to otherwise do battle in the name of justice.

Fighting is also a borderline case that makes us uncomfortable because it

challenges our moral sentiments toward violence: oftentimes there are no clear victims or

perpetrators (and sometimes everyone has grounds to claim victim status even while

being at risk of being labeled a villain); it may be impossible to assign fault; and, in fact,

each “side” on a fight may reasonably claim virtuous justifications (e.g. both sides may

claim self-defense or defense of “The Good” [see Katz 1988: Chapter 1]).

I argued above that these ambiguities explain the typical reluctance of the

criminal justice system (see Chapter 5) to officially respond to mutual fights. These

complications are not merely due to the difficulty in piecing together accounts of what

happened after the fact (although that is part of it). Instead, if one imagines fighting and

other violence in multidimensional social-moral space, one would find it located across

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the middle areas where the qualities of good and evil and of violence and justice are hazy

at best.

Turning here to similarly hazy violent interactions we may be able to ferret out

some positive conclusions. Many academic researchers have pointed to overlap between

the categories of nonviolence and violence. Wacquant’s (1995; see also 2004) Chicago

slum neighborhood boxers adamantly argued that they were athletic, workman-like, but

not “violent”: violence was “out there,” while the gym, “in here” was a safe bunker—

antiviolence. The examples are indefinite and, as anyone who teaches about them knows,

can be surprisingly controversial: capital punishment; date rape; bullying; animal

“cruelty”; “terrorism”; “warfare”; corporal child “punishment”; various kinds of sports

violence.

What makes these acts tolerable, at least in the eyes of some? They all seem to

share at least two important qualities in common. First, as many people see it, the targets

are non-victims, either because they are appropriate targets of violence (voluntary

combatants or morally deserving of punishment) or ineligible for the victim label (as in

the case of animals). Second, those doling out the bodily harm view it as something other

than predation, whether punishment by the righteous, combat among soldiers, or

slaughter for animals. While the empathy-lacking psychopath- or sociopath-theory of

violent actors (against which I argued in Chapter 10) is often exaggerated, it may be that

one must suspend empathy for the target during the actual moments of suffering. But this

is clearly not a defect limited to a few aberrant individuals; it is a quality of situations and

relationships between attacker and target.

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The same argument applies not only to potentially violent acts but also to actors.

Our popular culture readily defines gang members, “dangerous violent criminals”

(Athens 1992), and career criminal offenders as “real” violent actors. But what about

people who do not fit the conventional image? Police officers, soldiers, and certain

protestors are examples of types who may engage in violence at times but are unlikely to

be viewed as “true” violent actors by the public (Collins 2008). Otherwise-conventional,

affluent, white youth who dabble in fights of the kind I describe also challenge standard

views of the violent actor. We do not see in them the background factors (e.g. poverty,

minority status, psychological defect) that we expect violent actors to possess. If our

empirical understanding of violence is to transcend the cultural mythology of

stereotypical violent actors, we must suspend many of our preconceived theories about

who does violence, why, and what it looks like. Instead we must focus our attention on

the places obscured by mythology: not only by looking at types of acts and actors we

usually ignore, but also by revising our research methodology when necessary—for

instance, to look directly into details of the situations where people enact and define

violence, that is, the “foreground” of violence (see Collins 2008; Katz 1988).

It is revealing that many well-mannered individuals feel they must in their daily

affairs go far out of their way to avoid conflict (Baumgartner 1989). These symbolic

distances are, to be sure, ways of dramatizing the wrongs of “going too far” in the wrong

direction and ways of reaffirming one’s own place in the moral center; but equally surely,

they point to the inherent, fundamental ambiguities of those moral boundaries (see

Erikson 1966). People tacitly know there are no clear lines between violence and

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nonviolence; knowing this, most of them, most of the time, steer far clear of moral

danger.

In academic research one way to reaffirm the same perfectly understandable view

of violence-as-inherently-appalling has been to point the gaze far away from any

potentially ambiguous varieties. My point is not that sociology should provide moral

guidance to understanding what counts as “real” or “unjust” violence, only that the

struggle itself belies much greater diversity and uncertainty about violence than most

academic researchers have acknowledged.

The alternative approach to looking at extreme forms of violence is to look

closely at the range of variation itself. That is, treat it as a job in itself to inspect and

catalog variation, especially along the boundaries where violence blurs into less

stigmatized social interactions. One might read this research as a study of one liminal

category of human culture and interaction: Is it violence at all? Is it crime, partying,

sanctioned adolescent wildness, fun, competition, physical artistry? The point is not to

nail down where boundaries between violence and nonviolence should go. The point is

that there is nothing firm to drive the nail into.

It is curious that academic studies of violence are so intimately tied to the

academic discipline of criminology and related fields, since so little violence is

technically criminal. Rather than seeing it as a special kind of interaction (e.g. as crime),

one might see violence as one potential practical direction in any kind of relationship or

interaction. Violence is, after all, always possible (at least in moments of “co-presence”

[Goffman 1963b]). One might then study different forms of violence not as a single

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categorical outcome, but as various possible interactional pathways within the situations

and relationships where they arise. What violent interactions have in common (or not)

would be discovered by comparing those various forms.

In conducting this research I have deliberately tried to keep criminology at a safe

distance. The best substantive disciplinary home for this study was never obvious to me,

which actually turned out to be one important lesson. It was also unclear to me what

exactly justifies uniting studies of violence as a whole (especially within criminology). I

do not have a firm answer, but it seems evident that shared criminal sanctions should not

be the sole unifying theme, nor should “harm.” These are the bureaucratic concerns of

justice and health bureaucracies—important actors in understanding violence, but ones

whose “corrective” concerns can interfere with a faithful “appreciation” of empirical

reality (Matza 1969).

Violence and Sensibilities

An important step for sociology, I am arguing, is to understand our own

sensibilities about violence. Then we may begin to better understand those that seem so

foreign to us. Failing to study the borderline varieties of violence serves as a way of

collectively distancing ourselves from violence, to the detriment of empirical

understanding. We don’t study such violence for multiple reasons, but two important

ones are that they are neither “social problems” nor do they fit our stereotypes of what

violence and its actors look like.

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I would also suggest that what may appear barbaric at first glance does, in fact,

reveal civil underpinnings. As I argued in earlier chapters, the fights I described were far

less brutal than they could have been. My sample members’ fights were never lethal and

rarely disfiguring or disabling. Few of the members had ever been severely “brutalized”

in the same ways as members of the violent criminal elite (e.g. the “dangerous violent

criminals” described by Athens [1992]), though many had been subjected to lesser forms

of beatings and subjugation as children. Their fights may have actually reflected

“softness” when compared with the “hard” lives and violent techniques of their most

predatory peers in impoverished settings. They used conflict styles oriented toward

voluntary, competitive combat, as opposed to using interactional techniques meant to

ensnare people into coercive attacks or humiliation (see Garot 2007; Katz 1988: Chapter

1). Few of them had the stomach for the lethality, the high stakes, and the military-style

sneak attack involved in drive-by shootings (Sanders 1994).

Perhaps my ethnographic subjects were at the outer margin of the contemporary

leisure-class in terms of their tolerance for physical brutality. But, as an empirical matter,

we must recognize that they still represent a major shift in the direction of civility over

previous historical eras. Consider, below, a trio of cases that illustrate a major change in

our broader culture’s sensibilities about violence.

Elliott Gorn (1985) has written the most detailed historical study of hand-to-hand

fighting in the 18th and 19th century American frontier regions (evidence from elsewhere

[e.g. Asbury 1927] indicates the same style of fighting may have lasted into the early 20th

century in places). What was then called “rough-and-tumble” fighting—usually a fight

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over some “trifling and ridiculous” (Gorn 1985: 19) slight of honor—bears ritual and

ceremonial similarities to fighting today, such as calling for showdown-style meetings to

give an audience time to gather. But the “techniques of the body” (Mauss 1933/1973)

made it something quite alien to the experience of contemporary fighting. All kinds of

attack were expected in a rough-and-tumble match, including ear and nose biting, groin

kicking, and hair pulling. The most distinctive technique, however, was eye-gouging.

According to Gorn’s diverse sources of evidence, the practice was widespread, well-

known, and often tolerated (though some states found it necessary to criminalize gouging

another’s eyes, even in honorable man-to-man combat, just as they eventually

criminalized dueling). As one traveling minister commented, “I saw more than one man

who wanted an eye, and ascertained that I was now in the region of ‘gouging’” (Gorn

1985: 23).

Consider one case that Gorn (1985: 25) quotes at length from the travelogues of

Englishman Charles William Janson, published in 1807:

We found the combatants … fast clinched by the hair, and their thumbs endeavoring to force a passage into each other’s eyes; while several of the bystanders were betting upon the first eye to be turned out of its socket. For some time the combatants avoided the thumb stroke with dexterity. At length they fell to the ground, and in an instant the uppermost sprung up with his antagonists’ eye in his hand!!! The savage crowd applauded, while, sick with horror, we galloped away from the infernal scene. The name of the sufferer was John Butler, a Carolinian, who, it seems, had been dared to the combat by a Georgian; and the first eye was for the honor of the state to which they respectively belonged. (Ellipses and italics in Gorn [1985].)

Before turning to the second case, do notice a few similarities with the

contemporary fights I have described previously, save only the savagery of injury. Both

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kinds of fights are constructed by participants and audiences in the metaphor of athletic

contests (e.g. gambling on the outcome, crowd applause, keeping a grim trophy); the

combat seems to be provoked by a dare and is in that sense competitive and voluntary;

and the fight ends with a clear signal of victory and defeat.

Now, move ahead two centuries in history, from a time when Southern drinking

men viewed eye-gouging as sport, to the 2004 military combat for the Iraqi city Fallujah.

Specifically, consider the account by one US Army Staff Sergeant from Buffalo, New

York, of hand-to-hand combat with his enemy (Bellavia 2007). Bellavia was by this time

a seasoned infantry soldier, reportedly killing many and witnessing the deaths of

countless. Given his occupation, high-level training, and combat experience, we might

consider him one of the contemporary world’s violent elite—a “trained killer.” But at a

particular moment, when forced to battle hand-to-hand for survival, he surprises us (at

least in light of the previous excerpt). Comparing this case to the one above illuminates

an important point of variation in the practice and meaning of violence across time,

space, and culture.

Bellavia was “clearing” a Fallujah house when he injured an enemy militiaman

with a grenade. Choosing not to shoot him with his M16 (fearing his tracer rounds would

ignite several propane tanks leaking into the room) he bludgeons his fallen opponent with

the rifle, who tries to return the gesture with his own AK47 stock. Bellavia falls upon the

Iraqi and they continue in an extended stretch of hand-to-hand combat, much of it

unarmed. The Iraqi seems more competent at “rough-and-tumble” style combat, kicking

and even biting Bellavia’s groin. Bellavia mostly tries to find objects to bash his

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opponent’s face, but is unsuccessful. His opponent only struggles on. Finally Bellavia

uses a technique that is commonly taught in military and other kinds of hand-to-hand

combat training:

I gouge his left eye with my right index finger. I am astonished to discover that the human eye is not so much a firm ball as a soft, pliable sack. I try with all my might to send my finger all the way through. He wails like a child. It unnerves me, and I lose the stomach for this dirty trick. I withdraw my finger. (Bellavia 2007: 264; italics added.)

The enemy resumes his counter-attack. In the end, Bellavia is lucky to survive, finding a

knife on his belt and killing the man by severing an artery under the collarbone.

This second case is not a “competitive” fight of the kind I have focused on in

previous chapters, but it is instructive nonetheless. The contrast should be clear. While

many ordinary American fighting men of centuries past thought little of separating eyes

from their owners, even the most elite combatants of today—even when fighting for their

lives—may not have “the stomach” for the same technique.

The third case is drawn from my own dataset, also involving a serious eye injury.

Members treated a few cases of fights-turned-jumpings as exceptional but dramatic

cautionary tales (especially Walter Block’s, as described in Chapter 1).

The beating of a teenager named Lenny was a haunting example for several

members of my sample, particularly since they were the ones who did the beating. Lenny

got into a fight with Powel somehow—Powel does not remember how, but his friends

remember him “talking shit” to Lenny’s friends earlier that night. Joe prefaced his

account of the event with this lesson, during a group interview with his brother Justin.

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Joe, Justin, and the rest of Powel’s friends didn’t notice the fight happening until it was well

underway. Justin recounted how the exchange between Lenny and Powel came to his

attention:

Justin: Well, all of a sudden Rudy Baylor comes running out of somewhere, he’s all, “Dude, they got Powel in the street!” … So I just took off running. Curtis: What did you see? Justin: Well, what I saw was—Rudy is about fifteen feet in front of me. We came around the corner and—about thirty, thirty-five feet from Powel—Powel is on his back with Lenny on top of him stabbing him in the face with a screwdriver…. Rudy, he runs up and he just kicks him straight in the chest.

Lenny got up and started running. At least half a dozen of Powel’s friends gave chase, at

which point Lenny sought cover inside of his friend Douglas’ parked truck. Powel’s friends

struggled amongst themselves to reach inside the passenger door to beat Lenny with their

fists, until Lenny managed to close and lock the door. Douglas (the owner of the truck) was

still outside in the crowd, so Powel’s friends stood around for a while trying unsuccessfully

to break into the truck. Eventually they coerced Douglas into unlocking the door and then

resumed their attack.

During the closed-door interval Powel’s friends had found weapons of their own.

Danny grabbed a mop handle, broke it in two, and threw one end to Justin, who was at the

door:

Joe: And he throws it … And of course, he’s got a sharpened end like a javelin. Justin: … that’s when Danny tosses me the stick. And Powel runs up…. He’s all, “Where the hell is this motherfucker?” Grabs the stick, I grab the stick. And then Bam! Bam! [Both holding the same stick/mop handle, stabbing.] Joe: … I saw you catch him in the eye. Justin: Yeah, blood did squirt out. Joe: It was gross. Blood was on the windshield. And this kid’s sitting here, holding his face, and you could see the gaps between his fingers, with blood, and pretty much bulging pupil, screaming, “Get me out of here!” Crying. It was a scary,

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disgusting—... From there I believe Douglas realized, “Hey, if I don’t get this kid out of here, he’s going to die.”

Douglas got into the truck and drove Lenny out of the party-turned-mob scene. I never had

the nerve to ask Lenny how badly he was injured, but the rumor was that he lost partial

vision in one eye, but maybe not permanently.

Lenny’s case lends itself to a useful comparison with the previous two. His peers

considered his eyeball injury highly unusual, utterly repulsive, and somewhat shameful. As

Gorn’s (1985) and others’ evidence indicates (e.g. Asbury 1927) inflicting this kind of

injury was actually the routine aim of one-on-one fighting 19th century America. Clearly

unarmed fighting between adults can be extremely violent. Given the assailants’ sense of

horror at their own actions—in addition to the larger body of evidence on their practices of

fighting—it seems evident that the meaning and risk structure of contemporary fights is

predicated on routinely refraining from hurting opponents as badly as one could.

There are a few lessons here. First, and most general, violence is always socially

organized. The techniques of the body in violence are not a biological given as they may

be for some species; clearly they are limited by one’s position in history and civilization.

Second, in many ways members of American society (and presumably many others) have

lost (or, perhaps, never learned) the sensibilities necessary for the most brutal forms of

violence.

This point has been made in various ways by authors with a historical perspective

(see also Durkheim 1895/1966). As Elias (1939/2000) famously theorizes, there has been

a gradual “civilizing process” over the course of centuries through which European and

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derivative societies lost the taste for brutality and instead accrued more refined

sensibilities and manners. Similarly, Foucault (1977) argues that such a long process

reshaped our attitudes towards punishment, as nation-states gradually replaced torture of

the body with confinement and reform of the “soul” or “self.” Bourdieu (1984) also

argues that such habitual sensibilities and practices of a culture are always changing over

time, largely driven by the upper-classes’ desire to distinguish themselves from the

bestial actions of the lower. Gorn (1985) supports a similar idea, noting that in the US

South in the 19th century dueling emerged as a more civilized, honorable alternative to

lower-class gouging matches (see also Collins 2008). Whatever the reasons for changes

in sensibilities toward and practices of violence over time, there is evidently an ongoing

qualitative shift in the kinds of violence people are willing to use, which can only be

explained as a change in social organization (as opposed to biological makeup).

In studies of crime and violence experts at elite institutions make periodic

predictions that America or Western society is on the brink of decline into mass

brutality—most recently, in the mid-1990s, the imminent “blood bath of teen violence”

(Butterfield 1995)88 to accompany the predicted “Super-Predators” (DiIulio 1995), just

before homicide rates began falling precipitously (see also Bennet et al. 1996; Wilson

1995). But, as an empirical matter, commonplace interpersonal violence is, in many

ways, becoming increasingly civilized. Here is an apt point at which to recall Durkheim’s

(1895/1966: 67-69) famous passage from Rules of Sociological Method, where it might

88 Quoting criminologist James Alan Fox, making predictions based on his upcoming Trends in Juvenile Violence: A Report to the United States Attorney General on Current and Future Rates of Juvenile Offending (J. A. Fox 1996).

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be exaggerating only a little to say that sociology first began. It is both optimistic and

pessimistic in tone. Neither crime nor violence can ever be eradicated from society, but

their form may change, and the change may be in the direction of greater peace over

bloodshed:

For murderers to disappear, the horror of bloodshed must become greater in those social strata from which murderers are recruited; but, first it must become greater throughout the entire society. Moreover, the very absence of crime would directly contribute to produce the horror; because any sentiment seems much more respectable when it is always and uniformly respected…. Formerly acts of violence against persons were more frequent than they are today, because respect for individual dignity was less strong. As this has increased, these crimes have become more rare; and also many acts violating this sentiment have been introduced into the penal law which were not included there in primitive times.

Durkheim predicted—for the most part correctly—that murder would continue to decline

but not disappear completely. Only the introduction of mass-produced, cheap firearms in

the United States seems to have stunted this centuries-long trend (see, e.g., Eisner 2001;

Monkkonen 2001). It is worth noting that in other technologically-advanced rich, but

gun-less, nations homicide has continued to fall dramatically through the 20th century into

the present. This is the case even in Britain, where observers note a “rise of knife culture”

(The Independent 2006). Blades have certainly improved in quality and availability, so it

is noteworthy that the vast majority of British knife attackers manage not to kill their

targets (Ford & O’Neill 2008). Likewise, it is noteworthy that striking the face—a

technique that inflicts comparatively modest damage—has become the preferred mode of

physical attack in the United States (and other countries), rather than gouging and biting.

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We may continue to feel plagued by violence, but as Durkheim suggests, its form

has changed. While fighting men of the past blinded each other without scruple, today’s

brawlers trust each other to leave the loser without permanent injury. Even hardened

infantrymen’s stomachs turn at the prospect of plucking out the enemy’s eye, just as the

French masses soured on public torture ceremonies and demanded the cleaner, more

rationalized, more humane Guillotine in the 18th and 19th centuries. We have become

liberated to recognize new and more refined forms of violence: school bullying, domestic

abuse, date rape, hate crimes, and fist-fighting.

As Durkheim presaged, it has never become the goal of sociologists to define

“good” and “evil,” but it is still our task to document additional varieties of violent acts

and actors, whether they be historically new or simply overlooked because they

previously failed to inspire the “horror of bloodshed.”

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