Book
review
Respect – street culture,
new etnicity and drugs
Lalander, Philip
Respekt – gatukultur, ny etnicitet och droger
Liber, Stockholm, 2009 , 296 s.
A
ccording to the prominent social scientist Howard Becker, if we find a
certain area or aspect of human behaviour
irrational and without a meaning, we probably do not have sufficient knowledge of
that behaviour. Philip Lalander, a Swedish
anthropologist, endeavours in his new book,
Respekt –Gatukultur, ny etnicitet och droger
(2009), to understand and shed light on a
phenomenon which is usually regarded by
“normal” people as quite incomprehensible: The use of heavy drugs and the criminal activity involved with it. Lalander succeeds in his effort: after reading the book
it is quite understandable why a group of
young Chilean boys, living in Norrköping´s
“problem area”, Hageby, find it hard to find
themselves a place in the life style of “mainstream Swedes” and instead get involved
with drugs and drug trafficking.
Lalander lays out his starting point in the
first section of the book. According to him,
a behaviour that may appear as inhuman,
criminal and “bad” can be understood as a
result of a complex process where people
make human and understandable choices
and decisions within the limits of their social, cultural and economical environment
and background. The book centres around
a group of Chilean boys who during their
adolescence develop their own street culture
influenced by hip hop, reggae music and
heavy drugs and criminality. The setting is
a middle-sized city, Norrköping, in Sweden
and its suburb, Hageby. The period is the end
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of 1990s. The boys are second generation
Swedish-Chileans, whose parents moved to
Sweden when the boys were 4−6 years old.
In other words, the boys have grown up in
Sweden, but as Lalander points out with illustrating examples, they never felt quite at
home in their new country.
The boys live between two cultures, both
of which strike them as unfamiliar. In Sweden they are seen as Chilean, but in Chile as
Swedish, as one of the boys learns during his
journey to the land he has romanticized in
his daydreams. The boys´ homes feel oppressive. The parents are depressed and miss
their home country. Some of them move
back to Chile leaving the boys with only one
parent. In this situation the boys create an
alternative reality, where “the street” starts
to represent a problem free zone and a possibility for them to control their existence.
An American gang film “Blood in Blood out”
serves as an important example as well as
the street culture in Chile. With the help of
these and other sub-cultural codes and images the boys have taken from popular culture, the bleak Swedish suburb turns into an
exiting “el barrio” where the boys are kings
and able to control their environment.
The book consists of a prologue and four
parts. The prologue sets the scene and introduces the reader to the four young men that
the book follows. Lalander clearly wants the
reader to sympathize with the boys, making
them flesh and blood at the very beginning
and showing them in different contexts. In
the first part of the book Lalander lays out
his research questions, theoretical starting points as well as his data and method.
Lalander follows strongly the footprints of
the American anthropologist Philippe Bourgeois, who in his well-known research “In
Search for Respect” (1997) investigated the
street culture and underground economy of
Puerto Rican crack users in NY. From Bourgeois Lalander has acquired not only his
position as a researcher, but also the view
of the street as a place of power play where
person´s worth and status is measured according to the standards of that street – usu-
ally opposite to the standards of “regular”
society. Another important starting point for
Lalander is Pierre Bourdieu´s famous concept habitus. When trying to understand the
young men and their choices it is, according
to Lalander, essential to realize that the boys
have embodied the street and its rules: It becomes the viewpoint, or a structure, according to which the boys perceive, give meaning
and measure things. Outside the street the
boys feel vulnerable and weak.
On page 263 of the book, Lalander highlights two interview quotes that he sees as
“keys” to understand the psychological, social and cultural processes that work in the
background of the boys´ fascination with the
street and later with drugs and drug dealing. In the first quotes, one the boys, Miguel,
describes the boys looking at Hageby from
a top of a mountain, just like in the film
Blood in Blood Out, and feeling that the
suburb belongs to them. “It was great /Det
var fint”, says Miguel. In the other quote,
again Miguel, describes Patrizio, a slightly
older Chilean guy who is involved in the
drug business and who the boys look up
to. Patrizio is “cool” (schyst) and has lots of
stuff and things to offer. The boys want to
be like him. According to Lalander, the first
quotes describes the mentality among the
boys, “romantizing the outsidership/ utanförskapsromantik”, which gives the boys the
possibility to rise above their everyday existence and subordinate position in the society.
The other quote sheds light on the importance of charismatic relations in the creation
of an identity. Patrizio with his “stuff” has
that charisma and the younger boys, taking
him as their example, slowly follow him into
the drug business.
After the theoretical introduction, the book
continues as a chronological story where the
boys´ lives are followed from their childhood to their adolescence and early twenties. In the course of this period the boys get
involved with heroin and the drug business.
Lalander motivates the life historical perspective by his wanting to understand the
choices of the drug-using adolescent boys.
He is interested in the process, how things
develop into a certain point, and the interpretation of this development from the point
of view of the actors. The main emphasis in
the book is on the interviews, where the boys
recall their life retrospectively. Lalander emphasizes very strongly that the book is not
about drugs and drug cultures, but about
the social and identity processes that work
in the background of the boys´ drug use.
Lalander refer to this starting point with
the term intersectionality. He is interested
in the intersections between the boys´ age,
social class, gender and ethnic background
and how these different aspects of the boys´
existence together weave into making their
behaviour and choices understandable. Lalander also emphasizes that drug use and the
problems related to it should not be looked
at separately from society. For Lalander drug
use is a societal problem, not a minority
problem or a problem of Chileans. At the end
of the book Lalander states very clearly that
there should be other kinds of options than
drug dealing available in the society for kids
like his protagonists.
Lalander´s book is rich and fascinating
and it is difficult to condense into a short
book review what it is all about. The book
is in many ways a classical ethnography.
Even though Lalander makes the necessary
reservation in the beginning that the boys´
life is examined in the book from a certain
perspective, the book strives for a realistic
account of the boys´ lives. This is done with
Lalander´s style that aims for a detailed and
“dense” description of the environment the
boys inhabit as well as letting their “voices”
be heard with the help of long interview
quotes. These methodological choices give
the reader the possibility to absorb the life of
his informants and really look at the world
from their point of view. This could be seen
as the most important contribution of the
book, as drug users still too often are seen as
nothing but “dope fiends” loaded with negative attributes and without any history or life
outside drug use. Lalander also highlights
the emotional aspect of drug use and street
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573
culture. The boys are proud and want to feel
powerful. Nothing is more scary or humiliating for them than to lose that power. I think
that this dimension is often overlooked by
the various treatment professionals and public officials and this may lead to conflicts if
drug users feel threaten and constrained by
these authorities.
Another important and interesting contribution is taking into account the symbolic
aspect of drug use and the boys´ lives in
general. Lalander shows that the boys´ lives
are anything but meaningless, an attribute
which is usually associated with problem
drug use or so-called problem youth in general. The young men creatively circulate dif-
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ferent popular cultural images and use them
to enrich their existence. The process is dynamic and different aspects are put together
in creative ways to make new meanings.
This leads the reader to wonder where we
could find new kinds of strong images that
young boys all over the world could identify
with besides popular cultural images that
emphasize power, pride and wealth as central aspects of “proper” masculinity.
Translated by AAZET
Riikka Perälä, researcher
The Finnish foundation for Alcohol Research
E-mail: [email protected]