Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Kill Method: A Provocation

As criminologists we face two contemporary crises. The first is the unfolding

crisis of global capitalism and state governance, and with it the spiraling social harms of

dislocation, incarceration, impoverishment, and environmental degradation. Amidst these

spiraling harms will surely emerge, sadly, a further host of phenomena demanding the

critical attention of criminologists: new forms of acquisitive violence, new crimes attuned

to economic and existential uncertainty, new moments of down-market corporate

malfeasance, new strains on social and environmental sustainability, and new patterns of

state surveillance and control. Perhaps this crisis holds the promise of progressive

changebut if Marx and Merton were even half right, it most certainly contains the sorts

of contradictions out of which new forms of crime and predation will emerge.

The second crisis is the crisis of criminology. Criminology is today crippled by its

own methodology, its potential for analysis and critique lost within a welter of survey

forms, data sets, and statistical manipulations. Worse, criminology has given itself over to

a fetishism of these methodologies. Methods such as these are not only widely and

uncritically utilized by contemporary criminologiststhey are detailed and reified to the

point that, for many criminologists, they have now replaced crime and crime control as

the de facto subject matter of the discipline. The crisis of criminology doubles back on

itself; criminology first embraces methods wholly inadequate and inappropriate for the

study of human affairs, and then makes these methods its message.

1
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

This second crisis precludes criminologys progressive engagement with the first.

Over the past few decades surveys, statistics, and other objective methodologies have

increasingly served to couple criminology to criminal justice as both pseudo-discipline

and state practice. Made the adjunct of criminal justice, criminology not only colludes in

policing the crisis and propping up the very institutions that underlie the crisis itself;

criminology also finds itself pulled away from critical theory and into the realms of

practical crime control, risk measurement, and data management. This trajectory in turn

renders most criminological research impenetrablenot to mention off-putting and

unusableto everyday citizens, street-level progressive groups, young political activists,

and others who might enlist criminologys aid in confronting the contemporary global

crisis. Married to the criminal justice complex, divorced from the nuanced politics of

everyday life, criminology narrows its view at the very moment that broader, critical

criminological engagement is most needed.

As Rome burned, Nero fiddled. As our world conflagrates, criminology calculates.

These intertwined crisesthe crisis of global politics, crime, and economy, and

the crisis of criminologys methodological inability to engage this global situation

criticallymight be addressed in any number of ways. Seminars in advanced statistics or

survey construction might be summarily emptied out, their participants sent out to

establish urban gardens or no-cost daycare programs. Criminology as a discipline might

be declared a failure and a fraud, with its graduate programs and publications reinvented

as art, or history, or performance studiesor, if present orientations are maintained,

2
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

actuarial science. Alternatively, criminology could be continued as a discipline, but under

this ongoing disciplinary cover its scholars could begin holding seminars in revolutionary

political practice, do-it-yourself media operations, and economic self-sufficiency.

Dangerous times, after all, require dangerous thinking.

Here, though, I offer a different sort of proposal and provocation for saving

criminology, and for promoting its critical engagement with the current world crisis.

Kill method.

The Fetishism of the Methodology

Fetishism generally suggests two sorts of relationships between meaning and the

material world. The first is the attribution of animating powers to an inanimate object,

such that the object itself is seen to embody what otherwise might be understood as larger

forces of human action or cultural practice. Second, and relatedly, is the notion of

fetishism as a sort of unnatural preoccupation with some small dimension of a larger

totality. For the anthropologist, then, fetishism can be investigated as a form of religious

mysticism whereby various groups imbue fetish objects with spiritual powers. For

Marxists, the fetishism of the commodity implies not so much mysticism as

mystificationan essential capitalist conceit where commodities are imagined to embody

value in such a way that the creation of this value through human labor is forgotten. For

the sexual fetishist, the toe or the earlobe emerges as the object of affection, a focused

substitute for the broader dynamics of sexuality and allure.

3
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

The methodological culture of contemporary criminology operates in just this

way. Orthodox criminologists imagine that survey research and statistical analysis are

somehow mystically imbued with the power of objectivity, that they embody the spirit

of scientific inquiry, mathematical precision, and dispassionate analysis. They imagine

that these methods somehow operate independently of human emotion and human

actionthat such methods can drain objective data and useful knowledge from those

who are their targets, can produce results that are valid and replicable no matter the

researcher, can expunge error and subjectivity from the research process. And like the

sexual fetishist, orthodox criminologists focus so tightly on the minutiae of their

methodology, and on the social minutiae that their methods are designed to investigate,

that they regularly forget larger dynamics of crime, transgression, knowledge, and power.

This is of course neither the way criminology must be, nor the way it has always

been. Historically, many of criminologys foundational works have emerged from

idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and undisciplined approaches that bear little resemblance

to any sort of formalized methodology (Adler and Adler, 1998). When in the 1920s and

1930s Chicago School scholars conducted research, for example, they did so largely

according to their own sentiments and schedules. The research for Frederic Thrashers

(1927: xiii, 79) 571 page book, The Gang, occupied a period of about seven years, and

in the book he not only presents in fine detail his impressions of the thrilling street life of

the gang, but includes his own in situ photos of gang rituals and juvenile gang life. In

later decades, researchers associated with the National Deviancy Conference in Great

Britain (e.g., Young, 1971, Cohen 1972), and American researchers like Howard Becker

(1963) and Ned Polsky (1967), likewise undertook criminological research that remains

4
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

at the core of criminologyresearch that emerged not from pre-set methodologies, but

from their own marginal lifestyles and (im)moral predilections.

Still, over the past six decades or soand increasingly in recent decades

criminology has all but abandoned this tradition of engaged, fluid research for the

fetishism of the methodology. This trajectory in part began after World War II, with the

influx of governmental money into academia. Ample funding, entrepreneurial professors

and policy-makers thirsting for anything that looked like technical expertise provided a

combustible mix, says historian Mark Mazower (2008: 36, 42). Huge sums of money

were suddenly pouring into the universities. The social scientists who got the grants

offered technical advice that simplified the world and made it governable, using

behavioral science or mathematical economics models. They turned human affairs into

data sets, cultural patterns into forms of behavioral response, and they replaced the messy

multiplicity of words and tongues with the universal and quantifiable language of

science. Within sociology, Chapoulie (1996:11) adds, use of statistical instruments and

the language of proof of the natural sciences was clearly a way to increase the scientific

legitimacy of a discipline fully recognized neither in the university nor outside it.

For criminology especially, this tendency has accelerated in recent years with the

ascension of criminal justice, the funding imperatives of the National Institute of Justice

and other bureaucracies, and the consequent demand for research that is methodologically

marketable, politically fundable, and bureaucratically usable for policy makers and

criminal justice agencies. In this criminological environment of rationalized knowledge

and pecuniary aspiration, there is little room for research that is impressionistic,

innovative, and emergent. In this environment, in fact, there is no room for the

5
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

foundational works of criminology. They would be not be funded, not allowed to go

forward under Institutional Review Board guidelines, not accepted by journal editors for

publication, not valued by tenure and promotion committees. They would instead be

dismissed as field reporting, or speculative essay writing, or subjective interpretation, and

all because of their lack of, wellmethodological rigor.

And so, in place of the vivid ethnographies of Thrasher or Becker, in place of the

innovative theorizing of Merton or Sutherland, what does orthodox criminology today

offer? Put another way: What sort of discourse is produced by methodological rigor, by a

criminology addicted to surveys and data sets and statistics? What are the ambient sounds

of methodological fetishism? The answers arent difficult to find; theyre offered up in

issue after issue of Criminology, the flagship journal of American criminology:

First, household property crime committed against ones neighbors has an effect size of

.132 that is comparable with that of ones own household victimization (.121) (Xie and

McDowall, 2008: 827).

Recall that a key advantage of the tobit model is that it explicitly deals with the floor-

value of the summative delinquency measure (Ousey and Wilcox, 2007: 340).

A regression coefficient for role differentiation, such as y11,indicates the increase in the

tendency to be an offender versus a victim, with each unit increase in an explanatory

variable (X1), which is expressed as the extent to which log odds of offending exceed

6
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

those of victimization, adjusted for base-rate differences across all items (Schreck,

Stewart, and Osgood, 2008: 886).

Is the poor performance of MM in part because of the lack of fit with the RC association

model? (Wadsworth and Roberts, 2008: 860).

Now it might be argued that these excerpts are here being unfairly made to

represent and critique the studies from which they are taken, removed as they are from

the larger substantive or theoretical contexts of the research. In reality, though, it is

neither the substantive focus nor the theoretical framework that contextualizes this sort of

criminology; it is the methodology of data manipulation and quantitative analysis.

Statistical analysis drives and defines this research; as the authors make clear, the

research stands or falls on measurement and calculation. As exhibited time and again in

two-page tables, in elaborate mathematical equations that span the printed page, and in

extended methodological expositions vis--vis brief discussion or conclusions

sections, this sort of criminological research is primarily designed to construct towering

statistical edificesand to build these edifices on the shallowest of data and flimsiest of

epistemic foundations.

The delinquency research excerpted above, for example, targeted 9,488 Kentucky

seventh grade students, with less than 4000 of them eventually completing the surveys,

which in turn offered only limited, pre-set responses to statements like I talk to my

mother and I cant seem to stop moving. In addition, the researchers admit that our

sample does seem to under-represent males, but that without explicit data on the

nonresponders, however, we cannot know with any certainty the extent to which they

7
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

differ from responders (Ousey and Wilcox, 2007: 322-323, 351-352). In the 2008

offender/victim study, the researchers acquired from the Sociometrics Corporation data

from a decade-old (1994-1996) survey of middle school and high school students.

Despite noting the ambiguity of the survey such that offending and victimization might

be confounded within the survey questions themselves (!)the researchers felt free to

recode the original ordinal survey data into a yes/no dichotomy, and to omit the measure

of gang fighting from our list since the gang-fighting measure seemed to produce

greater confusion than clarity (Schreck, Stewart, and Osgood, 2008: 871, 881-2). Not

to be outdone, the authors of the 2008 study on household crime/victimization and

household mobility utilized decades-old (1980-1985) National Crime Survey datadata

which excluded mobile homes, hotels or motels occupied by transient guests, and

group quarters (such as dormitories or rooming houses) because too few observations

are found to support separate analyses (Xie and McDowall, 2008: 809, 816-17).

This is the informationa school kids pencil mark in a little response box, a data

set acquired from the Sociometrics Corporation, a decades-old survey rife with ambiguity

and omissionthat researchers then recode and manipulate to reach quantifiable

conclusions about crime and crime control. Surveys answered by kids who may or may

not understand the questions, who may or may not be willing or able to translate their

memories onto coded answer sets, who may or may not represent those other kids not

answering the survey; surveys then collated, stored away, and later salvaged for still more

recoding and reinterpretation; these recordings then recoded again into charts, tables, and

equationsthis is imagined to constitute knowledge of crime and delinquency, and

conclusions as to its causes and consequences? How immeasurably far is this

8
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

methodology of measurement from the lived experience of crime and victimization, and

from criminologists deep understanding of that experience?

Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul (Holmes, 1858)but not from

numbers dense as bricks, and not on foundations of epistemic fraud.

At times, the foundations of epistemic fraud are even layered one on top of the

other. As administered by the U.S. Department of Justices Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the National Youth Gang Survey allegedly measures

the number of gangs and gang members nationwide, and tracks significant trends in youth

gang characteristics and activitiesand, indeed, official reports based on the survey are

suffused with summative tables, charts, figures, and formulae. To acquire this statistical

and longitudinal knowledge, though, the OJJDP mails its surveys not to gang members or

community researchers, but only to law enforcement agencies. Whoever might be

assigned the task of completing the survey at each agency is then instructed to answer

survey questions based on records or personal knowledge, though it is impossible to

determine whichand further, no definition [is] presented regarding what constitutes a

gang member or a gang incident, since little agreement has been reached on what

constitutes a gang, gang member, or gang incident (OJJDP, 1999: 7). In this way, the

OJJDPs methodology generates official criminological knowledge of a critical crime

issuegangs, gang members, and gang activitiesthat can perhaps best be summarized

as follows: That which is not to be studied directly can nonetheless be surveyed

definitively, based on the records, or perhaps the personal perceptions, of those whose job

it is to eradicate that which they cannot define accurately (Ferrell, Hayward, and Young,

2008: 174).

9
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Of course this is all laughably absurd, unless your job is to believe its notthat is,

unless your job hinges on a politically expedient methodological fetish for figures and

formulae in place of on-the-ground criminological knowledge. And by the way: What if

your job is, in addition, to induce masturbation among college students? In his 2006

Sutherland Address to the American Society of Criminology, Professor of Public Policy

and Statistics Daniel Nagin (2007: 265) outlined a recent clinical experiment in which

male undergraduates were instructed to masturbate but not to the point of ejaculation

while responding to a series of sex-related questions. Citing this study as the type of

research on decision making that I believe will illuminate important issues in

criminology and help in moving choice to center stage in criminological theory and

empirical research, Nagin (2007: 262, 266, 269) went on to raise an interesting

methodological issue. Tests of wide-ranging theories, he noted, often rely on survey

data in which people respond in a cool, non-aroused state. Yet the masturbatory

experiment suggests that responses in a cool state to choice relevant considerations, such

as moral judgments and social attachments, may provide very poor measurements of that

factor in the aroused emotional states that commonly accompany criminal behavior.

Putting aside the question of what Nagin himself might actually know about the

emotional states of either survey respondents or criminals, his comments nonetheless

offer a telling insider critique of criminologys fetishized methodologies. Even a

criminologists who is a professor of statistics and author of more than one article on

semiparametric mixed Poisson models, even a criminologist comfortable with the

forced artificiality of clinical trials and controlled masturbation, cant help asking a

foundational question of the statistically manipulated survey data that orthodox

10
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

criminologists use to test theory and to measure crime: What emotional connection do

such data have to the reality of crime and victimization? Not only is such data

profoundly suspect in terms of clarity, perception, memory, and knowledgeit is likely

emanating from the wrong emotional register as well.

Nagin and his clinical masturbators confirm the masturbatory fetish that is

orthodox criminological methodology. Against all logic, orthodox criminologists attribute

to their survey data and statistical summaries powers that are in fact not present:

precision, insight, and objective evaluation. Like other fetishists, they in turn focus on

these fetish objects with a sort of unnatural intensity, obsessively turning them over in

their minds and in their computers, and so forgetting the world beyond answer sets and

data sheets. And indeed all of this is mostly masturbatorymostly for the pleasure of a

small circle of journal editors, tenure committees, and governmental operativesand

mostly unusable in that big and increasingly dangerous world beyond academic careerism

and bureaucratic policymaking.

Criminology, and that big world beyond, would be better off without it.

AlternativeMethod?

An alternative to all thisan alternative that can perhaps foster criminologys

critical engagement with the contemporary world and its criseshas already been

glimpsed: the tradition of deeply engaged, impressionistic ethnographic field work, as

practiced by early Chicago School researchers, later generations of qualitative

methodologists, and a few criminologists today. Yet even here, the debilitating effects of

fetishism remain a danger. In the decades since Thrasher and Becker, ethnographic

11
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

research has often been characterized as a sort of thoroughgoing, self-contained

alternative methodology, a carefully calibrated counterweight to the methods of survey

and statistic. This reification of qualitative method in part reflects a tendency that

philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1975) has identified: the tendency to imagine,

post hoc, that earlier disciplinary work must surely have anticipated the discipline today,

and so to assign to it a rationality and teleological certainty that it never had. This

totalizing sense of ethnographic field research derives also, ironically, from the

disciplinary stigma with which ethnographic researchers are currently saddled; like Al

Cohens (1955) delinquent boys, ethnographers well know that the measuring rod of

orthodox criminology finds them lacking, and so they invert it, and claim instead that

ethnography constitutes the real standard of rigorous method. For still other qualitative

researchers, disciplinary stigma induces not inversion by imitationa hope that if

qualitative research can somehow be made to seem more like quantitative research, can

be more infused with scientific schemata and self-avowed validity, then it might be made

legitimate.

For a variety of historical and disciplinary reasons, then, ethnography risks

becoming just another methodological fetish, just another chapter in the methods

textbooks, just one more set of deployable research procedures deserving of endless

reification, refinement, and discussion. Yet as all good ethnographers knowthough

wont always put into print, for reasons of disciplinary survivalthe field researchers

deep engagement with subjects and settings renders any preordained methodological

prescriptions provisional at best. Ethnographic research techniques are in reality not

deployed; they are negotiated with subjects of study, invented or reinvented on the spot,

12
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

and not infrequently discarded in the dangerous, ambiguous, interactive process of field

research (Ferrell and Hamm, 1998). OLS regression may be a technique of statistical

analysis, and taking good field notes a technique of ethnographybut where the first

follows procedural protocols for manipulating data, the second follows the uncertain

rhythms of human interaction beneath bridges, in back alleys, and inside courtrooms.

Methods textbooks and graduate qualitative research seminars aside, viable ethnography

remains closer to the impressionistic, humanistic, and artistic (Adler and Adler, 1998:

xii) undertakings of Becker (1963), swinging high with jazz musicians, or Polsky (1967),

hustling his way through seedy pool halls, than it does the formalized methodologies of

survey research or clinical experimentation.

With the emergence of postmodern and reflexive/auto-ethnographic orientations

over the past couple of decades, at least some researchers and theorists now embrace this

admission that ethnography is by nature a fluid and idiosyncratic undertaking. In this

context there is among some scholars increasing acknowledgementeven celebration

of ethnography as an enterprise distinctly and inherently different from the abstract

rigidity of social scientific method. This sense of fluidity and openness applies to the

subject of ethnographic research as well; where it was once imagined that rigorous

ethnography could capture the totality of a clearly delineated group or setting, many

researchers now speak of ethnographic research as an uncertain process attuned to the

parallel uncertainty of contemporary groups and their circumstances. Contrasting the

tradition of technique-driven social science research with postmodern notions of

fluidity and ambiguity, Peter Manning (1995: 246) argues that these notions can usefully

orient ethnography to the emergent, fragile, and reflexive character of modern life.

13
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Ethnographies of such circumstances, Manning (1995: 249-251, emphasis in original)

notes, can in turn account for the fundamental perversity and unpredictability of human

conduct by gathering fragments and shards of events into an open-ended

ethnography of experience. Unpredictability, fragility, fragmentationall constitute a

refreshing counter to any fetishizing of ethnography as a magical set of technical

maneuvers.

Along with revitalizing ethnographic research in general, the emergence of

cultural criminology has likewise spawned a certain reimagining of ethnographic

practice. In their recently published Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, for example,

Ferrell, Hayward and Young (2008) outline two sorts of ethnography emerging within

cultural criminology, and in response to the swirling possibilities of late, liquid modernity

(Bauman, 2000). Instant ethnography denotes an ethnography of moments and ephemeral

meanings and in so doing confronts yet another conventional assumption underlying the

sense of ethnographic method as a totalizing enterprise: the notion that durable social

groups and situations are to be studied through enduring ethnographic research. Echoing

Katzs (1988) conceptualization of crimes situational seductions, and Lyng (1990, 2005)

and Ferrells (1996, 2005) work on illicit moments of edgework and adrenalin, instant

ethnography suggests documenting not groups or organizations, but instead the situated

moments in which crime and crime control are negotiated. It further implies that the

ethnographer must become part of those negotiations, must go inside the immediacy of

crime (Ferrell, 1997), inside instants so fleeting and fragile that those involved often

believe them to be both ephemeral and ineffable (Ferrell, Milovanovic, and Lyng, 2001).

In this way, instant ethnography also becomes an ethnography of the performances

14
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

(Conquergood, 2002, Garot, 2007) whereby gang members, police officers, or victims

construct and affirm their identities.

Liquid ethnography likewise suggests a useful destabilization of ethnographic

method, and of the boundary separating researcher from research subjects. Liquid

ethnography is the ethnography of populations cut loose from stabilities of time and

space through global immigration, short-term employment, and virtual communications;

it is ethnography attuned less to durable affiliations than to transitory allegiances. Further,

liquid ethnography flows with the shifting interplay of images in media-saturated

environments, and with the interplay of ethnographer, ethnographic subjects, and social

activism that animates the best of field research. Ferrells (2006: 1) recent mixing of

field research and free form survival as an unemployed urban scrounger might

constitute one example. The research of David Brotherton, Luis Barrios, and their

associates certainly constitutes another (Brotherton and Barrios, 2004, 2009). Through

this engaged research they document the ongoing political interplay of street gangs,

U.S. immigration policy, street-level organizing, and global activismall while

critiquing conventional images of gangs and incorporating alternative visual

representations. Similarly, Maggie ONeill (2004: 220) and her associates utilize

participatory action research, performative praxis, and various forms of art and

photography in their collaborative work with prostitutes, immigrants, asylum seekers and

other marginalized populations, thereby inventing forms of field work that can affiliate

the researcher with even the most transitory and contingent of communities.

If the lived practice of ethnographic field research moves criminology away from

method as a set of deployable protocols and techniques, these recent

15
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

reconceptualizations push it away further still. Blurring researcher and research setting,

confounding engaged research with political engagement, destabilizing both the temporal

and spatial frames of the research process, they harbinger the death of method itself. They

suggest that ethnography, rather than existing as a method of research, in fact operates

most usefully as a sensibility about the external world and a sensitivity to its nuanced

ambiguities. This ethnographic sensibility orients the criminologist to the ongoing,

symbolic construction of meaning, and to the shared emotional environments in which

such meaning is madeall while promoting a research sensitivity of openness,

attentiveness, and epistemic humility. Conceptualizing ethnography as intertwined with

performance and persuasion in turn repositions it as part of a larger goal: the

ethnographers ultimate goal of communicating with othersreaders, viewers,

community membersin the interest of humanistic engagement and progressive social

change. As experienced by ethnographers themselves and as embodied in new

orientations toward instant inquiry and liquid research, ethnography disappears as a

method and reemerges as a way of living and being in the world, more ontological

orientation than methodological technique.

One further reorientation surely applies the coup de grace to any fetishism of the

methodology, to any lingering belief that control groups and carefully quantified data

setsor for that matter, pre-ordained techniques of ethnographic researchconstitute

appropriate avenues to criminological understanding. Simply put, this reorientation

involves acknowledging that, more times than most anyone cares to admit, good research

constitutes what we might call a gorgeous mistake (OConnor and Pirroni, 1990).

Ethnographer Stephanie Kane (1998: 142-43), for example, echoes Mannings sense of

16
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

the fundamental perversity and unpredictability of human conduct in arguing that

chaotic moments of extreme or unusual conditions often offer invaluable insights into

social situations. As such, she adds, mistakes and misdirections in research, moments of

stumbling serendipity, are to be valuedmaybe even soughtfor their criminological

insights. No less a criminologist (and sociologist of science) than Robert K. Merton (in

Cullen and Messner, 2007: 6) likewise notes the differences between the finished

versions of scientific works as they appear in print and the actual course of inquiry.

Typically, the scientific paper or monograph presents an immaculate appearance which

reproduces little or nothing of the intuitive leaps, false starts, mistakes, loose ends, and

happy accidents that actually cluttered up the inquiry. And then there are Kandinsky,

Man Ray, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Pollock, and de Kooning, all artists whose

breakthrough works, we now know, emerged out of mistakes and misperceptions, out of

cracked printing presses and broken picture tubesthough as art critic Carter Ratcliff

says, it wasnt part of the way they presented themselves to acknowledge this (in

Lovelace, 1996: 119).

Kill method indeedthese examples suggest, as does Feyerabend (1975) in his

critical history of modern science that method, and those who fetishize it as a safeguard

against error and subjectivity, regularly ignore insight and inhibit creativity. The failure

of method, it turns out, may often be the best method (Ferrell, 2004, 2009). Or as the

anonymous punk petty thief author of the book Evasion (2003:12) put it, I always

secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasnt limited by my

imagination. That way anything can, and always did, happen.

17
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Coda, as Performed by the Schwarze Kapelle

Then again, sometimes when nothing goes as planned, you end up in prison.

During World War II a group of German citizens, diplomats, and military officers

decided that the only hope for Germany, and for the world, was to depose Hitler, through

assassination if necessary. The Gestapos name for this informal group was the Schwarze

Kapellethe Black Orchestraand among them was the brilliant German theologian

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Through a series of unlucky accidents their plan to kill Hitler failed,

though, and members of the group were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

Even after his capture, sitting in his prison cell, awaiting execution, Bonhoeffer

(1972: 280) didnt doubt his commitment to the planbut he did began to reconsider the

nature of religion, faith, and existence. In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge, he wrote

that perhaps religion was only a historically conditioned and transient form of human

self-expression, not to be confused with Christianity itself. And so he asked Bethge a

question: If religion is only a garment of Christianityand even the garment has looked

very different at different timesthen what is religionless Chistianity?

Nothing on the order of life and death at stake in this essay; no theological

considerations either. But still, the parallel appeals. Sitting in the intellectual prison that is

orthodox criminology today, one cant help but wonder: Is method only a garment of

criminology, a transient construction, and not to be confused with the criminological

imagination itself? And if so, what might criminology become without it?

18
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

References

Adler, Pattie and Peter Adler. 1998. Foreword to Jeff Ferrell and Mark Hamm (eds)

Ethnography at the Edge Boston: Northeastern

Anonymous. 2003. Evasion. Atlanta: CrimthInc.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1972. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan.

Brotherton, David and Luis Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Brotherton, David and Luis Barrios. 2009. Displacement and Stigma: the Social-

Psychological Crisis of the Deportee. Crime, Media, Culture 5(1), forthcoming.

Chapoulie, J-M. 1996. Everett Hughes and the Chicago Tradition Sociological Theory

14(1), 3-29.

Cohen, Albert. 1955. Delinquent Boys. New York: Free Press

Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee

Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death

Penalty Theatre Journal 54(3) 339-367.

Cullen, Frank and Steven Messner 2007. The making of criminology revisited: An oral

history of Mertons anomie paradigm Theoretical Criminology 11(1) 5-37

Ferrell, Jeff. 1996. Crimes of Style. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Ferrell, Jeff. 2004 Boredom, Crime, and Criminology Theoretical Criminology 8(3),

287-302.

Ferrell, Jeff. 2005. The Only Possible Adventure: Edgework and Anarchy, in Steven

19
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Lyng, ed., Edgework. New York: Routledge.

Ferrell, Jeff. 2006. Empire of Scrounge. New York: New York University Press.

Ferrell, Jeff. 2009. Cultural Criminology: The Loose Can[n]on, in Eugene McLaughlin

and Tim Newburn, editors, The Sage Handbook of Criminological Theory. London:

SAGE, forthcoming.

Ferrell, Jeff and Mark S. Hamm, eds. 1998. Ethnography at the Edge. Boston:

Northeastern University Press.

Ferrell, Jeff, Keith Hayward, and Jock Young. 2008. Cultural Criminology: An

Invitation. London: Sage.

Ferrell, Jeff, Dragan Milovanovic, and Steven Lyng. 2001. Edgework, media practices,

and the elongation of meaning, Theoretical Criminology 5(2) 177-202

Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method. London: Verso

Garot, Robert. 2007. Where You From!: Gang Identity as Performance Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography 36(1) 50-84.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. 1858. The Chambered Nautilus (poem).

Kane, Stephanie. 1998. Reversing the Ethnographic Gaze, in Jeff Ferrell and Mark

Hamm, (eds) Ethnography at the Edge. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Katz, J (1988) Seductions of Crime. New York: Basic Books.

Lovelace, Carey. 1996. Oh No! Mistakes into Masterpieces ARTnews 95(1), pages 118-

121.

Lyng, Steven. 1990. Edgework American Journal of Sociology 95(4) 851-886.

Lyng, Steven, ed. 2005. Edgework. New York: Routledge

20
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Manning, Peter. 1995. The Challenge of Postmodernism, in J Van Maanen (ed)

Representation in Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mazower, Mark. 2008. Mandarins, Guns and Money The Nation 287(10) (October 6),

pages 36-41.

Nagin, D. 2007. Moving Choice to Center Stage in Criminological Research and

Theory: The American Society of Criminology 2006 Sutherland Address

Criminology 45(2) 259-272

OConnor, Sinead and Marco Pirroni. 1990. Jump in the River I Do Not Want What I

Havent Got. EMI.

ONeill, Maggie. 2004. Crime, Culture and Visual Methodologies: Ethno-mimesis as

Performative Praxis in Jeff Ferrell et al (eds) Cultural Criminology Unleashed.

London: GlassHouse

OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention). 1999. 1996 National

Youth Gang Survey. Washington: U.S. Department of Justice.

Ousey, G and P. Wilcox. 2007. The Interaction of Antisocial Propensity and Life-Course

Varying Predictors of Delinquent Behavior: Differences by Method or Estimation

and Implications for Theory Criminology 45(2) 313-354

Polsky, Ned. 1967. Hustlers, Beats and Others. New York: Anchor.

Schreck, Christopher, Eric Stewart and D. Wayne Osgood. 2008. A Reappraisal of the

Overlap of Violent Offenders and Victims Criminology 46(4), 871-906.

Thrasher, Frederic. 1927. The Gang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wadsworth, Tim and John Roberts. 2008. When Missing Data Are Not Missing

Criminology 46(4), 841-869.

21
Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009

Xie, Min and David McDowall. 2008. Escaping Crime: The Effects of Direct and

Indirect Victimization on Moving Criminology 46(4), 809-840.

Young, Jock. 1971. The Drugtakers. London: Paladin

22