A Tour of Gang Ethnographies: Key Themes in Contemporary Studies around the World

This chapter offers a review of recently published gang ethnographies across four continents. Historically rooted in the United States, today the gang phenomena as well as gang ethnographies are subjected to processes of globalization. Europe, Latin America, and increasingly the Global South are emerging as important field sites for ethnographic research. Contemporary unprecedented levels of international migration, displacement, and deportation of people shape current gang ethnographies and have led to reconfigurations of century-old debates. Global forces also push the traditional boundaries of ethnographic field site across nation-state borders and into the online world. In the past two decades, the nationality, gender, as well as the disciplinary background of gang ethnographers has also dramatically diversified. Nonetheless, the visibility of gang ethnographies is still highly dependent of an ethnographers’ nationality and linguistic skills. Here Anglophone researchers as well as ethnographers associated with countries that are more affluent and universities still have a clear advantage over the majority of scholars of the Global South.