Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town

Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard is a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and an associate professor at the department of Sociology of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

• AcknowledgementsPhoto IntroductionForeword by Randall CollinsPart one: Introduction 1. Chameleons 2. Mobility3. Culture 4. SituationsInterlude: Seduction5. Observations Part two: Realities6. Risks7. Patterns Part three: Dynamics8. Positioning Interlude: Fights9. Dispositions 10. Horizons11. Places12. PassagesPart four: Conclusions 13. Consequences14. Continuities References Appendixes

This book provides valuable insights into the minds and motives of South African youth, who, in their attempts to navigate stressful and dangerous environments, employ a number of different strategies to protect life, limb, dignity, and self-respect. Through ethnographically rich descriptions, Lindegaard contextualizes violence and its precursors – poverty, discrimination, inequality, and social status.T.W.Ward, University of Southern California, Author of Gangsters Without Borders Lindegaard is able to bring the participants’ worlds to the reader when telling their stories. [...] Lindegaard has produced a thoughtful ethnography. It is well suited for those interested in ethnographic studies of crime and those interested in cultural explanations of crime. As such, it is well suited for upper-level methods and criminological theory classes.Heith Copes, University of Alabama at Birmingham, for Criminal Justice ReviewOverall, this is an unusual, unconventional and—at times—uncomfortable book. On one hand, it offers a penetrating insight into the complex negotiations of race, space and identity in post-apartheid Cape Town, and a contribution to a developing global literature on the dynamism of gang identity and street culture. On the other hand, it is a book that is troubling in its depiction of race and racialization. Participants viewed the racialized categories of apartheid not as political constructs but as meaningful ways of classifying Self and Other; tellingly, one group reports their struggles in ‘avoiding thinking in those terms’. [...] demonstrate[s] the continuing need for grounded, rigorous and humane accounts of the causes and consequences of the global gang phenomenon to contest official accounts.Alistair Fraser, University of Glasgow, for The British Journal of CriminologyEvery so often a different perspective on current topics emerges on the gang research scene that changes the orientation of scholars for decades to come. A new way of seeing and understanding the current gang discourse emerges in the work of intrepid researcher, Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard’s book, Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town: Ghetto Chameleons. The book answers questions regarding what young men in gangs on the Cape Flats do, how they associate, and how they use mobility to move and change their cultural repertoires in gang and suburban spaces. [...] This book is required reading for any scholar addressing this theory and exploring the links between gangs, cultural repertoires and mobility.Irvin Kinnes, for South African Crime Quarterly