Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies

By H. David Brumble

Down the ages warriors have told the stories about their powers and their deeds. And some of their stories have made it into print––those of Black Elk, a Sioux shaman; Two Leggings and Plenty Coups, Crow Indians; Wolf Chief, the eagle hunter; Tukup and Tariri, shrinkers of heads; and others from North America, New Guinea, the island of Alor, the highlands of Luzon and even a Bedouin.

H. David Brumble’s ‘Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies’ introduces readers to all these warrior autobiographies—and to the memoirs of warriors who live just down the block: Carl Joyeaux’s ‘Out of the Burning’, Colton Simpson’s ‘Inside the Crips’, Nathan McCall’s ‘Makes Me Wanna Holler’ and Sanyika Shakur’s ‘Monster’. Gangbangers, Brumble argues, have told life stories that are eerily like the life stories that come to us from warrior tribes. He suggests that gangbangers were so alienated from the larger society that they reinvented something very similar to the tribal-warrior cultures right in the asphalt heart of American cities.

Grisly, probing and resonant with the voices of generations of fighters, ‘Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies’ is an unsettling work of cross-disciplinary scholarship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087839

Book preview

Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies

Gila River Reservation, gang graffiti. There were few buildings at this end of the reservation, and so the gangbangers painted their graffiti on the roads. (2005 photo © H. David Brumble).

Street-Gang and Tribal-Warrior Autobiographies

H. David Brumble

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© H. David Brumble 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-781-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-781-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Harriet

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies.

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Introduction

Appendix A On Circumcision

Appendix B A List of All the Tribal Peoples and Street Gangs Mentioned in This Book

Annotated Bibliography

Works Cited

Index

FIGURES

Frontispiece Gila River Reservation, gang graffiti

I.1Shuar shrunken head

I.2Monster in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, street-gang graffiti

I.3Yanomami barbed arrowhead

I.4Graffiti in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood: in memoriam

1.1Graffiti in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood: knowledge

4.1Graffiti in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood: red and blue

4.2Kiowa ledger drawing: Big Bow and the Navajo

4.3Cheyenne ledger drawing: Dog soldier

4.4Cheyenne ledger drawing: Beaver’s challenge

4.5Cheyenne ledger drawing: spirit power protection

4.6Yanomami warrior’s scars

4.7Shaman’s tree in Jukwa, Ghana

4.8Sioux ledger drawing: a warrior takes two women

PREFACE

I fell under the spell of American Indian autobiographies some thirty years ago. I found hundreds of them, and I read them all. But it was the early as-told-to autobiographies that I found most intriguing, the autobiographies of non-literate tribesmen and women: Black Elk, Two Leggings, Black Hawk, Yellow Wolf, Pretty-Shield and many, many others. They tell remarkable stories: Yellow Wolf’s role in the Nez Perce War of 1877, Two Leggings’ raids, Pretty-Shield’s stories of moving camp, Wolf Chief’s suffering for spirit powers, Plenty Coups’ rise to chiefdom, Apache raids into Mexico, stories of torture and enslavement, Geronimo’s vengeance, Maxidiwiac’s careful tending of her crops. There are stories of Kwakiutl and Arikara raids that recognize no boundary between the real and the spirit world.

Then I discovered street-gang autobiographies. Many of these, too, are as-told-to autobiographies, and I began to see that they were in many other ways like the early American Indian autobiographies. And then it occurred to me to see what autobiographies have been collected from tribes outside of North America. There are far fewer of these. One day I would like to find out why this is so. But for the moment, let me say that the chapters that follow are based on my reading of all the oral tribal autobiographies, all the North American Indian autobiographies and all the street-gang autobiographies—all, that is, that considerable effort has discovered to me.

I can only hope that these autobiographers, and the warrior cultures that produced them, will prove as fascinating to others as they are to me.

I would like to thank first of all the long list of amanuenses—anthropologists, sociologists and other enthusiasts—who have taken down these all narratives and edited them for later generations. They have built up a treasure trove.

I would also like to offer thanks to those who have helped me with this work more personally: the late Donald Bahr, Kathy Blee, Chris Boettcher, Chris Donnorummo, Russel Durst, Robert L. Gale, John Hagedorn, Norm Hummon, Arnold Krupat, Oommen Mammen, Josephine Metcalf, Eithne Quinn, Ravinder Reddy, James B. Richardson, Rich Scaglion, Eric C. Schneider, Michael West and Paul Zolbrod commented helpfully on all or part of this work in its various stages. Dan Everett has been especially helpful, as a prop, a guide and an inspiration.

Myke Reiser allowed me access to his unpublished gangsta-rapper interviews. Goeff Boucher helped me understand his collaboration with Mona Ruiz; R. Lincoln Keiser helped me understand his work with Chicago’s Vice Lords; Ann Pearlman helped me understand her work with Colton Simpson. Terrell Wright has corresponded with me from his prison cell about his street-gang autobiography, Home of the Body Bags. Clayton Robarchek and Carole Robarchek graciously allowed me access to some of their unpublished research notes on the Woarani.

A special thanks to Dave Stoddard of the Las Vegas Police Force and to Anthony Longo, Gregory Ziel and David Winslow of the Las Vegas Police Department Gang Crime Section.

I am also grateful to my editors at Anthem Press, Nisha Vetrivel and Abi Pandey—and to their anonymous readers—for their willingness to take a chance on this book. Stuart Murray has been an exemplary copy editor.

Some portions of this book have appeared in earlier form elsewhere: The Gangbanger Autobiography of Monster Kody (AKA Sanyika Shakur) and Warrior Literature, American Literary History 12 (2000): 158–86 (reprinted by permission); Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, Gangbanger Autobiography, and Warrior Tribes, Journal of American Studies 44 (2010): 155–70 (reprinted by permission); Brutal Honesty? The Uses of Gore in Tribal-Warrior and Gangbanger Autobiography, Canadian Review of American Studies 40, no. 2 (2010): 163–85 (reprinted by permission).

INTRODUCTION

Peace, or minimally the avoidance of victimization, depended upon a group’s ability to inflict more violence than it received.

James Flanagan, on the Rwala Bedoiun (1988: 179)

A total of 7288 gang-related homicides occurred in Los Angeles County from 1979 through 1994; Gang-related homicide rates for African American males aged 15 to 19 years increased to 192.41 per 100,000 population per year in 1989 to 1991.

H. R. Hutson et al. (1995)

As an undergraduate I took a course devoted to Beowulf. This tale of honor, courage, betrayal and slaughter made a deep impression on me. But some of my most vivid memories of the course are of the professor. He was a trim, tweed-coated man of about 60. His salt-and-pepper hair was close-cropped. He sat at a table, alternately reading and interpreting. He was a captivating teacher. The poem was very real to him. I remember that he would sometimes grind his teeth as he read the bloodier passages. His interpretations were vivid. And it seemed clear to me that this man’s heart beat in sympathy with the poem, that his vitals yearned for a more muscular age, that in his eyes Portland was but a poor, soft place in 1966. I wondered at the time if he was aware how casually Beowulf or Achilles would have burned his house, taken his Chevrolet and his daughter and eaten him for breakfast.

It seems to me now that Tukup’s oral autobiography might have proved illuminating for my professor. Tukup was a South American headhunter, a Shuar Indian, a shrinker of human heads (Figure I.1). Tukup’s ideas about what is necessary for personal honor and what is necessary in the pursuit of revenge are close to Beowulf’s. Still better, perhaps, my professor might have read Monster: The Autobiography of an L. A. Gang Member and some other street-gang autobiographies, because they take us into the mind and the territory of tribal warriors who lived just down the block (Figure I.2). Beowulf and Achilles live at a safe distance in time. Piegan, Crow, Sarsi and Sioux warriors are nearer, but they are bathed in the light of a glorious sunset. Tukup was cutting heads just 60 years ago, but in a remote region of Ecuador. And Yanomami poisoned arrows (Figure I.3) were confined to the jungles of the Orinoco Basin. Most American cities have become far safer in the last 25 years,¹ but back in the late 1980s and early 1990s you could board the wrong bus and end up in Monster Kody’s ’hood—every suburbanite’s worst nightmare: alone, after dark, in the wrong part of town, warrior territory.²

Figure I.1 Fifty years ago Shuar shrunken heads were on display in a number of American museums, but museums have become sensitive about displaying aboriginal human remains. Museums are also increasingly reluctant to mount exhibits that recall violence in the tribal past. This is a fake shrunken head made many years ago for the tourist trade. This was probably a sloth’s head, but it looks very like the real thing, and it was made in much the same way shrunken heads were made. Once the skull is removed, the skin is shrunk by successive boilings, with the facial features worked after each boiling to maintain the face’s original features. In this case, the features have been worked to form human facial features, rather than to maintain the sloth’s (Author’s collection).

Figure I.2 In 1993 CBS’s 60 Minutes allowed Monster Kody, a Los Angeles Crip, to tell his coup tales to the whole television-watching nation, and so his fame reached even little Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, where this gangbanger proudly bore the famous moniker. Another Pittsburgh gangbanger, this one from the Homewood neighborhood, had the moniker L’il Monster (1995 photo © H. David Brumble).

Figure I.3 Yanomami barbed arrowhead. Sometimes these heads were poisoned. The arrow is six feet long (Author’s collection).

This book will argue that the autobiographies of tribal warriors are like twentieth-century gangbanger autobiographies in troubling ways. I am, in fact, convinced that the street-gang autobiographers were so alienated from the larger society that they reinvented something very like tribal-warrior culture, right at the asphalt heart of American cities. Even out on the reservations (frontispiece). And in cities far from the United States.

I have seen wannabe LA gang graffiti—with Bloods spelled Blodds—in Portugal, on the exquisite eighteenth-century tiles of old Lisbon.

Street Gangs and Tribal Peoples

This book will have a good deal to say about street-gang autobiographies—street-gang autobiographies, not the autobiographies of members of the Italian Mafia, MS-13 and other organized gangs.³ This is an important distinction. Malcolm Klein’s The American Street Gang describes street gangs as they were in the heyday of the second wave of street-gang autobiographers, in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

Briefly, street gang members were young, usually between the ages of 12 and 30 and averaging probably 20 years of age. They were primarily male; various estimates of female proportions ranged from zero to 30 percent. Most gangs—not all—were composed of homogenous racial and ethnic minorities. Principally they were Hispanic or African American, with an increase recently [1995] in Asian and other groups. They are usually territorial (turf, barrio, ’hood and set are among the more common generic terms), although Asian gangs often present an exception. The gang’s criminal activities are generally very versatile. Finally, street gangs range enormously in their duration, from a few months to decades of self-regeneration.⁴ (Emphasis mine.)

The distinction between street gangs and organized crime, then, is definitional. Street gangs are loosely structured. Leadership is diffused, spread over several individuals and over several categories of activities. A fighting leader might have had little influence over social activities. He might have had no role at all as a gang spokesman. It is rare that a street gang leader had the power to command.⁵ And popular conceptions to the contrary, street gangs were not notably cohesive. Within a given gang, there might have been a tight bond among a small group of friends who happened to live on the same block or who had the same home room at school; there might have been a bond among the most active members of the gang, or a bond among three recently inducted members; there were small cliques, age-groupings. Klein concludes that the structure of a typical street gang

is a rather amorphous collection of subgroups, cliques, pairs and loners. This is not a picture of a tight structure. It’s loose and somewhat fragmented […]. This is not an organization that can readily act as a unit.⁶

He is describing, in fact, a structure that is strikingly like a tribal society.

The word tribe has fallen out of fashion among some anthropologists,⁷ although it is still sometimes used, for example, by North American Indians.⁸ What I mean by tribe is that form of human organization that was the commonest form throughout the world before the rise of the state, that form of human organization that did not recognize an authority with the power to enforce peace. In tribes human beings retain the right to use force in severalty. In making this point, Marshall Sahlins refers to the famously peaceable Hopi, who were as non-belligerent a community as one may find. But among the pre-contact Hopi there was no power, no authority to enforce peace. The United States limps along with high levels of everyday internal violence:

But politically the American citizens differ from the Hopi in this: they have […] a Government, which precludes that anyone take the law in his own hands, thus keeps the Peace. Tribes such as the Hopi lack a sovereign political and moral authority; the right to use force […] if not the inclination, is instead held by the people in severalty.⁹

The Hopis, then, had no state apparatus to adjudicate differences or enforce solutions, though they certainly had customary means of conflict resolution. This, then, is the distinction that is crucial for what I have to say about tribal autobiographers. In this way the Hopi were like Ifugao headhunters in the Philippine Highlands and like the Yanomami in the Orinoco Basin, and like Homer’s Greeks. None of these peoples were organized as are states.

And gangbangers opted out of—or were excluded from—the state. They saw the police not as keepers of the peace, but rather as an enemy tribe.¹⁰ If you or I be harmed or if our property be taken, you or I would call 911 and hope for the best. If a 1980s gangbanger was harmed or his property taken, he relied upon himself and as many allies as he could gather together to seek redress. This lack of strong, central authority is the main difference between street gangs and organized crime. This is what the sociologist Irving Spergel has in mind when he calls street gangs tribal or clanlike (1995: 70).¹¹

Tribes have been wonderfully various. (Appendix B lists all the tribal peoples mentioned in this book.) Some lived in villages; some were nomads. Some of the nomads followed flocks; others were hunter/gatherers. Many carried on remarkably rich ceremonial lives; some had little in the way of ceremony and ritual. Some have long histories; some were cultural mayflies. But neither Tukup’s Shuars, nor the Yanomami, nor the Crows on the Great Plains, nor the Dani in the Highlands of New Guinea, nor the Crips in 1980s Pittsburgh recognized anyone with the authority to compel men to settle their differences or to go to war. Shuars, Crows, Yanomami, Danis and Crips all thought of each individual, each family, as being finally responsible for the maintenance of honor and property. Even in Homer’s Iliad, where we begin to see some of the elements of kingship and state, Agamemnon does not have the authority to compel Achilles to fight. He can attempt to shame Achilles into acquiescence; he can send an embassy of respected warriors to try to win Achilles back; he can attempt to bribe him—but king though he be, it is never suggested that he has the authority to compel Achilles. Indeed, throughout the Iliad we see warriors entering and leaving battle by their own decision.

Power in states is centralized. In the days before some tribal peoples developed tribal governments (usually in order to deal with states), tribes were weakest at the center. There was little in the way of organization for the tribe as a whole.¹² Such a society acted in concert only rarely, as for example on important ritual occasions or in the face of major threats from other tribes or from states. In just this way, as violence mounted following the Rodney King verdict (1992), there were gang summit meetings and talk of gang peace between L.A.’s Crips and Bloods.¹³ In Las Vegas, several of the African American gangs banded together to participate in Las Vegas’s Rodney King riots.¹⁴ One Milwaukee gangbanger remembers that his gang wasn’t organized until a fight came up […]. That’s the only time it was organized, when a fight came up (in Hagedorn 1998: 95).

In tribes as in street gangs the most reliable bonds were in the smaller social units: households were more closely bonded than lineages, lineages more closely bonded than villages, villages than subtribes, subtribes than tribes. They were, as the anthropologists would say, segmentary societies. Indeed, in some tribes most of the warfare and raiding was between subtribes: Yanomami warriors most commonly fought with other Yanomami; the Meru often fought with other Meru; and Monster Kody’s Crip set often fought other Crip sets.

Sadly, another way in which street gangs were like tribes was in their death-by-violence statistics (Figure I.4). At the height of street-gang activity in L.A., the homicide rate for 15-to-19-year-old African American males was 1 in 500 per year!¹⁵ We recognized as an ugly fact that for some years murder was the leading cause of death for young black males in America. On the other hand, we tend to minimize warrior-tribe violence. When an inner-city gangbanger forces himself upon a woman, we are likely to call it rape. Homer’s Achilles kept captured women as concubines, but we do not think of Achilles as a rapist. When Crow or Sioux warriors kept women and children captured in raids, we call it adoption.

Figure I.4 In memoriam. Graffiti in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood. It is important in warrior cultures that name and glory live on (1996 photo © H. David Brumble).

And we are inclined to romanticize tribal warfare. How could we do otherwise? We have in our memory glorious Achilles, Hektor and Odysseus, men whose deeds we remember nearly three thousand years after Homer sang of them, men who fought hand-to-hand, men who seem about as far from the disillusion and confusion of Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria as it would be possible for men in arms to be. Even better known today are the American Indian warriors, especially the Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa—the warriors of the Plains with their magnificent war bonnets and feathered spears. In our memory they ride horses in such a way that horse and rider are one.

The remarkable documentary Dead Birds (1963) focuses on a single Dani village in the New Guinea Highlands. We see extended footage of real battles. We see two armies meeting at a predetermined time on an open field. We see the two sides surging back and forth on the battleground, shaking spears, dodging, feinting, challenging, taunting, shooting arrows. But the longer we watch, the more we are inclined to agree with the narrator, that there is little real danger here. This is not warfare as we moderns understand it. The lines surge back and forth, but no individual warrior dashes across the gap to engage an enemy in single combat. There is no death-dealing charge. Earlier in the film we saw Dani boys playing in the fields, throwing grass spears at each other, feinting, dodging—and now we see these Dani warriors feinting and dodging in battle in just the same way. The analogy is irresistible. Then one man is hit by an arrow with a barbed, wooden point. And we watch the arrow being removed. This is not pleasant viewing, but then the narrator confirms our sense that this will be about the only harm that will be done on either side in the course of this battle. The narrator tells us that both sides would withdraw, were it to rain, because rain would spoil their feathered headdresses. Such ideas about tribal warfare are common today, that tribal warfare was, in fact, rather innocuous, until Europeans arrived on the scene. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC, goes further. It seldom betrays even a hint of warfare until the US Indian wars. The NMAI went so far as to title a large exhibit devoted to the famously warlike Apache The Peaceful People.¹⁶

Perhaps, then, the point needs to be made that even in tribes, war was hell.

War Was Hell

Death by violence was more likely in tribal than in modern societies. Modern wars kill far more people, of course, but looked at proportionately, death by violence was more likely in tribal societies and, in some tribes, it was far more likely. Denig writes that from 1833 to 1856, when he was trading with the Crows, they were losing about a hundred people a year in their wars and raids (Denig 1961: 146). This would have been about 3 percent each year. The percentage is staggering. The anthropologist John F. Peters estimated that 40 percent of the men in the Yanomami villages where he did his ethnographic work had killed human beings, and that about 90 percent of the men were capable of killing. In 1935, in standing off just one raid by a neighboring subtribe, the Xilixana Yanomami lost seven people, 6 percent of their population (Peters 1998: 39, 172). The Waorani, in the lowlands of Ecuador, were even more violent. In 1987 Carole and Clayton Robarchek did a kinship study among the Waorani. I have before me an unpublished transcript of their interviews with a Waorani woman named Oba. This transcript, I think, conveys more powerfully than anything else I have read what it could mean to live in a warrior tribe:

Moipa’s people […] they two hit, then maggots […] all died. Robarchek asks about another man: They thrust spears in and he died. Robarchek asks how Kengade died: Outsiders [the Oruna] picked her up and carried her off. Robarchek asks how Mima died: Shot and she died, Mima. Robarchek asks about another woman taken by the Oruna: Marrying, he hit, hit, hitting hard and repeatedly, lots of blood spurted. A certain woman did not want her husband to take a second wife. Robarchek asks how the husband responded: He shot and she died […]. Neck, that place. Robarchek asks about a man named Gabe: They speared and he died.¹⁷ This continues page after page. The Robarcheks estimate that over the course of several generations before 1987 an astonishing 60 percent of Waorani deaths had been by violence.¹⁸

The Ifugao of the Philippine Highlands were not nearly so violent. Still, R. F. Barton calculated a rate of one headhunting death per year per five hundred people in four villages that he knew well in the 1920s.¹⁹ And Barton was not counting blood-feud killings. Even some of the tribes that we think of as being peaceful can post high numbers. The !Kung became famously peaceful in 1959 with the publication of Elizabeth Thomas’s The Harmless People. But anthropologists later calculated the! Kung homicide rate in pre-colonial times was .42 per thousand per annum.²⁰ To put this in perspective, this is only slightly lower than the murder rates in 2015 for America’s most dangerous cities: St Louis (.59), Baltimore (.55) and Detroit (.44).

Copper Inuit were active blood feuders until this activity was suppressed by the Canadian Mounties. Early in the twentieth century, when a Copper Inuit camp of 15 families was first contacted, it was discovered that every adult male in the camp had been involved in a homicide.²¹ Among the pre-contact Huli of the New Guinea Highlands about 20 percent of adult men died by violence. Elsewhere in New Guinea the rates approached 30 percent. The Murngin of Australia had a rate of 28 percent.²² Marvin Harris (1989: 288) and others have argued that such comparisons are unfair, unless the numbers of those killed in modern state-sponsored wars are factored in.²³ Lawrence Keeley’s War before Civilization responds to such arguments with pages of statistics comparing a wide range of societies, both states (ancient and modern) and tribes (historic and prehistoric). Germany lost two twentieth-century wars, but Germany’s population is so large that the average annual death-by-violence percentage for the twentieth century was on the order of two tenths of one percent. Japan’s rate was lower yet, even after two atom bombs. The Dani, the people whose battles seem so innocuous in Dead Birds, had a death-by-violence rate 20 times that of twentieth-century Japan. The Piegan and the Chippewa Indians died at nearly the same rate as the Dani.²⁴ World War I caused the deaths of 9 million people, a staggering number; but this was only 1.5 percent of the population of the participating nations, less than one half of one percent per year during the four years of the war.

Cross-Cultural Comparison

I am convinced that when literature takes us far from home, cross-cultural comparisons can be an aid to understanding. There is nothing new in this, of course. M. I. Finley’s description of The World of Odysseus makes frequent, illuminating reference to anthropological accounts of later tribal cultures (1979: 49). Thomas Overholt works in the same way in order to explain the prophet Elisha:

Many stories in the Hebrew Bible, at least on first reading, give us the illusion that things are normal and understandable, but the tale of Elisha and the Shunammite woman is not one of them (2 Kings 4:8–37). To state only the most obvious point, the narrative assumes a world in which holy men cure infertility with a word and resuscitate the dead by ritualized physical contact. (1996: 2)

Elisha revives the Shunammite woman’s dead boy by stretching himself out upon the corpse. When confronted with such puzzlers, the anthropologist has the considerable advantage of having living informants at hand. He can ask questions of native informants. The trick, writes Geertz, attempting to put the whole endeavor of anthropology into a single sentence, is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to (1983: 58). Overholt, alas, cannot question Elisha, the revived boy, or the Shunammite mother. But Overholt has noticed that Elisha is in some ways like nineteenth- and twentieth-century shamans. Since anthropologists have asked these shamans thousands of questions, Overholt is able to explain much of what is puzzling in the stories of Elisha and other Biblical men of power (1996: 24–59).

I hope to shed light on street-gang and warrior-tribe autobiographies in this same way. I think that the autobiographies that come to us from warrior tribes can illuminate street-gang autobiographies. And I think that Always Running: La Vida Loca, and Out of the Burning: The Story of a Boy Gang Leader and Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member can shed new light on the tribal autobiographies. And even on the Iliad.

1 Much has been written to explain America’s great crime drop. The latest and to my mind the most persuasive explanation, is Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (2018); see also, e.g., Blumstein and Waldman (2000) and Pinker (2011).

2 Several movies play upon this fear. The 1989 and 1992 Batman movies, for example, embody the suburbanite’s conception of the city: our hero lives on an estate well out in the country; he rides his magical vehicle into the dark , corrupt city to do battle with Joker, Penguin and other strangely misshapen people—allegorical versions of the people suburbanites fear, people who do not look like suburbanites. The villains’ malformations, we are to understand, are outward manifestations of the moral perversions of those who live in the dark inner cities of America. Another movie, Judgment Night (1993), does not bother with allegory: some regular fellas take a wrong turn on the way to a sporting event and end up in the wrong part of town . They spend the rest of the night, against terrific odds, trying to fight their way out of the ’hood. But the movie stays primly within the bounds of political correctness by populating its terrifying inner city almost entirely with scary-looking white people. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and its movie version (1990) expressed suburban America’s fears more honestly: when Sherman and his mistress take their nocturnal wrong turn, they end up in black Bronx.

3 For organized-crime gangs see, e.g., Chris Blatchford’s biography of Mexican Mafia member Rene Enriques (2008) and David Fisher’s Joey the Hitman: The Autobiography of a Mafia Hitman (2002).

4 Klein ( 1995 : 29). A great deal has been published on street gangs, but since I am concentrating on the autobiographies that come to us from street/youth gangs, rather than from the organized-crime and drug-dealing gangs, I have found the scholarship contemporary with these narratives to be most useful. For a sampling of such sociological work on gangs, see Thrasher ( 1927 ), Anderson (1994, 1999 ), Chicago Crime Commission ( 1995 ), Chesney-Lind and Hagedorn (1999), Hagedorn (1998, 2008), Phillips ( 1999 ), Miller ( 2001 ) and Spergel ( 1995 ). For a history of street gangs in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, see Schneider ( 1999 ); for a history of street gangs in Chicago, see Olivero ( 1991 ). For Moroccan street gangs in Amsterdam, see Werdmö lder (1997 ); for Crips in the Netherlands, see Van Gemert ( 2001 ); for street gangs in Nicaragua, see Rogers ( 2002 ). For street gangs in Malaysia, Jamaica, Honduras, Ireland and other countries (mostly in the developing world) see Duffy and Grillig ( 2004 ). For the effects of globalization on street gangs, see Hagedorn (2006). Levitt and Venkatesh ( 1998 ) provide a fascinating account of the economics of gang life. For street-gang autobiography in particular, see, e.g., Brumble (2010, 2014) and Metcalf ( 2012 ).

5 Klein ( 1995 : 62). This lack of strong, stable leadership is one of the reasons, Klein writes, that most street gangs in the 1980s and 1990s were not, contrary to popular opinion, drug-dealing organizations. Individual gang members might have dealt drugs, but street gangs usually did not. Dunston wrote of New York City, for example, drugs are controlled by organized crime groups. Young […] and poorly organized street gangs cannot compete with the older more powerful and violent groups (1990: 7). In some cities street gangs morphed into drug-dealing organizations; see, e.g., Hagedorn (1998, 2006 and especially 2015). Venkatesh (2008) provides a fascinating account of just such a morphed gang in Chicago. But even as some of the gangs were morphing into drug-dealing organizations, they remained less centralized than the Italian Mafia: Collectivist ideologies such as ‘BK [Black Knight] Nation,’ which emphasized the fictive kinship relation of members, did not always dispel rivalries, arguments, and fighting among BK’s (Venkatesh 2002 : 137). One of the consequences of the morphing of street gangs into organized crime is a decline in the number of gang-related murders, but a rise in the average age of gang-related murders. With the rise of street gangs in the 1980s, the average age of US murder victims and perpetrators dropped by some three years. But since 2014 the murder rate has risen sharply and the age of both victims and offenders continues to rise. And gang-related murderers are, on average, six years older now [2017] than they were then ( Economist February 4, 2017: 27).

6 Klein ( 1995 : 60–61); Hagedorn’s closely observed account of Milwaukee’s street gangs also insists upon the lack of hierarchy and of strong, stable leadership (1998: 86–94). This fragmentation can be extreme; in little Wilkinsburg, one of Pittsburgh’s nineteenth-century suburbs, gang activity has now devolved to the point that it has become simply a few friends on a block or two acting occasionally in concert (Chris Donnorummo, personal communication).

7 As early as 1967 a whole anthropological conference was devoted to The Problem of Tribe; for the conference proceedings, see Helm ( 1967 ).

8 Some of these peoples now prefer the term nation to tribe, and worldwide they now tend to be called indigenous rather than tribal peoples.

9 Sahlins ( 1968 : 5).

10 This attitude toward police is not unusual where they have the task of stepping into conflicts in the tribal world. Strathern and Stewart, for example, tell us that this was the situation in the Western Highlands of New Guinea in the 1970s and 1980s (2000: 31).

11 Bloch and Linklater ( 1958 ) were the first to suggest that gangs are essentially tribal; see also Keiser (