The anthropology of crime

Professor Henrik Vigh and Postdoc David Sausdal have recently contributed to the Handbook of Political Anthropology with the chapter 'The anthropology of crime.'

This book chapter tackles the contemporary potential of the anthropology of crime by tracing the origin of the discipline back to ‘criminal genetics’ and the study of innate dispositions before engaging with the collective social conditions and logics that are the pillars of criminal formations, flows, and networks. It claims that political anthropology is needed to study more carefully the frames within which crime develops, is executed, and also is identified as being deviant. Beyond earlier evolutionistic, racialized, and functionalist approaches to crime, this chapter provides an investigation of criminal structures and groups as sub-societal or sub-cultural entities leading us, in conclusion, to an examination of movements and assemblages along networks and trajectories that move across strata and space. In essence, anthropological knowledge is accumulative rather than linear as many of the insights gained and the knowledge learnt are complementary rather than contradictory.

Henrik Vigh & David Sausdal, The anthropology of crime, Handbook of Political Anthropology, November 2018.