Interactional privilege of violence: Status and interaction in the street field

Abstract

Criminologists have long described and theorized the relationship between status, respect, and violence within urban communities. Although this finding is generally accepted within criminology, ethnographic empirical illustrations of this phenomenon are sparse. To better understand how the potential for violence shapes interactions, affords interactional privilege, and structures relative positions in the social hierarchy, we develop a theoretical framework based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a disadvantaged area in Copenhagen, we show that interactional boundaries—what liberties one can take with others—are contingent on familiarity and verbal skill but more fundamentally on one’s violence capital (i.e., the resources, capacities, skills, and dispositions that confer advantage in exerting corporal violence against others). By empirically illustrating how interactions are structured by violence capital, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how street hierarchies are maintained and reproduced through violence.