Commanding The ‘Art of Killing’: How Virtuosic Performances of Street Culture Disrupt Gang Rules

Street cultural scholarship draws heavily on Bourdieusian social theory to explain how criminal social practices are both generated by and generative of the conditions of marginality. This paper reasserts those aspects of street cultural analysis that break from the expectations of street habitus by showing how extreme violence and criminal cunning disrupts existing notions of street life. It is based on the life histories of two ‘street virtuosos’, who have successfully mastered the ‘art of killing’ to thrive in the street field of Cape Town’s townships. These street virtuosos demonstrate the transformative ‘practical dimension’ of Bourdieusian social theory, which still largely exists as a subplot throughout his writing and in the street cultural texts to which it has been applied.