Two Models in Action: Symbolic Violence versus Ethico-Craft

This chapter presents an analysis of findings from an ethnographic participant observation study in two sites. The study examined the nature of interactions between youth crime prevention practitioners and young people in urban peripheral settings during 2004 and 2005. The purpose of the observational study was to deepen the theoretical case by exploring the governance of the subject through practices at the face-to-face level. Achieving a closer position to the action was required to engage with the question of symbolic violence. The purpose of under-taking participant observation fieldwork was to explore the nature of the youth crime and disorder prevention curriculum. The starting assumption here was that, if states mobilize crime prevention to moralize, regulate and govern, then some systematic investigation of whether these processes exist was necessary. Some writers, most specifically those of the neo-Foucauldian tradition (Rose, 1999, 2001; Rose and Miller, 1992), assume that governing involves the mobilization of subtle processes of self-regulation and hence is part of an ‘ethico-politics’. Thus, at some point, values and beliefs held by governors must be exchanged with the governed.