Arborealism and Rhizomatics: A Treatise

Abstract

How do we understand and make sense of informal organisations such as gangs? For gang-talkers, this is not a question that appears to present any serious epistemological and ontological challenges. Gangs, from this standpoint, are simply considered criminal organisations with clear determinate features that can be established and measured. Considered this way, they are imagined to possess fixed essences, the compilation of which provides an understanding of the whole. This tendency is wonderfully exemplified in the quantitative tendencies at play in the American administrative gang-research industry. It is particularly evident in their autistic obsession with reducing the complexities of informal street organisations to denaturalised and decontextualised clusters of risk factors from which the truth of gangs is then discerned (Klein 2001).