Gang Graffiti as Totemism

In Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States, gangs demonstrate a profound interrelationship between street life, mass incarceration, gang cartographies, and the development of meaning, which together act as a form of totemism. Long used in anthropology, the concept of totemism remains powerful analytically because of its ability to describe how intentional oppositions are hinged to surrounding environments. Gang writing allows members to infuse themselves into neighborhoods by spatializing the tie of sympathy between signature, person, and landscape. Gang totemic practices originate from similarity in form as well as shared history, and from the contradiction of knowing a system is constructed while continuing to treat it as if it were primordial. Showing how social meaning is tied to the built environment contributes to decolonizing discourses by further eroding the binary between nature and culture. When combined with critical frameworks that look at power and inequality, the concept of totemism may be revitalized in a manner that respects local understandings, is distilled to its essential component parts, and gains relevance across wide swaths of ethnographic cases. The framework of totemism enables understanding of how urban environments become a locus of gang sentiment, moving away from simplistic ideas of gang territoriality. [ gangs, totemism, prison, graffiti, critical structuralism ]