Teoria del campo criminale

Abstract

This chapter establishes a comprehensive Bourdieusian framework for contemporary criminology by conceptualizing urban crime as a relatively autonomous "criminal field" ($street\ field$) governed by its own immanent logic, internal hierarchies, and power dynamics. Moving beyond the positivism of traditional ecological theories and the pure constructivism of labeling approaches, the authors utilize Pierre Bourdieu’s core analytical toolkit—specifically the concepts of field, habitus, and capital—to examine how crime functions as a highly structured social space. The text illustrates that the State plays a foundational role in constructing this arena by using its monopoly over physical and symbolic violence to dictate legal categories and boundaries through the penal system. Within the criminal field, actors develop a generative street habitus—a system of durable, bodily, and emotional dispositions that allow them to navigate the practical opportunities and structural limitations of marginalized environments, separating the behavior from mere rational calculations or passive subcultural reproduction. Furthermore, the authors outline the circulation of street capital (the cultural capital of the street), which stratifies the field through incorporated skills, objectified markers like tattoos or weapons, and institutionalized elements such as criminal records, which paradoxically confer subcultural prestige and credibility. Methodologically, the chapter advocates for a reflexive, critical ethnography to unpack how these structural forces embed themselves within individual subjectivities, contrasting empirical applications from the welfare-reliant street culture of Oslo to the shifting economic landscape of Naples' Quartieri Spagnoli. Ultimately, the authors address potential limitations of the framework, such as analytical determinism and conceptual ambiguity, concluding that the criminal field offers a powerful, relational lens to bridge structure and agency in contemporary criminological research.