ABSTRACT
Cultural criminology involves a focus upon the continuous generation of meaning around interaction where rules are created and broken involving a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, political innovation and transgression. Cultural criminology therefore studies the way that some cultures have come to be designated as deviant. Similar themes are very much in evidence in one of the other major social dynamics explored by cultural criminologists: the changing cultural significance of contemporary consumer cultures and their particular effect on feelings and emotions. Cultural criminology uses everyday existences, life histories, music, dance and performance as databases to discover how and why it is that certain cultural forms become criminalized. Hopkins Burke introduces the term ‘the schizophrenia of crime’ to refer to the apparently contradictory duality of attitude to criminal behaviour that has become endemic in contemporary societies characterized by the postmodern condition.
