ABSTRACT
In this chapter I develop a phenomenological understanding of ‘recreational’ crime and drug use, that is, what is often referred to as ‘petty crime’ and ‘playful’ use of ‘soft drugs’. I start the chapter by returning to my discussion, in Chapter 3, of the academic and practical ‘points of view’. This time I am concerned to unravel the epistemological and social consequences that result following the imposition of one (academic view) over the other (practical view). Following Bourdieu (1992), I refer to this as ‘symbolic violence’ because the imposition of the academic point of view involves the violation of a whole way of being, seeing and speaking ‘practically’. First I discuss the social and personal consequences of my respondents’ acquiescence to my invitations to them to reflect on the reasons for their actions. ‘Looking back’ with the ‘benefit of hindsight’ they would always describe their actions as ‘stupid’ even though this contradicted the non-reasoned reasons that they provided elsewhere when they were describing their practices, in their own terms, from within ‘the thick of it’. Encouraging respondents to offer ‘second order’ representations of practice as ‘stupid’ therefore violated the ‘first order’ articulations of practice that they offered elsewhere which, of course, has epistemological consequences for social researchers. But it also has consequences for the subjects of research that have a tendency to adopt a subordinate position when invited into social science interviews and whom, as a consequence, offer a point of view on what they do that is incongruent with the ‘average everyday’ point of view that they carry with them.
