Review: Packing Heat: Armed Americans and the Meaning of Guns

Reviewed Work(s): Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy by Bernard E.
Harcourt; Shooters: Myths and Realties of America's Gun Culture by Abigail A. Kohn
Review by: Charles Fruehling Springwood
Source: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 31, No. 1 (May 2008), pp. 180-185
Published by: American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497573
Accessed: 09-01-2018 00:30 UTC

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 Page 180 PoLAR: Vol. 31, No. 1

would be valuable readings for courses on

but I would hesitate to assign the book as

Nevertheless, Ntsebeza's work offers a c

communities who are now challenging th
Rights Act of 2004, and an example of en
political struggle. Read together with Klu
constitution and the emergence of the pos
stage for understanding the confrontation
traditional authorities, and the state now

References Cited

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Society and Colonial Rule. V. Turner, ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
James, Deborah
2006 Gaining Ground?: Rights and Property in South African Land Re
form. London: Glasshouse Press.
Mamdani, Mahmood
1996 Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ribot, Jesse
1999 Decentralisation, Participation and Accountability in Sahelian Forestry:
Legal Instruments of Political-Administrative Control. Africa: Journal of
the International African Institute 69( 1):23—65.
Whitehead, Ann, and Dzodzi Tsikata
2003 Policy Discourses on Women's Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: The
Implications of the Re-turn to the Customary. Journal of Agrarian Change
3(1—2):7—112.

Charles Fruehling Springwood

minois vvesieyan university

REVIEW ESSAY

Packing Heat: Armed Americans and the Meaning of Gun

Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy

Bernard E. Harcourt, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Shooters: Myths and Realties of America's Gun Culture

Abigail A. Kohn, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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May 2008 Page 181

Anthropologists have alway

and objects, especially—but
ertheless, collectively, anth
object that may indeed be th
rary material culture in the
whose members variously d
guns. Yet, save for an occas
work settings, most studies
for the larger-scale process
quent displacement and vic
and methodologies of anthr
the social meanings of firear
considers the everyday relat

Although firearms remain la

books successfully respond
ica's Gun Culture (2004) b
Crime, and Public Policy (2
fieldwork and interviews to
distinct populations. Guns a
court's informants, where a
and almost 40 percent of Am
anthropologist, examined th
sport shooters, hunters, and
the University of California
sity of Chicago, interviewed
order to unpack their assum
so central to their daily live
the words and experiences o
to speak more broadly to th

Starting her research as so

begins the project apparentl
point. Nevertheless, she bri
in the United States between
having to do with firearms. S
herself to an analysis of wha
a range of ideas about what
their use as instruments of
that guns are paramount to
an American ideology built
reliance. Nearly all of the sh
or by lobbying groups to cir
and social oppression, contra

Kohn also addresses the sym

terms of how guns inform pe

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Page 182 PoLAR: Vol. 31, No. 1

view the very act of owning, indeed carryi

citizen or "a full-status person" in the con
that, "To 'pack' a gun, or wear it on you
ensuring not only your own safety but
enforces personal boundaries and ensures

The act of "packing heat" also resonate

Harcourt's study, but in ways vastly div
drawn to firearms in multiple ways, the
patriotism, frontier romanticism, Republ
about weapons. For Harcourt's respondent
into three primary clusters. First, guns are
associated with danger, attraction, power
The second cluster Harcourt terms "comm
economic fungibles to be exchanged and
significant meaning are most likely to re
turns on perceptions of the gun as a source
and as a tool (no different than, say, a scr

Harcourt's analysis is based largely on exten

in the detention center, representing dive
and non-gang affiliated. Interviews began
the young men are given three color pic
magazine. They were asked, then, to exp
what experiences the images reminded th
dislike for the weapons, many voiced thei
are nice I just like guns a lot," or "I'd
cool" (p. 37). In spite of the common expr
the youth acknowledge their danger, in
informants. For example, a youth of nort
"Dangerous... you could get killed by the
My friend got in a fight with this other
in his house and got a gun and started s
off' (p. 36).

Social scientists will be particularly inte

which includes a rigorous application of c
Pierre Bourdieu's coded mappings of judgm
some twenty primary meanings of guns
condenses into clusters (outlined above),
then seeks to place the meaning clusters in
or not the respondents commonly carrie
carrying practice contexts: "no carry," in
gun; "one carry," in which the youth car
carry," in which the youth carried two or
youths carrying one or more guns at all tim
correspondence maps, Harcourt resists any

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 May 2008 Page 183

the fluidity of the structur

social identity to social iden
the indication that non-gang
terms of their exchange val
(the action-protection cluste

But just as frequently, Harco

of the subgroups in his stud
are almost universally exper
the informants in Kohn's st
some cases, is hard to comm
'When you go to shoot a gu
unless you do it quick'" 9 (p.
also construct the firearm
building inspector:

I'm content and I'm happy

it... it's... it's a work of ar
beauty, and there's form
this I would rather fondle a fine firearm than I would a naked woman.
Now does that make sense? (p. 12)

"Protection" is another common register, but one that only some of Harcourt's re
spondents articulate in their gun experiences. On the other hand, the overwhelming
majority of Kohn's informants claim protection motivates (in part) their gun owner
ship. To a degree, this is ironic since these San Francisco Bay area residents, largely
white, are less likely to have been involved in crime-related gun incidents than the
youth in Harcourt's book.

Both of these books, which do a meticulous job of listening to the voices of their
subjects, deal with how race and gender relate to guns in less than satisfactory
ways. In terms of race, for example, while Harcourt does include this as a variable
in his mapping analysis, he does little more than to comment that the recreation
respect cluster is more aligned with Anglo experiences and the action-protection
cluster with Hispanic youths. He confesses that his sample of respondents included
very few African Americans. Regarding gender, Harcourt's analysis is surprisingly
non-committal. Although gender—masculinity—is overdetermined in the voices and
experiences of his respondents, and although gunplay and gun violence are conspicu
ously masculinely gendered, Harcourt does not directly address this dimension. This
is surprising because, given his theoretical orientations—post-structuralism, prac
tice, and performance—he is well positioned to unpack the gendered spaces that
structure the worlds of these youths. In fact, in a chapter dedicated to sketching the
ways in which these young men embody scripts of violence and gun use, he draws
substantially from Judith Bulter's methods outlined in Gender Trouble, yet without
foregrounding masculinity per se.

Kohn's ethnography highlights race only very occasionally, when she quotes, for
example, one of her informants expressing the claim that all races of people should

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Page 184 PoLAR: Vol. 31, No. 1

have access to guns, or another who insis

icans and African Americans would have
pression. What Kohn does not do near
and opinions of her informants more cr
tions. For example, that many gun en
seems more than anything a more recen
is one that belies a much longer history
refusals to build alliances with certain
Panthers.

Kohn's approach to gender is more nuan

clearly express a tendency to view learn
a man. Moreover, they claim that knowl
fillment of one's masculine responsibility
the inherently sexist character of the noti
otherwise weaker wives and children. Ho
larger historical and social context in wh
by men, nor does she discuss the idea tha
totems of masculine dominance. Indeed, g
cial spaces upon which male-male intima
subjects include several women, and she st
as significant in an otherwise masculinize
female shooters buy guns for protection,
these women view their firearms as a way

They very explicitly assert that they p

ous aspects of the patriarchy to be th
gun ownership helps make shooters to
patriarchal belief that women are weak
argue that being tough by owning gu
patriarchal tendencies of violent men.

In contrast, other female shooters in the

gun-owning male as a masculine source o

Both of these books close with an effort

"centrist" position, offering suggestions fo
the debate, such as moving away from the
for reducing crime. Likewise, she encoura
shooters, such as those in her study, do n
let go of the notion that guns have no intr
critique of historical landscape of legal p
asserts that we should strive to understand
of talk central to the lives of criminal juve
in living safer lives.

I urge anthropologists to consult these im

ventional accounts of firearms by acknow

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 May 2008 Page 185

subjects. We would do well n

to begin with, and to see gu
dimensions. I suspect that t
its owner is a very useful sta
cultural and the political, of
of the firearm, trying to ap
object.

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