gangs

All research aims to find, challenge, investigate or push limits within a given field of knowledge. But what happens if, rather than viewing limits as inherent premises or side-effects of a research process, one activates them as tools? This chapter exemplifies a conceptual experiment with the methodological affordances of limits, through the classical Spinozian approach to affect. After introducing some relationships between limits and affects, it explores how one may actively use these types of affective occurrences within the specifics of an ethnography of Danish gangs.

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling.