Abstract

Politics of Vandalism

All disciplines tend to have an underground of theory, which challenges the traditional ways of studying their subject matter, the ways ensconced in undergraduate courses, textbooks and professional journals. This underground, like similar movements in the arts, in time becomes fashionable, goes through a period of vulgarization and is eventually absorbed into the traditions of the discipline. Such a process can be observed in the fields of criminology and the sociology of deviance, with the gradual emergence from the underground of what has been called transactional or labeling theory. The first point, then, to make about vandalism is that it is an emotive label, attached to certain forms of behavior only under certain conditions. The vandalism that, criminologists study or the vandalism defined more as "political" than "criminal" and which conveys evident ideological overtones seems far removed from the etymological origins of the term. Vandalism raises many social problems.