The Politics Of Social Outlawry In Urban Jamaica

The informal economy and patterns of state intervention involving patronage-clientelism and police repression contribute to a fragmented praxis of short-range strategies in Kingston, Jamaican slums. Containment, cooptation and repression, although widespread, are uneven processes often countered by such oblique forms of popular rebellion as social outlawry. An emergent political expression encompassing beliefs and practices which fall outside conventions, social outlawry represents an alternative outlet for many of those alienated from legitimate vehicles of empowerment. Unlike the more predominant mercenary clientelism, outlawry represents a more principled form of resistance against established authorities and the oppressive social order they represent and defend; and contrary to many forms of criminality, it opposes the victimization of the innocent and the oppressed. The case of Oceanview illustrates how in the context of gang politics a group of outlaws emerged and eventually succumbed to the forces of a destructive partisan conflict. The demise of a city-wide truce, a massive anti-government campaign, and an IMF-induced economic collapse were among the factors contributing to the the outlaws' loss of integrity. While rarely associated with a coherent, long-term political program, outlawry can be viewed as part of a broader political process shaped by the struggles of various segments of Jamaica's population. The failure of many dependent, peripheral capitalist nations to undergo structural transformation is often attributed, at least in part, to the allegedly inhibiting political character of the urban poor. This conception of poor urban dwellers as apolitical or inadequately politicized has been disclaimed by several studies which reveal a fairly broad range of informal as well as formal patterns of sociopolitical organization and behavior in squatter and slum settlements (Perlman 1976; Leeds 1973; Portes and Walton 1976). In some national contexts, poor people's political actions have represented some of the most strategic manifestations of emergent class struggle (Portes and Walton 1976; Velez-lbanez 1983). What I would like to attempt here is to explore and make sense of one particular dimension of the complex and contradictory sociopolitical reality 259 ISSN 0894-6019, © 1988 The Instutute, Inc. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.104 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 06:02:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 260 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 17(2-3), 1988 of Jamaica's urban slums and shantytowns, called ghettoes.1 That dimension is what I refer to as social outlawry, a diffuse sphere of popular rebellion generally neglected in the literature on Jamaican politics. While it is not uncommon for political analysts (Lacey 1977; Stone 1973, 1980) to be concerned with national security ramifications of crime and the criminalization of party politics (i.e., mercenary terrorism and violent rivalry over patronage benefits), there has been little recognition of at least some patterns of illegal and outlawed behavior as bona fide resistance and protest, In fact, Stone (1973: 149-152) argues that there is an absence of what Hobsbawm (1969) would designate as a contemporary, urban banditry, a form of illicit individual or collective action not regarded as simply criminal by considerable segments of the poor. Although it is true that crime, particularly violent crime, is indeed a grave problem in Jamaica, I contend that among those who act outside of the law are men and women who, using the situations and opportunities most readily available to them, oppose the oppression manifest in chronic unemployment, police repression, and partisan victimization through principled political expressions. To view crime and the intersection between it and politics as merely parasitic economic opportunism is to reduce a range of activities to a monolithic legal category and to stereotype the variegated ghetto dwellers who disproportionately populate Jamaica's jails. Th ensuing discussion will illuminate the parameters of social outlawry by defining this political form in general terms and then revealing its dynamics in a particular ethnographic case, namely that of a Kingston, Jamaica neighborhood I shall call Oceanview. I begin with a preliminary treatment of general political conditions in localities like Oceanview. Ghetto Alienation and Constraints on Political Expression The unemployed, casual workers, hustlers, and self-proclaimed petty entrepreneurs constitute well over fifty percent of the Jamaican population (Stone 1980:20-21). In the towns and cities, especially in the Kingston Metropolitan Area, they are quite visible in their impoverishment, in their lack of secure and gainful employment, and in their alienation and volatility. Within the past decade, disquiet, evident in rampant crime and political violence, has reached crisis proportions. This critical national security problem is, ultimately, symptomatic of Jamaica's pattern of dependent capitalist development (Pryce 1976), which has historically been characterized by the inability to provide full wage employment opportunities for those divorced from means of production and subsis-