“Beefs” in New Orleans: Inside Long-Lasting Gun Conflicts

• In Event: 1550 - Research on Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

I describe a mechanism that can shape how long-running urban gun conflicts unfold. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans, I explain the ways that young men in the city understand and navigate beefs. In New Orleans, a beef is an enduring dispute between former friends or acquaintances in which each hunts the other through social networks. I show that young men with beefs use knowledge of how these conflicts usually play out to anticipate their adversaries’ actions and determine their own. In this way, individuals with beef follow a script. In the case I document, young men adhere to the script not because of lingering concerns from disputes that triggered their conflicts but rather because of the terrible stakes they face: to deviate from the script is to risk death at the hands of an adversary who may be faithfully following it. Thus, violence scripts like the one I describe can spur shootings for reasons different than those that started the conflict.

Author

• Tom Wooten, Harvard University