Blurred Lines: A Critical Interpretive Ethnography of “Rape Culture”, Victim Blaming, and Women’s Rights in Late Modern India

• In Event: Everything You Can Imagine Is Real: Jock Young’s Legacy on Othering in a Divided Society

Abstract

Jock Young’s (2011) renewed call to turn mainstream criminology on its head emphasizes the need for richer narratives taking into account people, structure, history, and locality. Fueling the thrust towards a more comprehensive understanding of human nature and the lives at stake, this paper offers an interpretive ethnographic piece on sexual violence and “rape culture” in India to illustrate the ability of critical ethnography to disrupt perceived social inequalities and ruffle putative power relationships. This reflexive inquiry tackles the “bogus of positivism” relentlessly promoted by U.S. “fat cat” criminologists and reinforced across the globe by researchers and policymakers lacking the imagination, curiosity, and edge required to probe into multiple layers of cultural meaning and complex conceptual structures. Here, we denounce the Americanization of criminological inquiry, where culture, meaning, and place vanish into standardized quasi-scientific explanations of crime and crime control. We reject the theoretical segregation and ethnocentric narratives that have led criminology astray and, instead, refocus on power relations within their specific cultural context. We rise against hegemonic epistemologies and practices in order to not only promote postmodern ethnography as the moral discourse of today’s world, but also pointedly move us forward on the occluded path to transformative criminology.

Author

• Cecile Van de Voorde, MANTRA