How Well Does Theory Travel? David Garland in the Global South

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12182
Date01 December 2016
Published date01 December 2016
AuthorJONNY STEINBERG
The Howard Journal Vol55 No 4. December 2016 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12182
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 514–531
How Well Does Theory Travel? David
Garland in the Global South
JONNY STEINBERG
Professor of African Studies, University of Oxford; Visiting Professor, Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract: How well does theory travel? The article examines this question by exploring
how David Garland’s work on crime control in Britain and the United States might be
used to shed light on crime control in South Africa. I argue that theory travels badly when
what is transferred is not the hard work of genealogical method but the shiny concepts that
are the product of somebody else’s labour. Entire countries and regions appear to have
come off an assembly line, each made from the same parts, each more or less resembling
the next. Theory travels well when it transmits imaginative resources that inspire one’s
own genealogical explorations, thus giving due weight to the historical antecedents of
contemporary practices.
Keywords: David Garland; crime control; genealogical method; Britain;
United States; South Africa
In the opening paragraph of his highly influential book, The Culture of
Control, David Garland draws attention to the scale of its ambitions. His
goal, he says, is to tell one coherent story about an extremely broad ar-
ray of practices, ‘ranging from the conduct of householders locking their
doors to the actions of authorities enacting criminal laws, from community
policing to punishment in prison and all the processes in between’ (Gar-
land 2001, p.vii). Doing this for just one place would be ambitious enough,
Garland suggests. That his scope encompasses both Britain and Amer-
ica – ‘two such different societies’ – ‘might strike the reader as foolhardy’
(p.vii).
If the scale of The Culture of Control is ambitious, what are we to make of
attempts to take it from its north Atlantic context and use it to illuminate
complex social processes in places far-flung from Britain and America,
like Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa?1On the face of it, such a project
seems at once both obviously appropriate and yet obviously dangerous.
Appropriate because so many of the deep social changes and policy choices
at the heart of Garland’s argument – suburbanisation, the valorisation of
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2016 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol55 No 4. December 2016
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 514–531
personal expression, the increasing use of custodial prison sentences, of
strategies of environmental crime prevention, the rise of populist rhetoric
– are in abundant evidence in many parts of the Global South. It makes
sense to take Garland’s ideas abroad because their resonance is, in so many
places, self-evident.
And yet such a project is obviously dangerous, for the power of Garland’s
argument lies in its historical embeddedness. The Culture of Control,after all,
is an account of why a deep and old Anglo-American consensus about crime
and its control began unravelling in the 1970s. Its persuasiveness consists
in showing the intricate filigree of institutions, professions, discourses and
practices through which this consensus expressed itself. And its drama lies
in its account of how new policies and mentalities arose at the coalface
of practice, as all sorts of agents across society forged answers to practical
problems.
In a word, Garland’s method is self-consciously genealogical. It is to
show that mentalities and practices arise from historical processes. How
one might use his ideas to explore other places with other histories is thus
not a straightforward question.
I write this article both as a long-time admirer of The Culture of Control
and as a scholar with an abiding interest in South Africa. I have thought
much about how reading The Culture of Control has influenced my under-
standing of South African criminal justice, sometimes for better,sometimes
for worse. The purpose of this article is to share some of this thinking and
thus to try to put a finger on what it is that makes theory travel badly and
well.
My choice of The Culture of Control is somewhat incidental. I might have
chosen Jonathan Simon’s work on governance and criminal justice (Simon
2009), Stan Cohen’s writing on moral panics (Cohen 2011), Jock Young’s
on late modernity (Young 1999), or Ian Loader and Aogan Mulcahy’s
ethnography of policing in England (Loader and Mulcahy 2003). Crimi-
nology in the Anglo-American world has collectively embarked on an enor-
mously productive endeavour to understand what has changed since the
early 1970s. As somebody trying to understand what has changed in an-
other part of the world, I have read all of this work with absorption and
wondered a great deal about how best to use it. I guess that I’ve chosen
The Culture of Control as a platform for this investigation because its sweep
and ambition make it attractive and because it is especially self-conscious,
wearing its method on its sleeve.
At the risk of banality,let me say that theory travels well when it transmits
imaginative resources that inspire one’s own genealogical explorations.
Theory travels badly when the importer of theory gets overexcited by the
objects the exporter has produced. What travels, in this instance, is not
the hard labour of method but the shiny concepts that are the product of
somebody else’s labour.Certain phrases such as neoliberalism, responsibil-
isation and governmentality end up occluding, rather than illuminating,
complex social processes in disparate societies. Entire countries and re-
gions appear to have come off an assembly line, each made from the same
parts, each more or less resembling the next.
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2016 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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