The Ontological Politics of Heritage; or How Research Can Spoil a Good Story

Abstract

Criminologists, perhaps more than other social scientists, are much exercised by the extent of what they do not know. Theirs is a field dominated by the efforts of the controlling state and its law enforcement apparatus to record criminal behaviour in all its myriad forms, gleaning information that is then used as a basis for policy-making and the allocation of resources to further that end. Important stuff, of course; but it does mean that the study of crime has become more than usually obsessed with the dichotomy of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in its thought world. It is well known, for example, that recorded crime is the tip of an iceberg, the remainder of which is made up of a bulky and submerged ‘dark figure’ of unknown and unknowable criminal enterprise, as set out in the well-cited paper ‘On Exploring the Dark Figure of Crime’ by Biderman and Reiss (1967). And then there is the issue of what constitutes crime in the first place, a phenomenon that appears to be bounded more by legal codes than any deeper ontology, and which therefore begets attempts on the part of criminologists to find a better way of describing … what? Law-breaking? And how does that make us judge the law itself? Or is it about deviance, lawful or otherwise? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.