Nighttime Street Fighting and the Meaning of Place

Abstract

The limits of honor and dishonor, order and disorder, and theirs and ours were negotiated in the early modern nighttime streets. These cultural negotiations are approached here from the viewpoint of one particular street fight in the seventeenth-century town of Turku in the province of Finland, in the kingdom of Sweden. The drunken, out-of-control fight included both ritualistic forms of a masculine street fight and uncontrolled rage as well as a territorial contest over urban space. The material form of the street as well as the time of the day added their own influences. The nighttime street emerges as a place of metaphorical and physical boundaries, where open and closed, shared and private, and controlled and suppressed were defined. The aim of the article is to see urban space as something more than just a neutral site of actions and practices or a mere network of social interactions without clear material referents.