People around the world have been regularly writing, drawing, and creating combinations of words and figures on public surfaces for centuries. Contemporary graffiti style emerged during the early 1970s in beleaguered American urban communities like New York City and Philadelphia. American graffiti quickly went global, entangling with visual cultures and existing practices of wall writing in other parts of the world. Anthropologists working on graffiti have offered insights into the lives of individuals, communities, and collectives that write graffiti, including gangs and hip‐hop culture; urban cartographies and strategies of spatialization grounded in graffiti writing; the commercialization and commoditization of graffiti and street art; the dialectics between graffiti and street art, and the environments in which they are created; and use of graffiti and street art to communicate, advocate, and share new ideas. For anthropologists, graffiti offers a vital optic on topics such as identity, power and resistance, urbanism, and creativity.
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