Scholars writing about gangs frequently lament the “the media's” treatment of gang stories. Monica Brown, for example, is troubled by such “spectacularization.” She is saddened that “the media” have even infected the gangbangers’ own accounts: “Even among the Latino/ a authored works,” which she discusses in Gang Nation, “there are moments in certain texts where writers obviously capitulate to the logic of the market and consumers hungry for gang literature” (Brown 2002: xxi)— as though it would never occur to gangbangers on their own to “spectacularize” their deeds.

In fact, as we have seen, gangbangers have powerful reasons for “spectacularization.” And so, tribal warriors have traditionally had much to say about blood and bones and ruined flesh. Milovan Djilas, for example, writing as a middle- aged man of letters, tells of his own remembered sense of the ethos of blood feuding in Montenegro. He is writing in 1958, by which time blood feuding had been outlawed in Montenegro and severely punished for more than a hundred years. And yet:

The bloodier the story of an uncle or a father killed, the more horrible the story of the sister raped, the more likely the son will be to remember and to avenge.

But gore works in another way as well. The more gore there is in the stories, the more we recognize the courage, and so the glory, of warriors who actually face such terrors (see Figures I.4, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4). The gore that we find in warrior- culture narratives, then, is closely related to the ritual display of wounds, as when Assiniboine warriors appeared naked for recitations of coup tales, so they could point to their wounds (Rodnick 1938: 44), and when Yanomami warriors shave their heads to display their scars (Figure 4.6).