Imprisonment and (Un)Relatedness in Northeast Brazil

This dissertation – based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around a men’s and a women’s prison – explores imprisonment and (un)relatedness in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. From the vantage point of a prison compound and the heavily penalized neighbourhoods surrounding it, I describe and analyze inextricable connectivities which bind this compound to its social milieu, prison cells to houses, and prisoners to non-prisoners. I focus in particular on the gendered experiences and life projects of male and female “subjects of incarceration” – social actors whose entanglements with the prison are relatively intense, namely: (ex-)prisoners, visitors, and non-visitors (people with an imprisoned relation who do not visit the prison). In short, what is at stake in this dissertation is the question of how social reproduction occurs in a context in which imprisonment has come to be a regular, predictable part of life for poor and racialized groups. To grasp material and symbolic continuities, ruptures, and interconnections constitutive of prison-society relations I have developed the concept of “carceral forms.” This concept offers an approach to delineating objects of inquiry and a set of questions that will enrich multidisciplinary conversations about imprisonment as well as punishment and society. Anthropological insights regarding (un)relatedness have informed my theoretical-methodological approach to practices of imprisonment. This means that I approach penality and penal effects through the ethnographic investigation of gendered social relations forged, maintained, strained, and severed within and across prison boundaries. I also use the ethnographic fact of relatedness theoretically. I draw on anthropological theorizations of (un)relatedness to trouble taken-for-granted carceral boundaries and devise an innovative object of inquiry which I call carceral forms. In conceptualizing imprisonment in this way, I take inspiration from Strathern (1989) and her emphasis on immanent sociality. That is, I take “the relation” (1995) as a starting point to rethink the prison as a social institution. Rather than presume the boundaries, and the boundedness, of this institution, I attend to the statements and practices of people who negotiate imprisonment in a manner that at once (re)produces differences between carceral and non-carceral domains and establishes connections between these emergently distinct domains.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0