Food and order. An ethnography of daily meals and contamination in a Bolivian self-governed prison

The state responded brutally to lockdown protests in Italian prisons soon after Italy announced its first national Covid‐19 lockdown. This article affirms the need for prison ethnographies, exploring ethical and methodological directions to research what is potentially a violent environment. However, within a prison context devoted to secrecy and suspicion, this research focuses on mundane fieldwork topics ‘other than violence’; namely, everyday life in prison (such as food, health and spirituality). Such a focus allows us to develop cultural intimacy in formal institutions while preserving political engagement.

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‘You feel it in your bones’: Mobility, animacy, and the everyday violence of incarceration in the American southwest

Garcia

2024

Critique of Anthropology

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In this article, I explore how mobility, animacy, and ontology intertwine to shape everyday violence in the carceral American Southwest. I draw on ethnographic research that I conducted between 2016 and 2017 at the Desert Echo Facility, a state prison that holds individuals from minimum to high-security levels. Some incarcerated people feel supposedly inanimate objects, such as walls, rocks, paper, and floors moving, while others feel vibrations moving across the compound. For some of the incarcerated, physical movement signifies aliveness – meaning that incarceration forces them to question if they are less alive than the “inanimate” materials that confine them. Others understand these movements as the direct violence of the state that purposefully disrupts how they construct relations. In this context, incarcerated peoples’ alive status is no longer a given and their relations no longer assumed to be inherent and ongoing, but rather, processes to be negotiated within criminal punishment systems. I focus on what these movements mean to incarcerated people, and how they situate these movements within differing ontologies to make visible the often-hidden violence of incarceration in the United States.

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Food and order. An ethnography of daily meals and contamination in a Bolivian self-governed prison

Cited by 3 publications

References 26 publications

Co-designing a conceptual controlled environment agriculture (CEA) model inside an Australian maximum-security prison: A research framework

Co-designing a conceptual controlled environment agriculture (CEA) model inside an Australian maximum-security prison: A research framework

On the possibility of engaged ethnography in prison

‘You feel it in your bones’: Mobility, animacy, and the everyday violence of incarceration in the American southwest

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