Abstract
Incarceration is extremely hard to document ethnographically. Social anthropology with its ethnographic method possibly offers an expedient way of representing spaces of incarceration and expressing marginalised voices within them. These statements express the inherently paradoxical encounter between ethnography and prisons. Rhodes (2001), in a path-breaking review essay on the anthropology of prisons, argued that there is a need for prison ethnographers not just to get inside prisons and describe life within prison walls, but more significantly to ‘interrupt the terms of the debate’ (2001: 75). Wacquant (2002) articulated otherwise: that in a context of eclipsed prison ethnography, it is more important for ethnographers to enter prisons and fill the void in the literature on prisons, through ‘thick descriptions’ of a range of different kinds of carceral spaces. In this chapter, such observations about the anthropology of prisons form a backdrop for reflections on their methodological import for prison ethnographers.1
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Further reading
Jewkes, Y. (2013) ‘What Can Ethnography Offer in an Age of Mass Incarceration?’ Criminal Justice Matters, 91, 1, 14–15.
Liebling, A. (2001) ‘Whose Side Are We On?: Theory, Practice and Allegiances in Prisons Research’, British Journal of Criminology, 41, 472–84.
Rhodes, L. (2001) ‘Toward an Anthropology of Prisons’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 65–83.
Rhodes, L. A. (2004) Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (California: University of California Press).
Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration’, Ethnography, 3, 4, 371–97.
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© 2015 Mahuya Bandyopadhyay
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Bandyopadhyay, M. (2015). Deviation and Limitations of (Prison) Ethnography: Postscript to Fieldwork in an Indian Prison. In: Drake, D.H., Earle, R., Sloan, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_24
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