The growing literature on carcerality emphasises the subjective experience of coercion and control beyond the physical confines of the prison. In this paper, I argue that while carcerality indeed manifests in varied ways, meshing with other sources of surveillance and forms of constraint, the prison itself remains a determining element of this. I do so by presenting the contrasting examples of two inmates’ families from the same community but with very different socio-economic situations, drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural western Nepal. The highly stratified social hierarchy of the region and the local character of a Nepalese district prison, make it a particularly well-suited context to study the dynamics between the two sides of the walls. As relatives negotiate their inclusion and exclusion from social spaces in and out of the prison, it becomes evident that caste, class, and gender are instrumental in shaping their experiences of the carceral. They share the predicament of striving to remain ‘respectable’ members of the community while continuing to care for imprisoned men, but their day-to-day reality diverges based on markers of social difference. In turn, their situation is also constitutive of how these imprisoned men live their incarceration and move into life after. Time and again, the prison both reflects and exists in a dialogic relationship with the world around it, and sheds light on a societal order which in itself can be punishing.
Departmental Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2024
3.15pm, Fridays of Weeks 1, 3-8.
In person in the Lecture Room, 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by Alpa Shah and Elisabeth Hsu
Week 2 is replaced by the Marett Lecture delivered by Professor Deborah James
