Allá abajo pasan muchas cosas. Espacios, cuerpos y corporalidades en una cárcel rionegrina"

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the senses of confinement for those who are deprived of their freedom, focusing on how they are perceived, interpreted, lived and resisted in and from the bodies and corporalities. The field work was carried out in Penal Unit No. 3, in San Carlos de Bariloche, a medium-security provincial prison facility for men, about fifteen blocks from the city center. The general structure of the thesis follows de Certeau's proposal about the organizing practices of space, used in this work in order to analyse the mechanisms of population distribution. Specifically, the notion that guides thought to register distribution of bodies and corporalities is that of "making out boundaries", used in an heuristic mode to contextualize different levels of analysis. A first level shows mechanisms of controlling the space and distribution of the population through the elaboration of maps, mechanism that constitutes a practice with its own history within the framework of statehood. A second level, analyze the boundaries based on the relationships between different institutions located that converge in the prison establishment. A third level of analysis is oriented to the agencies with and from the bodies by the staff A third level of analysis is oriented to the agencies with and from the bodies by the staff of the establishment, the experience of the same as is lived by the inmates, and their agencies, key axis to answer the research question. The last level refers to how bodies and corporalities guide relationships and bonds and groups of belonging, among which are respect and care. The different levels of analysis work in a complementary way, channeling the understanding of possible ways in which those deprived of liberty are able to live - or survive -. At the same time, the ethnographic approach that guides the research reveals a series of heterogeneities within the establishment in terms of subjectivities, agencies and identifications. Parallel also, it allowed register continuities between the interior and the exterior of the prison establishment. Such continuities are perceptible in the relationships between security forces and the prison population or young inhabitants of city neighborhoods, as well as elicited from observations made in the establishment and from the inmates' stories regarding daily dynamics consisting of ways of doing things, say and feel. The relationships, meanings and practices that circulate between the grates thus compose a context in which the prison walls function as a membrane. This membrane is flexible and permeable, but also selective and differential. Flexible in that certain practices of violence that occur within the prison space are common also outside it. Selective in terms of who or what (relationships, practices, objects) can enter or exit. Differential in terms of the variations that income, stays and departures adopt according to those who are making them. At a first glance, which could nourish common sense, permeability seems to intercept care, solidarity and affection. Those behind the walls are there because of behaviors that would be at the opposite pole. Although it is true that confinement favors the reproduction of behaviors that reinforce hostility, tension, mistrust and rivalry, shifting the focus allows us to observe gestures and behaviors whose subtlety places them in the background, but whose importance in sustaining existence it is as indispensable as fierce.