Chris Garces

Bio: Chris Garces is an academic researcher from Cornell University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Prison & Latin Americans. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 15 publications receiving 179 citations. Previous affiliations of Chris Garces include Sarah Lawrence College.

Informal prison dynamics in Africa and Latin America

Abstract: Investigating prison dynamics across the global south would appear a matter of urgent scholarly and policy concern. For while notable transfers of bureaucratic and security technology – namely, hum...

The cross politics of ecuador's penal state

Abstract: This essay examines inmate "crucifixion protests" in Ecuador's largest prison during 2003-04. It shows how the preventively incarcerated-of whom there are thousands-managed to effectively denounce their extralegal confinement by embodying the violence of the Christian crucifixion story. This form of protest, I argue, simultaneously clarified and obscured the multiple layers of sovereign power that pressed down on urban crime suspects, who found themselves persecuted and forsaken both outside and within the space of the prison. Police enacting zero-tolerance policies in urban neighborhoods are thus a key part of the penal state, as are the politically threatened family members of the indicted, the sensationalized local media, distrustful neighbors, prison guards, and incarcerated mafia. The essay shows how the politico-theological performance of self-crucifixion responded to these internested forms of sovereign violence, and were briefly effective. The inmates' cross intervention hence provides a window into the way sovereignty works in the Ecuadorean penal state, drawing out how incarceration trends and new urban security measures interlink, and produce an array of victims. Language: en

Informal Prison Dynamics in Africa and Latin America

Abstract: Investigating prison dynamics across the global south would appear a matter of urgent scholarly and policy concern. For while notable transfers of bureaucratic and security technology — namely, human rights discourse and the control prison — have migrated from the former metropolitan centers to former colonies, in the postcolonial world itself informal prison dynamics remain curiously part and parcel of punitive enclosure. These unofficial, self-regulatory dynamics often turn into a source of deep-seated misunderstanding between criminal justice establishments and the local and international communities which house them. Here we seek merely to outline how exploding incarceration rates and human rights discourse, in countries as far flung as Ecuador, Brazil, and Uganda, exhibit a set of ‘undisclosed’ institutions and problems typically ignored in penological debate as well as in most calls for humanitarian prison reform.

Surviving in the new mass carceral zone

Abstract: As regional scholars, statespersons, and critics know all too well, prison populations have in recent years risen sharply across Latin America. The sheer numbers of the incarcerated have more than doubled since the turn of the century; in the aggregate, South and Central American prison populations grew from an estimated 650,000 in 2000 to over 1.3 million by 2014. All 20 Latin American countries now lock away more people than they did little more than fifteen years ago. The new mass carceral zone has much to teach about the present and future of global state penality and carceral (mis)management, and it is to these pressing matters of life and death that, first and foremost, any publicly engaged prison ethnography ought to direct itself.

Mauss Redux : From Warfare's Human Toll to L'homme total

Abstract: After his 1919 demobilization, yet before writing The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss developed his concept of the "total human being" (I'homme total) as a methodological spur in works such as "L'expression obligatoire des sentiments" (1921). This translation and introduction to uThe obligatory expression of feel ings" highlights Mauss's post-war transition to psycho-physiological research and the concept of totality. Here, Mauss considers Australian "greeting by tears" as a synchronized performance of mind, body, and soul. We argue that Mauss's post-war concerns had crystallized around the omnipresent threat of loss-of-humanity and his war-survivor's scepticism toward absolute concep tions of individual and collective sovereignty. [Keywords: Marcel Mauss,

Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming

Abstract: Philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the primacy of desire over power and the openness and flux of social fields. In this article, we place our ethnographic projects among the urban poor in Brazil and Bosnia‐Herzegovina in dialogue with Deleuze’s cartographic approach to subjectivity and his reflections on control and the transformative potential of becoming. As people scavenge for resources and care, they must deal with the encroachment of psychiatric diagnostics and treatments in broken public institutions and in altered forms of common sense. By reading our cases in light of Deleuze’s ideas, we uphold the rights of microanalysis, bringing into view the immanent fields that people, in all their ambiguity, invent and live by. Such fields of action and significance—leaking out on all sides—are mediated by power and knowledge, but they are also animated by claims to basic rights and desires. In making public a nuanced understanding of these fields—always at risk of disappearing—anthropologists still allow...

The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement

Abstract: Centered on the ethnography of prisons and field research on penal confinement, this review maps out current developments and characterizes them in relation to key themes that shaped earlier approaches. Further internationalizing the ethnographic discussion on prisons by broadening the predominant focus on the United States and the English-speaking world, the review is organized around a main line of discussion: the prison–society relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds. More or less apparent in field research, this articulation is addressed from different perspectives—within and across different scales and analytic frames—whether centered more on the workings of the institution or on prisoners and their social worlds, both within and outside walls. The porosity of prison boundaries, increasingly acknowledged, has also been problematized and ethnographically documented in different ways: from prison-in-context to interface approaches, both more reflexive and attuned to broad...

China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law

Abstract: China and Islam examines the intersection of two critical issues of the contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian (unofficial) law in China, to pursue their respective visions of 'the good'. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, 'China's Little Mecca', this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the 'New Silk Road', female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law.

The rebirth of the prison in Latin America: determinants, regimes and social effects

Abstract: Throughout the last three decades, almost all Latin American countries witnessed a dramatic growth of their inmate population that is indicative of the rebirth of the prison in the region. This article contextualizes the rebirth of the prison in contemporary Latin America in empirical and theoretical terms. To this end, it offers a discussion of the expansion of Latin American imprisonment, changes in the region’s prison regimes and their embeddedness within wider social and economic contexts, as well as of the impact of institutional histories, larger economic and political transformation processes and globally circulating penal ideas and institutional models, all of which contribute to the growing punitiveness of contemporary Latin America states and politics.

Cannibal states, empty bellies: Protest, history and political imagination in post-Dayton Bosnia:

Abstract: In February 2014, Bosnia-Herzegovina witnessed its largest and most dramatic wave of civic protests since the end of the 1992–1995 war and the signing of Dayton Peace Accords. Confrontations with t...