1st Edition
Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons Stuckness and Confinement
Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons explores the relationship between ghettos, camps, places of detention and prisons with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed through the lens of ‘stuckness’.
From a point of departure in anthropology, with important contributions from criminology, geography and philosophy, the chapters explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life, while being mindful of how forms of abjection are constitutive elements of these sites. Stuckness, from this inter-disciplinary perspective, is not simply a function of the spatial form it takes; we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement. Death, the ultimate temporal boundary, emerges as particularly significant in this regard. With case studies from Palestine, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Northern Australia, Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Nicaragua, the contributors focus on the empirical question of how structures of stuckness, confinement and forced mobility impact on the possibilities of ‘making life’.
Suggesting new ways of thinking about how temporality and spatiality intersect and overlap in the lives of people struggling to manage conditions of stuckness, Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons will be of great interest to scholars of anthropology, geography, criminology and philosophy. The chapters in this book originally published as a special issue of Ethnos.
1. Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement
Andrew M. Jefferson, Simon Turner and Steffen Jensen
2. Camps, Encampments, and Occupations: From the Heterotopia to the Urban Subject
Michel Agier
3. ‘Winning Life’ and the Discipline of Death at Iwawa Island
Rose Løvgren and Simon Turner
4. Awkward Entanglements: Kinship, Morality and Survival in Cape Town’s Prison–township Circuit
Karen Waltorp and Steffen Jensen
5. Urban Anti-politics and the Enigma of Revolt: Confinement, Segregation, and (the Lack of) Political Action in Contemporary Nicaragua
Dennis Rodgers
6. Life in a Space of Necropolitics Toward an Economy of Value in Prisons
Frédéric Le Marcis
7. The Confines of Time – On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine
Andrew M. Jefferson and Lotte Buch Segal
8. Driving Across Settler Late Liberalism: Indigenous Ghettos, Slums and Camps
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Biography
Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. His work has focused on conflict and displacement in the African Great Lakes region, where he has studied hope, anxiety and rumours among refugees in and out of camps. He has also explored humanitarian governance and layered sovereignty in refugee camps.
Steffen Jensen holds a professorship at the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University in Copenhagen as well as being Senior Researcher at Dignity: Danish Institute Against Torture. He has published extensively on urban violence, policing, and criminal and violent networks in South Africa and the Philippines.
