The Perfume of Sweat: Prison Research through Deleuzian Lenses

Abstract

This chapter draws on experiences of ethnographic research in closed male prisons in Norway. From the positions as researchers, our aim is to explore what our bodies can be in the field, what they can do to the field and what the field can do with them. By using the term ‘can do’, we want to draw the reader’s attentions to affects produced in specific events through ethnographic fieldwork. Our analytical point of departure is to explore how our bodies enter into compositions with other bodies both human and non-human. Approaching the body as always more than itself, as an always relational and social-material event (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), opens up questions related to what we can know together with prisoners. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris’ key concepts ‘event’, ‘a body without organs’ and ‘the process of becoming’, we explore the affective journey of our researcher bodies by sketching a couple of body assemblages¹ across two vignettes that we call ‘a cup of coffee’ and ‘the perfume of sweat’.² Each of the two vignettes foregrounds the complex, contradictory and changing nature of becoming researchers and prisoners. Enlightening the process of becoming in the ethnographic prison research field, the chapter brings bodily experiences in touch with analytical, methodological and ethical questions important in newer prison ethnography.