Ethnographic Imagination in the Field of the Prison

Abstract

In this chapter, I propose that something about ethnographic practice itself can help us expand our understanding of what is possible for the ethnography of prisons. As other chapters in this volume attest, ethnographers of prisons face challenges specific to oppressive and secretive institutions (see particularly chapters 2 and 13). The extent and intensity of these challenges vary widely, but in many cases we encounter an inversion of the guiding premise of our craft, as the fundamentally relational quality of the ethnographic method encounters restriction, surveillance and suspicion. My aim here is to explore the territory that emerges from these pressures, such that the field site, or specific events within that site, cannot be grasped or comprehended entirely through standard ethnographic practices. By seeing ethnography as a specific perception of our surroundings — an apprehension of figure and ground — I suggest one way we might approach our collective imagination as prison ethnographers in creative and perhaps unexpected ways.