Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the contrasting experience of the carceral for two prisoners’ families in rural Nepal, exploring how they navigate different social and physical spaces. ‘Carcerality’ emerges as subjective and contingent on social markers of difference, in a dialogic relationship with state law.

Paper long abstract:

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around a district prison in western Nepal, this paper will focus on the contrasting experience of ‘the carceral’ for two prisoners’ families from the same community, by exploring how they navigate different social and physical spaces. They continually wrestle with the tensions of the different expectations placed on them: on the one hand, being a ‘good parent’ requires an involvement with the carceral world in order to care for an imprisoned son; on the other, a respectable member of the community is expected to keep their distance from that very world. I will detail how they move in and out of different social spaces, and how their status also shifts across the physical boundaries of the prison, to conclude that ‘the carceral’ they experience is subjective, and contingent on their social identities of caste, class, and gender, in a normative societal order that in itself can be punishing. A focus on relatives here also brings out the dialogic relationship between the prison and the world outside, as ‘free’ people’s experiences of carcerality inevitably impact upon the daily lives of their relatives behind bars.