Paper Short Abstract:

In Kanaky/New Caledonia, the penal population's own bodily practices spread outside the prison, becoming generational badges and configuring a specific aesthetic spectrum, showing the articulation between person, class, gender, ethnicity in a colonial space of settlement.

Paper Abstract:

In Kanaky/ New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the south Pacific, the prison's experience was no longer then just a 'passage' but a real forge of symbolic, identity and aesthetic references "at home". This process made use of the logic of physically inscribing by tatooing and circumcision one's difference and thus the reaffirmation of one's specificity as men culturally defined as Kanak (the indigenous people of the country). Individual and collective identities are restructured in the porous passage between domesticity and the prison walls, determining new ethnic and class's visibilities in a contended space in which the Kanaks have historically constituted the head of the anti-colonial emancipation movement. "Making" men inside and outside the penitentiary then becomes as much the consequence of a dynamic of criminalization of global Kanak society as it is the expression of individual and generational forms of resistance to the stigma.