Paper short abstract

Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.

Paper long abstract

Lebanon’s state institutions are mostly discussed in relation to an absence or lack of care. Yet care is administered by state and non-state institutions in unlikely, contradictory, and subtle ways. These care mechanisms work alongside practices of domination and control rather than countering or undoing them. My paper takes Lebanon’s prison system as a case study towards analyzing how the state’s dual impulses to govern and tend to the population intersect in disturbing ways as well as the implications this may have for anthropological research. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with ten former prisoners in Lebanon, I examine the forms of care that are undertaken by prison authorities to trace how care is experienced, channeled, and reverberated through the state/carceral violence – and what forms of resistance or refusal are subsequently possible. How to conduct fieldwork with and “care” for one’s interlocutors without reproducing or reiterating carceral violence, surveillance, control? What might an ethics of care, reciprocity, and solidarity look like in such circumstances? Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.