Log in
Nicolás Díaz Letelier Publishes "Aislar. Una etnografía de la condición carcelaria en Rapa Nui"
Joint PhD candidate Nicolás Díaz Letelier’s (Isolating. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition in Rapa Nui) has been published in Spanish by .
On the most remote island on the planet stands the smallest prison under Chilean jurisdiction. It is said to have no padlocks, no high fences, and no one who wants to escape. It is called the happiest prison in the world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted alongside incarcerated men, gendarmes, judicial actors, and correctional officials, Díaz Letelier composes in Aislar an ethnography of the Easter Island Prison Complex that serves as a magnifying glass: in its most minimal form, this prison reveals what constitutes every prison, on Rapa Nui, in Chile, and elsewhere.
Chapter by chapter, the book traces a phenomenology of everyday confinement: the rhythms, gestures, and silences through which punishment becomes embedded in daily life, both for those who inhabit the prison and for those who guard it. As the most brutal conditions of incarceration, such as precariousness, overcrowding, and overt violence, are stripped away one by one, what remains in plain sight is the very foundation of the prison: the production of suffering as an irreducible and unreformable principle of all penitentiary justice. Aislar returns the question that no society wants to answer: What, exactly, are we doing when we lock someone up in the name of justice?
Parts of this work appeared in English in Current Anthropology as (2022). The essay received the from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Nicolás is a fifth-year graduate student in Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. His dissertation research is co-advised by Professors João Biehl and Laurence Ralph.