Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología

Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol | eISSN 2011-4273 | ISSN 1900-5407

Matrioshkas, or One Confinement within Another

No. 36 (2019-07-01)
  • María Angélica Ospina Martínez
https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda36.2019.08

Abstract

This visual essay presents the photographic collection Matrioshkas (I): Corrosion and Scars, taken by the author in different Colombian establishments that once served as total institutions, in particular, of forced reclusion. The purpose of the text that accompanies the collection is to record some facets of the experience of confinement and its repercussions on bodies and their environment, as an input for the anthropological analysis of what confinement does to people and places. The spaces of confinement may be abandoned, but the corrosive traces and the scarred matter of the experience remain, and these are seldom used by the ethnographer-archaeologist to deduce meanings and forms of habitation. On the contrary, as evidence of the dense human and non-human presence, the author postulates them as materials that attest to the suspension of time, the resignification of limits and the diverse strategies of survival in a situation that is borderline in itself: forced confinement.

Keywords: anthropology of space, confinement, ethnography, experience, total institutions

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