Advanced Topics in Anthropology (Half-Term): Discourses on Punishment

Imprisonment has become the central form of punishment worldwide. It has given birth to multiple approaches from justification to denunciation, from description to fiction, from realism to utopia. It has mobilized multiple disciplines, notably legal studies, political science, moral philosophy, evolutionary science, anthropology, sociology, economics, literature, and journalism. The course addresses from a critical perspective the way in which these discourses apprehend punishment and incarceration, their reactionary power, their transformative potentialities and their blind spots.