Mundo do Crime: revisitando anotações de trabalho de campo 50 anos depois

Abstract

The World of Crime – Revisiting Fieldwork Notes 50 Years Later. While recently rummaging through boxes of documents in my office at IFCS-UFRJ, I discovered several notes from fieldwork carried out in 1975 and 1976 during research on the inmates of a São Paulo house of detention. These notes, which I thought were lost, were essential for the writing of my book Mundo do Crime: a ordem pelo avesso (1979, 1883). In this ethnographic record of the impressions about the visits to the prison and the interviews conducted with the inmates, I tried to describe and reflect on the challenges faced during the investigation. Some of these observations were reported in the book. This text redescribes some of these records half a century later. I believe that this recovery can somehow dialogue with the vast body of research and writings on the subject elaborated over these decades, showing a little of the daily life of the main and largest detention center in the country, marked by the terrible massacre of prisoners by the military police, which occurred in 1992 and by the fact that it no longer exists as it was imploded in 2002.