Making Family and Ethnography Among Brother-in-Arms

Abstract

This article discusses the plot of doing research among “brothers in uniform”. I approach the complexity of doing ethnography in prisons in the dual condition of ethnographer and criminal police officer, but also in the flows of relationships between the inside and outside of these institutions and between the face-to-face and the virtual. The analysis of this plot emerges from the unique way of researching prisons in which, at the same time, I am an ethnographer, object and subject of research, involved to the core in the prison scene. In this scenario, the production of kinship relations, which extend from the face-to-face to the virtual, has the uniform as a primordial element in the constitution of complicity, intimacy and political alignment, elements glimpsed in terms of solidarity and support networks in the face of difficult conditions of life and work in Ceará prisons.