Criminal justice history in Latin America : promising notes

Abstract

Q uite recently, a series of research projects, stemming from various sub- disciplines and informed by distinct methodological perspectives, have begun to converge towards a common territory which, for lack of a better name, I shall call crime and justice history.Studies of banditry, prostitution, street violence, policing, prisons, corporal punishment, ideologies of social order, indigenous litigation, the legal profession, and judicial practices -to name only the principal groupings -have opened up a field of inquiry which, in approach, sensibility, and subject matter, seems quite distinct from the old legal history, as it was practiced in Latin America 2 .These new concerns and new sensibilities -gender studies, subaltern or « bottom-up » history, discourse analysis, ethnographies of modernity, the history of the disciplines, questions of hegemony and social order, studies of democratization, etc. -have produced an accumulation of insights and evidence on issues that are, in reality, quite traditional: crime, law, justice, and punishment.Methodologically eclectic and with fuzzy borders, this « new » field seems to be enjoying a period of remarkable vitality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.