The Culture of Violent Behavior: Language, Culture, and Worldview of Prison Rape

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of theories of language, culture, schemata, and the function of linguistic enculturation as a means of acquiring cultural knowledge and competence in the oral culture of prisons. It illustrates the methodological processes necessary to derive cultural information from linguistic data. The chapter describes data coding as a type of semantic analysis, and explain domain analysis and the taxonomic nature of cultural knowledge. It also illustrates with linguistic data elicited in author ethnosemantic study of prison rape, which explains that inmates' source of knowledge about prison rape and sexual behavior derives primarily from prison oral culture's verbal storehouse of rape and sexual violence stories. Coding texts is an empirical and replicable analytic method used to analyze narrative data. Domain analysis has long been a mainstay of cognitive anthropology. Prison culture's range of sexual categorizations depends on both prison inmates' and correctional staffers' cultural assessment of inmate sexuality and sexual behavior.

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