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John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Language and Violence. Pragmatic perspectives. Edited by Daniel Silva. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Chapter 9

Discursive constructions of deviance in the narratives of a prison inmate Liana Biar This chapter aims at identifying a specific type of discourse about violence: the stories of adherence to drug trafficking, their emergence in the research context and the processes of identity construction resulting from said context. The data comes from fieldwork done during 2009 in one of the main prison institutions in Brazil. Interviews were realized with inmate members of Rio de Janeiro criminal gangs who attended the prison school. These interviews were then qualitatively analyzed, from a micro-perspective approach, in light both of studies on oral narratives, based on interactional sociolinguistics, and of identity studies, especially those which consider narrative discourse as a privileged locus for social identity construction and analysis. From the analysis of the narratives’ structure systems of coherence, it was possible to understand the way in which inmates neutralize the force of values and of accepting order so as to give new meaning to deviant actions, as being pleasant or respectable.

1. Introduction In the social sciences, academic works which explore the topic of deviance in complex societies are quite common – in particular, Becker (1963), Velho (1974), and the vast amount of work related to their own. Nevertheless, there is still a growing demand and a rather pressing need for research that hones its way of thinking about discourse, and which aims at explaining, from a microanalytical perspective, the group interactions that make up contemporary social formations. Moving in this direction and endorsing the notion of deviance as a symbolic social construction that comes about dialogically from interactions that emerge in situated social practices, the objective of this text is to analyze oral narratives co-constructed in interviews with prison inmates in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Prisons are spaces in which discourses about violence become potent, since they hold the protagonists of stories about crime. In this analysis, I shall focus on the processes and discourse markers that give shape to what is conventionally called “deviant identity”. doi 10.1075/pbns.279.10bia © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Rather than attempt to explain the complexity of the identity constructions that emerge in the mold of the prison system in its entirety, this chapter shall unite theories about identity, deviance and narrative. It shall attempt to demonstrate the importance of the symbolic dimension, present in some aspects of each of those three areas, as the breeding ground of co-constructions of labels and trajectories that are geared towards specific interactional purposes. In other words, in this chapter I am interested in showing the contact points among areas of study that believe stabilized meanings regarding who one is are strategic and co-constructed, and that take into account (1) claims of belonging to certain cultural aspects, and (2) interactional aspects that lead social actors to construct their identities in a favorable light, always geared towards another’s expectations.

2. Identity and discourse In the socio-interactional perspective, language that emerges from interactions – discourse – isn’t seen only as a reflection of macro-structures, but also dialectically, as a process of constructing actions, social realities, and also identities (Moita Lopes 2002). The interactive construction of subjectivity is particularly important in Goffman’s (1959) sociological work. For Goffman, identities come about in the presence of others, starting from different signs that participants constantly give off and interpret in daily interactions. Such signs help us to define the situation and guide our way of acting in the world. Whether it is purposefully or with little awareness, social actors are constantly expressing themselves, making an impression on those who receive and interpret such signs. This is what Goffman refers to as the “self ”, defined as “the subjective sense of his own situation and his own continuity and character that an individual comes to obtain as a result of his various social experiences” (1963, 105). Although this sense of subjectivity resides in a social actor, according to Goffman this actor is not without contradictions. This is because activities in the presence of others, since they are indexical, are always characterized by conveying a promise: the original inferences of the indexical signs are always related to expectations, such that the identity that is co-constructed in the interaction is always an impression, an appearance. The fluid character of these projected images require the people who are interacting to think of them as strategic and regulated work, depending on how the situation is defined and the image they wish to obtain from the exchange. A strategic plan of action is thus established, based on longstanding schemes of knowledge that associate certain signs with pre-established interpretations.

© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Chapter 9. Discursive constructions of deviance in the narratives of a prison inmate 229

Goffman’s choice of using theater as the basis of his metaphors for life in society was not made lightly. According to the author, the interactional modus vivendi is characterized by paying homage to appearances, based on the theatrical work of portraying activities and roles, in which the situation is the stage, the subject is the actor or actress, and the interlocutors are the audience, from whom a certain degree of cooperative attention is expected. As in theater, social life is full of abstract stereotypes that are collectively sustained and that restrict identitary possibilities, regulating the way in which a certain group is expected to behave socially. Goffman uses the expression “institutionalized face” to refer to actors’ tendency to incorporate socially recognized values into their performances in order to create an idealized impression for their peers, ignoring any incompatibilities in order to maintain expressive coherence. These behaviors depend, as was mentioned previously, on the type of audience, also idealized in the performer’s eyes: to paraphrase Goffman, those for whom we play certain parts are not the same as those for whom we play other parts. From there we can see that, for Goffman, the knowledge required for life in society and for indicators of belonging to social groups means obtaining not only a certain repertoire of conventional signs related to pre-established norms, but also a familiarity with how to manipulate them in order to carefully keep a culturally desirable mask in place. This means that, in Goffman’s non-representationalist vision, the self is a social product resulting from these normalized performances in which the individual is engaged, inevitably false in their local representations, yet necessarily appearing to be truthful. Based on Goffman’s ideas about the interactional performance of the self, other studies have tried to account for the relationship among discourse, culture and identity (Bastos 2005, 2008; Moita Lopes 2002, 2003; Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Schiffrin 1996, among others). Such studies view identity as a contextual, dialogical and multifaceted performance that emerges in a co-constructed manner for locally situated interactional purposes that are based on culturally accepted standards. For Bastos (2005,13), identity is constructed through a process in which individuals transform, adapt, accept and react to canonical standards of behavior. Through its emphasis on identity construction as a process and on its agentive aspects, this definition is related explicitly to two of the most frequent current-day theoretical issues: firstly, to anti-essentialist discussions about the fragmentation of the contemporary subject (Hall 1992), capable of showing multiple, sometimes contradictory, facets of her/himself that are always subject to negotiation and re- creation depending on the practices and communities of discourse in which s/he is engaged (see also Moita Lopes 2002). Second, it is related to socio-constructionist epistemologies, firmly believing that meanings – a category in which identities are included – become comprehensible in and by way of their discursive elaboration, © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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recognizing the demiurgic potential language has over all that we believe exists (see, among others, Gergen 1985; Ibáñez 1994). 1 With specific regard to identities, what is recognized – similar to what is seen in Goffman’s work – is that the apparent stability of identity is derived from repeated processes of discursive performance (Butler 1990). An important point for the analysis that shall be developed in this study is Goffman’s observation regarding individuals’ tendency to always project themselves in a positive light, based on social consensus for what is considered “positive”, through “a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation and rediscovery” (1959, 8). As I shall try to show, the images of the self projected during interviews are strategically geared towards that particular frame and related to a set of expectations for what social research is. It is this background that guides the discursive choices made by the interviewees; in the interview excerpts analyzed in this chapter, a leader of a criminal faction reclaims a politically correct image. As Moita Lopes (2002) suggests, identities, despite their fluidity and fragmentation, reach a sort of “photographable” stability as meaning is discursively constructed.

3. Deviant identity According to interactionist theories, a social position is not something that one possesses and later exhibits; rather, it is a consequence of adopting and accepting appropriate and expressively coherent models of conduct. Studies of this theoretical inclination that focus on deviance tend to characterize it in the same way, countering more deterministic visions. Such deterministic explanations can be divided into two basic groups. The first group, of a more psychologizing slant, equates deviance with vices and personality flaws. Its basic idea is that there is something inherently deviant in a certain type of individual that is qualitatively distinct from what exists in so-called “normal people”. A classic example of how this vision has been applied is the creation of the prison system – its history and the justifications for it. Authors such as Foucault (1977) and Goffman (1961) who investigate the genealogy and the interactional patterns in these institutions, speak out against this vision by showing that the emergence of jails is closely related to processes of modernization and the blossoming of the 1. Discourse studies that endorse constructionism also consider it to be a critical stance. In accordance with this vision, when identities are chosen as the object of study, the researcher commits to favoring social transformation by denying static, fundamentalist ideas about people and social groups (see Moita Lopes 2006).



humanities, which tended to find psychologist causes of so-called “criminal instincts”. This theoretical assumption, widely accepted as common sense, considers a supposed character flaw or moral defect in individuals labeled as delinquents to be the cause of their deviant actions, as was mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. As such, prisons should try to reform inmates, believing that it is possible to modify this “instinct” through education and bodily discipline. The isolation, standardization and rigid systems of surveillance and routine in prisons are supposed to encourage the transformation of inmates’ improper conduct into socially acceptable behavior. In other words, penitentiaries function according to a plan of action in which their inmates are, on the one hand, submitted to mechanisms of standardization and erasure of their stories and identities asserted in civil society, and, on the other hand, put through mechanisms that train them to take on another self (see Goffman 1961). This tendency to individualize crime creates an obvious problem for explaining crimes done by groups, as in the case, for example, of drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro: explanations of a strictly psychological nature are weakened because they assume there is a certain determinant, overlapping combination of pathologies among people who display deviant behavior. The second type of explanation is of a macro-sociological character, equating causes of criminality with pathologies of a “social” nature and believing that the causes of criminality lie in class struggles, processes of urbanization and difficulties in upward social mobility resulting from these processes (Velho 1974). Such an explanation also has its limitations, since it treats social condition and life history as determining factors, homogenizing categories such as family and neighborhood, and ignoring the fact that, in practice, these groups do not homogeneously adopt the same sort of behavior. In Rio de Janeiro, for instance, about 22% of the population lives in favelas, only a small percentage of which is involved in criminal activities. Besides that, upper-class citizens are also known to be involved in drug trafficking, although this information is usually absent from police records (see Misse e Vargas 2010). According to Gilberto Velho, both explanations are variations of a static view of social life that is lacking in complexity. This view and human psychology itself are reified, placing the explanation for deviance well beyond that which direct observation can reach and well before the process of actually accusing someone of being “deviant”. According to Velho, this is a variable that is much more relevant than the deviant action itself, since circumstances in which the label “deviant” precedes the action are just as common as circumstances in which the action never results in the label. As such, in this study I am basically interested in the concept of deviance as it is formulated by Becker (1963). Influenced by ethnomethodology and © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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phenomenology, which tend to spurn exploratory mechanisms that take “abstract forces” into account, the author emphasizes that it is necessary to consider what deviant individuals do in their daily routines, as well as what they think about themselves, about society and about their activities. Becker is interested in elucidating questions such as what is the process through which a “normal” person becomes involved in conventional institutions and behaviors? And what process makes that person engage in behaviors considered to be deviant? Becker, stressing agency as a principle of social action and, moving his discussion to the symbolic plain, bases his work on the rather evident notion that a group passes judgment on what is deviant and, for this reason, different groups consider different things to be deviant. Deviance itself is a vague and divergent concept that results from a process of labeling that is not infallible, nor does it correspond to what is real, as the deviant individual is someone to whom, due to complex power relations, a label has been successfully applied. This social actor does not have a localized and identifiable cause for his or her deviant behavior. Becker reformulates such behavior as something that emerges from social relations, that is created within them – “social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance” (1963, 9) –, and for which a certain degree of consensus and cooperation among many people is required so that it can be sanctioned as such. As was mentioned previously, since deviance is not defined here by a type of act or by any kind of conditioning, but rather as something that results from interaction between the accusers and the accused, it is considered a controversial notion, influenced by different perspectives. In fact, Becker points out that the socially agreed-upon rules that determine the parameters for deviant action do not descend directly from the moral values cultivated in a given culture. Values are ambiguous and can be interpreted in many ways. As Geertz has said, cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete, and values are part of this incompleteness – this room for maneuvering, for open-ended meanings. The rules are products of a doer’s action and of the power relations that came to a consensus regarding that action. A concept formulated by Becker comes forth from this observation and is of particular interest to me in this study. For the author, impulses and deviant desires, which everyone certainly has, are transformed in definite patterns of and standards for action by way of social interpretations of an experience that is ambiguous in and of itself. This ambiguity tends to force the social actor to produce rational justifications that make the deviant action seem to conform within a larger circle of acceptable behaviors. Deviants remain sensitive to conventional codes and conducts, and the way they find of dealing with them is to draw on neutralization tactics that come to organize their identities. These neutralization tactics are “justifications [of a historical, psychological or legal nature] for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent, but not by the legal system or by society at large” (Sykes and Matza © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


1957, 666). Nevertheless, they neutralize the force of values and of accepting order to the point of giving new meaning to the deviant actions as pleasant or respectable. In this study, I assert that life story narratives are a fertile terrain for the elaboration of such justifications.

4. Narrative Analysis Narratives are recurrently seen as a locus of identity constructions (Schiffrin 1996; Moita Lopes 2002; Bastos 2005, 2008). In them, we organize ideas about subjects, objects and narrated actions in an evaluative manner, positioning ourselves in relation to these elements and, as a result of this, creating an apparently stable self that can be analyzed. Defined as a way of recapitulating past experiences, narratives have been studied in terms of their syntactic structure (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972) and emergence in interactionally diverse contexts (Mishler 2001). In this study, however, since our analysis of deviant identity organization shall focus on justifications for deviance, my main objective is to support studies such as Linde’s (1993) and Bruner’s (1990). These studies approach cohesion in narratives, that is to say, the way in which events told in stories relate to each other, through mechanisms for creating sequentiality and causality that are faithful not to an order of the real, but to what is culturally accepted. In other words, I am interested in seeing how narratives make events, sometimes unusual and contradictory, conform to standards of beliefs and values that are culturally accepted by the group. Particularly useful for the development of this analysis was Linde’s (1993) work on life stories – specifically on narratives about personal experiences – collected in interviews. Basically, the objective of Linde’s work is to observe how these units, simultaneously social and discursive, work to create and maintain social identities. These identities become manifest not only through the evaluative markers present in the stories, but also mainly because while constructing life stories we are also constructing a sense of being in the social world in an acceptable and coherent way; we are also organizing the world around us, so as to establish relations of continuity between deeds and incidents, giving them sequences and causalities that are compatible with the values and basic beliefs of our society. According to Linde, this is one of the most basic ways of negotiating and legitimating our multiple ways of belonging to social categories: justify them so as to make them conform to culturally shared and valued abstract principles. Narrative coherence is therefore constructed by discursive organization and by the relation among events that emerge from this sequencing.


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Linde’s work on professional choices, for example, reveals that among middle class North American individuals it is common to justify one’s choice of profession with relation to one’s personal abilities (for example, “I was good at it”, “I’ve been interested in it since I was a child”). These are the type of justifications that are considered appropriate for success stories in a particular narrative. The suitability of these reasons, at least from the viewpoint of North American middle class culture, is what makes discourse coherent. Coherence can be sewn together through common sense or through a system of coherence, meaning systems of beliefs and relationships among beliefs derived from folk versions of specialized theories, like psychoanalysis, astrology and behaviorism. One of the objectives of this study is to describe how relationships of sequentiality and causality are presented, and what systems are used to support them, in the discourse of inmates in a penitentiary. Through the summary of Linde’s (1993) work, we can infer that maintaining coherence is work in which narrators engage while justifying and explaining a choice. This is done by maintaining focus on culturally shared schemes (or systems). This idea is also backed by Bruner’s (1990) work, in which the narrative also serves to organize discourse and construct reality. According to Bruner, and very similar to Linde, meanings assigned to human experiences are public and constructed intersubjectively from interpretative cultural systems based on cognitive models or schemes of knowledge (beliefs, desires, etc.) shared by common sense. Narratives are thus construction mechanisms that organize – or shape – experience, which is by nature porous and discontinuous, within these systems. An idea derived from this previous concept and taken from Bruner (1990) that is especially important for the analysis we shall now begin to develop, is that narratives are not necessary when things are as they should be. They are constructed when schemes of culturally shared beliefs are violated (borrowing the pragmatic notion of cooperation from Grice 1989). For Linde (1993), as well as the entire constructionist tradition rooted in sophist philosophy, which asserts that meanings are conventions, the narrativization of facts is not based on reality, but rather on a relation that is located inside discourse, and, Bruner adds, inside cultural canons. In other words, a story is a construction of a possible world, where things that are exceptional or out of the ordinary become possible; the purpose of the story is to find a state of intentions that at least makes deviance from the cultural canonical standard understandable. For Sacks (1984) as well, the construction of narratives is part of the work of making oneself seem normal, by shaping what we see into a standard of normalcy, encapsulating experience into the mental models shared by our peers so that things make sense.



I link Becker’s ideas with the other concepts mentioned here in my argument that life story narratives, such as those told during the interviews analyzed in my research, function as neutralization strategies that shape deviance into the order of what is socially acceptable. The justifications for participating in drug trafficking shall reveal this, as we shall now see in the analysis of our data.

5. A brief contextualization of the data The data analyzed in the following section were collected during fieldwork in a Penitentiary Complex in Rio de Janeiro. In the year 2009, I visited the prison regularly with my research partner Julio Giannini, particularly the prison school located in one of the penitentiary units, during which time I was able to observe, participate in activities and do interviews with some of the inmates who were willing to collaborate. At present, the corpus of this still ongoing research comprises a total of seven interviews of between 30 and 95 minutes, which were transcribed based on the transcription conventions that can be found in Appendix. For this article, I chose to use one of these interviews to illustrate and defend the viewpoints of this study. The interviewee, who was given the fictional name “José”, is a young leader in the criminal faction to which he belongs. José is 29 years old, and serving his second term in prison for his activities in the drug trade. Imprisoned criminal faction leaders such as José serve as mediators and peacekeepers between the inmates and the prison management, avoiding potential conflicts. For this reason, they are given the right to circulate freely about the corridors that connect the communal cells and the school. The other inmates have a very high level of respect for these leaders, as they are considered to be in a hierarchically superior position of power in the faction’s chain of command, spokesmen for their high commanders and responsible for giving orders and meting out punishment to the rest of the group within the prison. All of the other inmates with whom we spoke had to request José’s permission before accepting to be interviewed. José himself did not have to ask for permission from his superiors, expressed his desire to be interviewed, and seemed quite honored that we were doing research on this topic and had requested to speak with his men. The data from the interview with José that shall be analyzed here come from approximately 14 minutes of the recording. Julio Giannini and I were in a classroom in which artwork made by the inmates is created and displayed. On that day, we waited a long time for José, who had already shown interest in being interviewed and had been summoned to the interview by his companions since the beginning of the school day. Julio and I sat next to each other, with José in front of us. I held


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the recorder. José responded to my questions, but almost always while looking at Julio. Until then, we had always called all of the people interviewed by the code name “João” while recording, but this interviewee requested to be called “José”, in order to be different from the rest. In the interview that shall be described shortly, José talks about his family history and offers a detailed explanation of how he was exposed to police violence for the first time, an incident that, according to him, caused him to become involved in drug trafficking. The selected sequences were analyzed qualitatively and interpretatively, focusing on the theoretical templates developed by Linde (1993) regarding life stories, and on observations, particularly those of Goffman (1959), regarding the discursive presentation of the self. 2 The nature of the interview and the stories that surfaced during it lead to this article’s main query: How does José construct his narrative about becoming involved in drug trafficking? The following analysis shall respond to this question in three complementary stages: a. analysis of the narrative’s sequentiality and causality relations, as well as the systems of coherence they support, according to Linde’s (1993) theoretical developments. b. analysis of the way in which the narrator describes himself vis-à-vis his past. In the data examined here, I shall study the codification of agency (Duranti 2004) in José’s discourse, and the way in which this linguistic manifestation constructs a socio-discursive presentation (Goffman 1959) of the narrator-character, also contributing to the system of coherence that sews the components of the interview together. c. analysis of the categorizations and expectations about the research itself that become relevant during the mixed interactional encounter of the interview. These are made clear in specific moments in which José interrupts the topics of a narrative in progress in order to answer to a sort of “agenda”, seemingly influenced by his recognition that academic research is a type of work that requires critical social reflections regarding social stratification and the Brazilian prison system. The following subsections shall examine each of these three topics.

2. Narratives are also approached interactionally by Lewis and Bastos, in this volume.



6. The beginning of José’s involvement in drug trafficking: Sequentialities and causalities The interviews that provide the data for this research have a recurrent characteristic: in them, narratives are always constructed for the purpose of justifying, or accounting for, choosing to become involved in crime, even when this topic was not asked about specifically. Participation in drug trafficking – a choice of an unusual and reportable character – is, therefore, a topic tacitly understood as necessary, derived from discourses or shared knowledge that guide the interview. In Jose’s case, his narrative equates the beginning of his involvement in drug trafficking with experiencing prejudice, particularly the fact that he was persecuted by a police officer. As we shall see shortly, three shorter narratives join together to form a longer narrative whose point is to clarify Jose’s reasons for entering the world of crime. Therefore, I shall consider the three excerpts found in this section as one large narrative, divided into three different movements, each of which has a specific “subpoint” related to the interactional project of presenting the self during the interview. Excerpt 1. Removing blame from the family 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Liana

José

Liana

José

so↑ let’s begin… talking a little about your life story, ok? so, I wanted you to tell us a little about what your life was like… maybe about↓.. [about what part? my chi:ldhood or… [it can be since chi::ldhood, it can be about your relationship with your fa:mily, let’s start from the very beginning… for me to try to reconstruct your path… see who José.. is ↑ .hhh ok let’s go… I’m José, right, now I’m twenty nine years old, born and raised over in Itaboraí… you know?… my parents are separated… with a hard path through life…y’know?, to the point of me- being incarcerated. when my father and my mother was separated, I was approximately three years old… and from then on my mother started to struggle to be able to.. support not just me, but also four other siblings. my mother’s bee::n a house(wife), my mother’s been a cleaning lady… my mother’s bee::n is… a maid… and so on↑… and then my mother met a guy, right, who ended up raising us↑,…


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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Liana José

he was your stepfather? he was my stepfather. He raised me really well.. giving me values.. really calm, my father also always did ((incomprehensible)) help us and also ( ) and that’s where ↑José came from, y’know? José studied, studied, studied a lot… and- and his family wanted that more than (crime). he studied, °I finished middle school° and unfortunately had this here in store for me…

All of the prototypical stages of narrative construction appear and come together in a move that is recurrent in inmate’s life stories: they usually try to save their families from appearing responsible for their entering the drug trade, constructing them, particularly their parents, through positive evaluations. José’s speech, marked by emphatic parallelisms (lines 19–21), associates his mother, for example, with qualities related to struggle, determination and honesty. mother’s bee::n a house(wife), my mother’s been a cleaning lady… my mother’s bee::n is… a maid… and so on↑…

Even his parents’ separation, first referred to in lines 12–14 (my parents are separated… with a hard path through life…y’know?) is reconstructed immediately afterwards, and freed from negative evaluations in lines 25–27 (he

was my stepfather. He raised me really well (…) my father also always did help us), moving from the issue of suffering (potentially

a motive for becoming involved in crime) to simply mentioning the stepfather as another positively situated family reference. As we shall see later on, saving the face of his family by removing the potential for blame is crucial to the theoretical objective inferred in his story, namely undoing psychologized discourse about the causes of deviance in favor of a macro-sociological vision that blames the “system” for the inmate’s situation. In line 28 (that’s where ↑José came from), the protagonist constructs himself as someone who emerges from an adequate family structure – as someone who inherited, even, the agentive and honest self attributed to his mother. Once more he uses emphatic repetitions (José studied, studied, studied, lines 28–29) as an evaluative resource to help prove that point. Excerpt 2. Professional ability 33 34 35 36 37

José Liana

that nowadays I- I know I can draw, I’m an artist[… a::nd [ah, I didn’t know that you also… are part of the group ((we all look at the paintings on the other side of the room))


38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45


José

Liana José

I even did that one there, that woman there with the kid there. I did it ((points with pride to one of the best pieces of artwork displayed)), that’s ↑great… .hhh The photo, I look at the photo here and put it down on paper… a couple sizes…, any size I put it down on paper a::nd…

In Excerpt 2, a second sub-narrative, less canonical than the previous one but with a similar discursive function, is constructed. A new summary (that nowadays I- I know I can draw, I’m an artist, lines 33–34) interrupts the story about José’s family that was in progress in order to introduce a new virtue of his. The narrative clauses that follow (lines 38–45), anchored to the deictic reference to the painting displayed in the room in which the interaction occurred, stress José’s artistic abilities (sub-point). José, in a similar manner to the first sub-narrative about his family, constructs himself as someone who is capable, talented and hardworking: I know I can draw, I’m an artist (lines 33–34) I even did that one there, that woman there with the kid there. (lines 38–39) several sizes… any size I put it down on paper (lines 44–45)

José’s artistic abilities are described through actions in the present tense and indicators of positive evaluations, such as repetitions and parallel rhythms, so that they are portrayed as everyday and easy. Excerpt 3. Police violence and becoming involved in drug trafficking 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

José

(…) any size I put it down on paper a::nd… ( ) really it’s the authorities that’s turned me into this… because… when I wa::s sixteen years old …I always looked kinda.. first time someone looks at me they think I’m a criminal,.. ‘cause of my appearance.. .. so several times goin’ to school, or comin’ from school, goin’ to a bar, or goin’ to a party, I always ran into a police car or police officer, always. the first, this was the first.. ↑so, when I was seventeen years old ..when was it? I experienced police violence for the first time.. why? I was going to see a girl I was dating… I wo:rked, I stu:died… but when I was at the bus stop there was also a guy who.. in their eyes he


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60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

was a criminal.. already had a record, right?, ↓anyway.. so they approached me., they approa:ched me,.. they said I was a criminal and that I was( ) I had to take out my wallet and.. my payslip, and I had no clue “↑this one here he ain’t got no clue, blah blah blah, …he’s practically a bum, just like a bum”. and and me, huh? being approached, and so I shouldn’t have stood next to someone who shouldn’t ( ) he attacked me phy:sically, mo:rally too… and from that day on they’ve had me pegged as a bad guy, for being someone who[for saying what I think. Liana José

[you got stuck with that reputation. I got stuck with that reputation because of some (brute), huh?, singling me out… even telling the big drug boss that if he saw me at four in the morning ( ) that I wouldn’t exist no more, ↓I wouldn’t be alive no more, y’know?… so then my family also (was worried about that…). that was when I had to drop out of school, give up every↓thing.

Excerpt 3 presents a third and longer sub-narrative from the interview. Starting with a new evaluative summary (really it’s the authorities that’s turned me into this, lines 46–47), José begins to develop another point: the justification for becoming involved in drug trafficking. This summary, which at first seems to be a new rupture in the flow of interview topics, is simply returning to the move present in the first narrative, in Excerpt 1, lines 13–15 (with a hard path through life…y’know?, to the point of me- being incarcerated), redirecting it to the beginning of his involvement in crime – the unstated topic of the interview, as we mentioned previously. If that mention of suffering did not seem to make sense as part of the story about the family’s determination and honesty, it now takes on a new meaning. The structure of this new narrative is also hardly canonical. The long orientation (lines 47–55) that brings the interlocutor to a key moment in José’s adolescence (when I wa::s sixteen years old, line 47; so, when I was seventeen years old, lines 54–55), while José simultaneously points out a negatively constructed characteristic for the first time (I always looked kinda.. first time someone looks at me they think I’m a criminal, lines 48–49), is reinforced and repaired by a second summary (so, when I was seventeen

years old.. when was it? I experienced police violence for the first time.., lines 55–56) that reframes the subsequent narrative clauses

(lines 58–80). This time, these clauses account for a specific episode, situated in a specific moment of José’s past. © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


The evaluations present in the excerpt, like the commentary “I always looked kinda […] criminal” (lines 48–49), make it so that self, previously

constructed as capable and coming from a good, honest family, comes to be victimized through circumstances that are beyond the actor’s control, such as his appearance and the frequency of police surveillance. This frequency is emphasized in an evaluative manner through emphatic parallelisms (lines 51–54; 57–58; 61–2; 68–69), so several times goin’ to school, or comin’ from school, goin’ to a bar, or goin’ to a party, I always ran into a police car or police offer, always. the first, this was the first.. (lines 51–54) I was going to see a girl I was dating… I wo:rked, I stu:died… (lines 57–58) so they approached me., they approa:ched me,.. they said I was a criminal and that I was( ) (lines 61–62) he attacked me phy:sically, mo:rally too… (line 68–69)

and through reported speech (lines 64–66) that adds a dramatic quality to the complicating action, drawing the listener into the narrative: “↑this one here he ain’t got no clue, …he’s practically a bum, just like a bum”. The narrator devalues the problems in his family history, reported as a distant past, and identifies a more recent episode – the police violence – as the determining cause of the beginning of his involvement in crime. It is after this incident with the police officer that José begins to be persecuted and has to seek shelter with the drug traffickers in the favela, from whom he learns the new trade: that was when I had to drop out of school, give up ↓ everything, (lines 78–80). Both the first narrative about his family and the narrative describing José’s artistic abilities – and this is fundamental for the analysis undertaken here – go through a process of syntactic transposition that subordinate these two moves to the third narrative: the first two stories (Excerpts 1 and 2) are transformed into orientations for the third one (Excerpt 3). If police violence is what “provoked” José into becoming involved in drug trafficking, these two moves for saving the family from blame and erasing any possibility of a natural predisposition towards crime construct an initial, long-lasting state for the protagonist. This initial state only changed after a specific event situated in a specific moment of his past, an example of what Mishler © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

242 Liana Biar

(2002) calls a “turning point”. In the initial state of the narrator-character, both his family and he himself are evaluated positively and positioned in a way that contrasts with the deviant universe; under a “favorable light”, in Goffman’s (1959) terms. The evaluative expression “that’s where ↑José came from” (line 28) is emblematic of his emergence in this favorable context. In this sense, the very ordering of the narrative can be seen as an evaluative resource that implies José’s lack of responsibility for his deviant condition. The true culprit is the “system”, the police, discrimination, that is to say, an external or conditioning element that influenced the course of the inmate’s life. As such, three different smaller narratives, identified by their own summaries and sub-points, join together to form a larger narrative – the narrative about becoming involved in drug trafficking. The first two narratives (Excerpts 1 and 2) compose the orientation for the third (Excerpt 3), which, in turn, returns to the general point present at the beginning of José’s speech. Now, some theoretical considerations may be made about the way in which José retells his experience. According to Linde, the sequentiality and attribution of causality networks in the stories are aspects that sew together the narrative’s coherence. These aspects are often supported by discourses based on common sense or by derivations of folk versions of specialized theories, such as, in the case of the data analyzed here, psychoanalysis, astrology or behaviorism. Similarly, for Bruner (1990), the meanings attributed to human experiences are public and intersubjectively constructed, rooted in interpretative cultural systems that are based on cognitive models or schemes of knowledge (beliefs, desires, etc.) shared by common sense. José’s narrative appears sustained, as was mentioned previously, by a system of that nature, namely, the idea according to which deviance is the consequence of subjection to a set of social determinations, such as poverty and class discrimination, and consists in a simplified version of macro-sociological theories on the criminalization of poverty, as described in Section 3 of this chapter. One idea derived from this first one, based on Bruner (1990) and especially important for this analysis, is that narratives are not necessary when things are as they should be; they are constructed when there is a violation of shared norms. José seems to be aware of the unusual character of how he entered the drug trade, and his story consists of constructing a world in which the exceptional or out-of-theordinary becomes possible. The purpose of the story is to find a state of intentions that at least makes deviance from cultural standards understandable. This conformity sometimes implies recognizing a narrative temporality, in a sequence of events, that is different from the mimetic principle that time is a factual sequence of linear moments. As we shall see as the story continues, the episode of police violence is a temporal marker after which José’s path swerves (a turning © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


point). According to José, this was what caused him to “give up ↓ everything” (line 79–80). It is a construction, according to Mishler (2002), that is produced from a “sense of finality”, or from a retrospective look: the entire story is constructed from José’s present perspective, governed by his knowing how the story ends. The story’s coherence can be found in the agreement among its beginning, middle and end: “we have to know how the story ends in order to know how previous events function as the beginning and middle” (idem: 104), in other words, how this beginning and middle create an end that makes sense according to cultural standards and for the context in which the story is produced. 6.1

The mitigation of agentivity

Starting from the interruption in the flow of topics that introduces the third narrative, and from the resulting process of José’s victimization, a feature that becomes prominent is the alternations between agentive and passive constructions that indicate the alignments of the self in the narrative. The narrator-character, previously capable and active in relation to his artistic abilities and the past actions mentioned in the two orienting narratives, suddenly disappears from the subject position in the narrative clauses of the specific past moment of complicating action (the police violence). Table 1 shows this transformation, which I shall refer to as the “mitigation of agentivity”, following Duranti (2004). Table 1. Weakened agentivity Orientation

Complication

José studied, studied, studied

Life unfortunately had this here in store for me

I finished middle school I know I can draw I’m an artist I even did that one there

Any size I put it down on paper

It’s the authorities that’s turned me into this

I experienced police violence for the first time They’ve had me pegged as a bad guy

So they made me into this

From then on they interrupted my life

For being someone who for saying The act of cowardice a human what I think being is capable of doing to me I was fine

Until it got to the point that I had to change my life


244 Liana Biar

In this brief selection of clauses in which the narrator talks about himself, we can see a change in the way he syntactically codifies his persona. The more agentive speech (column 1) refers to qualities and facts from his family history that appear in the orientation (the first two narratives), while the more passive speech, or that in which José appears syntactically objectified (column 2), are related to the result of the complicating action (the third narrative). The transformation in the way agentivity is codified in José’s third narrative can be understood as a strategy for modalizing responsibility about deviant action, attributing its causes to others and, as a consequence, saving his own face: he saves himself from being seen as a deviant and from the interactional disorder that such a confession would perhaps provoke. In José’s narrative, and in accordance with the system of coherence through which it is sewn together, the absence of agency is not a synonym of alienation, but rather, as we have mentioned, of conscious subjection to a set of social determinations; his discourse adds to an implicit theory of social action that sees this action as produced via logic or historic laws which are neither controlled nor understood by the actors. It is in this sense that an examination of the way in which agency is codified can be useful for explaining systems of coherence or ideological formations that form the foundation of discursive constructions. The most passive self present in column 2 is, however, still constructed in the favorable light of which Goffman speaks. In these instances, the deviant paints a picture of himself not as someone who “chose” crime, but as someone who was labeled as a criminal and thus obliged to follow the typical path of those who are so labeled. The logic here is that if there is no choice or responsibility,there must be an external factor that deterministically causes a swerve towards crime by an individual whose history and personal characteristics (present in the agentive phrases in column 1) would have permitted him to go in a different direction. In this sense, the argument that a macro-sociological position functions as a system of coherence that binds causality and narrative sequentiality is strengthened. Criminal action is shaped to fit an ethical system that is socially accepted and prestigious. Combined with the continuity established among the episodes, in the mitigation of agentivity we also have a move of self-evaluation, in which the narrator negotiates and legitimizes his belonging to social categories. 6.2 The “agenda” of the interview and the observer’s paradox Another important aspect in the construction of José’s narrative about becoming involved in drug trafficking is related to the situationality and dialogicity of the discourse in question. As we attempted to explain previously, sequentiality and causality do not depend only on cultural expectations on a macro level, but also © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


on the situated demands of the interactional context in which the narrative was constructed; in other words, the definitions of frame that are negotiated in the social encounter in which narratives emerge. Regarding this point, it is useful to remember, according to Goffman (1963) and using his terminology, that especially in mixed contacts between the stigmatized and the non-stigmatized, the former tend to regulate the potential conflicts in the face-to-face situation, using information control techniques that consist in manipulating the deviant behavior in order to cover it up or soften it. Add this to the fact that this interview was conducted as part of social research and that the interviewers were identified as members of this community of practice (informed interlocutors, once again in Goffman’s words) – a community with which José, as a representative of one of the oldest, largest and most important criminal factions in the country, is familiar (consider the number of academic, journalistic and literary works that mention drug traffickers). The shared knowledge that is relevant for this context certainly influences some of the discursive paths that were chosen; guiding those participating in the event.Another way of making this point is to understand the research interview itself as a legitimate and relevant object for discursive research, as highlighted in contemporary discourse studies (Mishler, 1986). This kind of context allegedly presents some limitations due to the careful, monitored nature of its talk, which supposedly deviates from more spontaneous discourse. However, such limitation, which complicates the participation bases of mixed contacts, can be seen as an analyzable object of research. In short, the widespread critics to the “observer’s paradox” (Labov, 1973) may be turned into an advantage to the analysis (on this, see Biar, 2015). Linde (1993) affirms that one of the requirements for formulating life stories is to offer support for – or at least not to challenge – the life story of the interlocutor. If, in the institutional contexts of which José is knowledgeable, the interviewer is associated with images of critical academic discourse regarding the prison system, it is normal that José would try to not violate such expectations during the course of his interview. This draws attention, in all of the interviews, to how interviewers and interviewees (who were aware that their interviewers were researchers from the social sciences), push a sort of “agenda of the interview”. This move has an essential purpose in José’s interview and is repeated frequently throughout the rest of the data from this research project. In the aforementioned interruption in lines 45–46 that introduces the summary for the last narrative, José deliberately abandons the topic of his artistic capabilities in order to return to his point about entering the drug trade and develop his main reason for becoming involved in drug trafficking, giving life to a specialized scheme of knowledge about the criminalization of poverty. This artifice functions as an important weapon and seems to be used consciously © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

246 Liana Biar

due to the presence of an also specialized audience. The use of the marker “really” (any size I put it down on paper a::nd… ( ) really it’s the authorities that’s turned me into this) introduces a supportive evaluation and strengthens the existence of a tacit agreement about this agenda, making me think that perhaps there is a certain content interviewees believe must be mentioned in the presence of the researcher. This content once again is related to the macro-sociological system of coherence that is supposedly understood tacitly among the interlocutors, and, although it implies brusque changes of topic and/or in the alignments being sustained, such changes are authorized by the context of the interlocution. At another time during the interview, José abandons once again his calm, deliberate tone and the story of his first time spent in jail in order to construct a long, similar speech regarding public policy. It is possible to say, therefore, that the technique of information control employed by José does not consist in covering up, as is typical in mixed interactions with stigmatized individuals, but rather in reinforcing the system of coherence that composes the schemes that José perhaps supposes belong to social research. When working in this relationship of cause and effect – ‘I choose trafficking because the social system excluded me’ – a degrading experience can be given a new meaning as a respectable one. The “favorable light”, in this case, is created based on a certain idea of what the interlocutor considers to be a positive critical attitude vis-à-vis social problems that supposedly lead to deviance.

7. Final considerations Over the course of this research realized in the context of a prison, many stories similar to José’s were told. Economic problems, addiction to drugs, feelings of exclusion and being exposed to situations of violence and discrimination seem to form the foundation of the accounts of those who are labeled as deviant and incorporate this label into their lives. It is in this sense that José’s narrative is a shining example of the collection of stories to which we had access. Something that receives special attention in this analysis is the fact that the three elements emphasized here – the network of sequentialities and causalities, alternating passive and agentive constructions of the narrator-character, and the “agenda of the interview” – converge to construct deviance as an inescapable condition for those who find themselves stigmatized a priori by a “system” that determines the courses of their lives. This means that the inmate – José as well as the others – is conscious of the exceptional nature of his becoming involved in drug trafficking, and remains sensitive to social norms that discredit it. Therefore, his narrative – a possible world constructed through discourse – functions as a © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


technique of neutralization (Becker 1963). This neutralization smoothes the edges of deviant experience, rewriting the stigmatized identity in such a way as to make it conform to an order of “normalcy”, to the point of giving new meaning to those rough edges as pleasant or respectable. In this chapter, I demonstrated that life story narratives are a fertile terrain for elaborating these justifications.

Acknowledgements Translated by Elizabeth Sara Lewis

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Appendix. Transcription conventions .. or… . ? , underscoring °word° >word< : ou :: [ ] () (( )) “word” hh ↑ ↓

untimed pause falling intonation rising intonation continuing intonation interruption stress or emphasis speech quieter than the surrounding speech faster thansurrounding speech slower than the surrounding speech lengthening of the last sound the point at which overlap by another speaker starts the point at which overlap by another speaker ends uncertain or unclear talk extralinguistic information; comments by researcher quotation voice laugh particles higher pitch lower pitch
