"Screaming Baboons, Howling Wolfs, Roaring Lions": Infrahumanization of Prison Society through the Perception of Sound
Abstract
The prison environment consists of sounds which are an integral part of the daily prison regime and to which prisoners must devote different kinds of attention. It has already been argued that, in prison, sensitivity and attentiveness to certain sounds, or their willful ignorance, become key to one's survival and well-being (Cusick 2013).
In my current doctoral ethnographic research of music and sound in Czech prisons, I try to understand prisoners' acoustemological (Feld) relationship to this environment and interpret the statements of prisoners not only as descriptions of sound perceptions carrying information about the place but more broadly as a manifestation of prison culture, social conditions and mental state of prisoners. With imprisonment a prisoner experiences besides the loss of freedom also many other negative effects such as social death, or mortification of his civil self (Goffman 1961), he comes through a process of decivilization.
In this paper, I will try to present how acoustic experience is related to the subjective perception of one's own position in the social structure of the prison. As I will show, the sound expressions of prisoners and the language in which they express themselves reveal a process of dehumanization that takes place on a subtle level within the prison population itself.
This type of dehumanization, which Leyens (2007) calls infrahumanization, is incorporated into the very experience of the prison's sound environment and is encoded in speeches about it, which in this case are characterized by offensive animal metaphors (Haslam)