Ghosts of the Gulag: Negotiating Spectres of the Penal Past in Northern Russia
Slade G. Piacentini L. Kravtsova A.
1 January 2024Oxford University Press
British Journal of Criminology
2024#64Issue 117 - 33 pp.
The paper develops the concept of penal spectrality—a sense of the presence of those who endured past penal suffering within environments and among objects related to the practice of punishment. The residents of Ukhta, a Gulag town in Northern Russia, engage uncomfortably with penal spectrality and employ two forms of distancing—pragmatic and cultural—to deal with its melancholic affects. Pragmatically, residents repurpose and reincorporate the things of the penal past into the social order, finding a use-value in them for the present day. Culturally, residents engage in the museumification and commodification of Gulag things. The paper advances two directions for research in ghost criminology. First, we show how uneasy spectral feelings are not passively observed but actively negotiated. Second, in this interaction, we show the immediacy of engaged practical interaction with material objects that points to modes of encountering and misrecognizing penal suffering beyond cultural commodification and penal spectatorship.
Gulag , museum , penal spectrality , punishment , Russia
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Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Nazarbayev University, 53 Kabanbay Batyr, Astana, 01000, Kazakhstan
University of Strathclyde, Department of Social Work and Social Policy, 141 St James Road, Glasgow, G4 0LT, United Kingdom
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Strathclyde
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