Aníbal:

un cuerpo sacrificial en un circuito de muerte institucional

Abstract

In 1993, Anibal’s dramatic death, in the context of an inter-institutional intervention, induced to think critically about the part taken by interpretation; about its limits and perspectives seen from Anthropology and Social Work. The theoretical- methodological implications of interpretation –which mediates every intervention practice– orientated us to a path through the procedures that act establishing a problem (in this case represented by Anibal) to the legal, medical, psychiatric, psychologists and social worker’s speeches that treated with him; added up to the relatives that signed it up categorically. Not so much a “problem”, Anibal’s case represented the construction of subjectivity inside an institutional circuit, in which his body became “a superficial body”. The symbolic dimension that these linked speeches get makes a plot where his death is heavily significant. This is the core of our current revision of Anibal’s case that checkmates the complicity of diverse intervenient practices and speeches, as long as they anticipate, criminalizing, and his death in an institutional circuit. We take a step forward in this aspect, in a deeper and broader sense of the concept of “institutional violence”.