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Death of a Traveller. Didier FassinЧитать онлайн книгу.

Death of a Traveller - Didier  Fassin


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the public prosecutor alternates the slightly pejorative noun gypsy (manouche) and the common phrase travelling people (gens du voyage). However, the point is not to incorporate verbal tics, syntax errors or clumsy expressions that would undermine the credibility of the speakers and distract readers. Hence the refusal to use the realist effects of quotation marks and dialogues. Furthermore, it is important to remember that, while interviews do allow access to the words of the speaker, records of depositions are not word-for-word transcriptions but summaries of what the court clerk heard. They thus do not constitute a complete reproduction.

      No proper name of any person or, indeed, of any place appears, nor any date. This choice of anonymization arises not only out of ethical concerns to protect the individuals involved or legal considerations to protect the author; both these protections are illusory given that modern search engines make it a simple matter to identify all the details of such an event. Anonymization is used above all as a way to draw out the broader meaning of this death, the conditions of its possibility, the actions of the gendarmes, the practice of judges, the campaign led by the family. Specific though this story is, it nevertheless reveals fundamental features of the state’s law-enforcement institutions and of the punitive treatment of Travellers: it is not merely a regrettable incident. One exception is made to this rule of anonymization: the forename of the Traveller. Refusing to consign him to anonymity is a way of respecting the memory of the person who is, ultimately, the only victim of the events that occurred one day in early spring at his parents’ farm. The fragile trace of a life cut short. An intimate connection through which, for his family, he lives on.

      As many studies, in France and elsewhere, have established, decisions taken by the courts reflect the balance of power and relations of inequality within a society, which come into play not only in the way certain people are convicted and others acquitted but also in the way social worlds are represented – in this case, those of the gendarmes and of the Travellers. In other words, they involve the production both of justice and of truth. When the sociologist embarked on this project, he knew that he would obviously have no impact on the former, but he thought he might be able to unravel its connection with the latter while the justice system represents the truth of the courts as the sole legitimate one. His counter-investigation could indeed reveal a different reading of the facts. The point was not to take the side of the vanquished against the victors, as historians sometimes put it – in other words to deem the family’s version more truthful than that of the officers – but to produce an account independent of all institutional links, of all professional affinities and, as far as possible, of any prejudice. The account must derive purely from the application of a dual principle: all voices deserve the same degree of attention, and the conclusions must proceed purely from the correlation of the available evidence interpreted in context.

      But, for the sociologist, the reason it made sense to engage in this work went beyond the mere critique of punitive practices to which he had devoted his previous books. By focusing on the events that led to the death of the young man, by granting the accounts of his family equal value with those of the gendarmes, by formulating a version independent of that of the courts, by offering a glimpse of what his life had been like, troubled to be sure, but so different from the defamatory portraits painted by the criminal investigation file and the media reconstructions, by pulling him out of oblivion and freeing him from stereotypes, the sociologist thought that it might be possible to return to him, whatever his criminal past, something of what society refuses Travellers, and that the family, through their campaign for justice and truth, had never stopped demanding: respectability.

      He started writing.

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