Abstract

This text is the Preface to the English edition L'ombre du monde. "Une anthropologie de la condition carcérale" (Seuil, 2015), forthcoming as "Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition" (Polity, 2016). In the Preface, the author introduces the international readership to court and prison ethnography in cross-national perspective, looking in particular at the differences between France and the U.S.