Um caso extremo do social: as sociedades dos prisioneiros nos campos de concentração nazistas

Abstract

After all the historical investigation into the concentration camps from the perspective of national socialist domination, Maja Sunderland offers one of the first sociological analyses of the communities formed by camp prisoners. Countering the thesis that the prisoners were basically an amorphous mass, she draws upon first-hand accounts in the literature to show how they actually devised a special system of social relations. The analysis is oriented by the theoretical concepts of Bourdieu, particularly his notion of habitus, by Foucault's concept of power; Goffman's 'total institution' concept; the culture theory of Zygmund Bauman and Louis Dumont's historical outline of the relationship between the individual and society. With the help of these categories, the author distills from the first-hand accounts three planes of sociality that enabled them to demark territories of the self, namely: military order; economic exchange; and everyday cultural exchange. On the level of social structure, the categories of gender, class and ethnicity proved decisive in maintaining the social identity of the prisoners. While this extreme situation represented a social deformation, the author shows that structures akin to those of normal society also managed to take hold, even in the concentration camps. For the prisoners, the idea of human dignity was of the utmost importance. In the present study, the prisoners are not seen merely as victims, but as social agents. The elements of continuity, as opposed to those of rupture with the pre-camp world, acquire new meaning under this perspective.