Abstract

GRAZIANO, Florencia. What, how and how much is written in documents of the judicial bureaucracy for “minors” in the City of Buenos Aires. Etnográfica [online]. 2018, vol.22, n.3, pp.531-553. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.5901.

In this article, I introduce and analyze the written expressions of certain documents from the judicial bureaucracy, which reveal particular ways of the institutional endeavor and portray moral evaluations and decisions constructed on the basis of, and in interaction with, judicial officers, and in specific cases, showing how the reports which constitute the files related to young people charged with criminal offences are constructed. I seek to provide an account of the construction of those written records on the basis of my own field work, carried out during the years 2012 and 2013 at the guardianship secretariat of a juvenile criminal court in the City of Buenos Aires. On that occasion, I examined the translation from the oral and interactive to the written and fixed. I will focus my ethnographic description on the values, representations, language and institutional categories that shape the narratives of those reports, addressed as a bureaucratic literary genre that constitutes a specific way of constructing the culpabilities and acquittals of those people accused a criminal offence.

Keywords : documents; justice; youth; ethnography.

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