El Internado de Villa de las Niñas como comunidad emocional: disciplina y control de los cuerpos en el encierro

Abstract

From the perspective of the anthropology of emotions, the narrative of suffering, and the concept of emotional communities coined in the area of the history of emotions, I aim to show, through ethnographic data obtained from in-depth interviews, the main explanations that a group of former students of a boarding school run by nuns in Mexico gave to reveal the epidemic outbreak of mass-hysteria they faced there in 2007. Based on that, it shows how a new system of morality and emotional expression, required intra-muros, and driven by discipline and control of the bodies and souls of the boarding students, was imposed in this liminal space in which illness, punished, turned into a form of body language that revealed the social suffering.

Keywords

• Thesaurus: body
• Mexico
• Author: anthropology of emotions
• narrative of suffering
• emotional communities
• psychogenic disorder
• religious boarding school