Positivist criminology is drawing renewed scholarly attention. Yet the new historians of the science of crime do not come from legal backgrounds. This heavily ideological, discourse-based discipline is an irresistible temptation for scholars who (under the influence of Foucault) see a link between ideas of punishment and the symbolic legitimacy of social systems, and who (thanks to the linguistic turn) have become sensitive to the multiple implications of text and discourse in the analysis of power systems. To a great extent, the new studies about criminology are enterprises of “unveiling.” Furthermore, the study of criminology is exceptionally relevant for Latin America, where this science was genetically bound to the emergence of several nation-states, and contributed to shaping the discourse and perceptions of many reform-minded elites.
In this carefully crafted book, Robert Buffington analyzes how the eclectic collection of photographs, and medical, penal, journalistic and anthropological texts that constituted (or were...
