Strategic naïveté, intentional forgetting, and interpretive labor: Ethnographic methods in a carceral setting

In this article, I discuss how I effectively employed methods known as strategic naïveté, intentional forgetting, and interpretative labor during fieldwork at the Desert Echo Facility (DEF), a state prison in the American Southwest that holds incarcerated people at minimum-, medium-, and high-security levels. I describe these methods and argue that they prove useful when attempting to collect data in carceral settings and with participants tasked with upholding state violence. While these methods do not fit easily within disciplinary boundaries, they offer opportunities to grasp the ambiguities of everyday life in difficult field sites. I focus on my relations with correctional officers to provide context as to how these methods opened new pathways that allowed me to produce rich ethnography. In describing these methods and the choices I made at the DEF, I offer options for those who seek to interrupt the lack of ethnographic attention within carceral systems.