Abstract

VELAZQUEZ**, Josefina Ramírez. Villa de las Niñas Boarding School as an Emotional Community: Discipline and Body Control in Confinement. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2017, n.62, pp.29-41. ISSN 0123-885X.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res62.2017.04.

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 : Body; Mexico; anthropology of emotions; narrative of suffering; emotional communities; psychogenic disorder; religious boarding school.

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