ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what it means to survive institutional violence. While the lasting impact of violence and trauma is both clear and unassailable, the question of what it means to survive institutional violence, which is rooted in particular bureaucratic and organizational structures, is more complicated. The chapter examines both how the logic of institutional organization exerts itself over a lifetime in and through embodied experience, as well as the ways in which institutional survivors resist this replication, assert agency, and live bravely against the chronic pull of institutionalization. Institutionalization is logic rather than a space and, in this sense, inescapable. The chapter focuses on ethnographic observation compiled over four years of working with and alongside Huronia survivors. It explores a self-consciously interpretive analytic framework through which to reimagine small moments of psychic and bodily force as instances of embodied reproduction of, and resistance to, the logic of institutionalization.
