ANTROPOLOGIA DA MORTE

Uma ficção etnográfica que habita as fronteiras entre o real e o imaginário

Abstract

According to the writer Wolfgang Iser (1996), fiction promotes two ways of transgressing; one concerned with “unrealizing the real”, which would serve to not reproduce the empirical universe in its entirety, open spaces to reinvent and claim new orders; and a second concerned with “realizing the unreal” where everything is possible to happen, so that the process of existing and the uniqueness of it is made from laws and determinations of the author. So the fictional text is not a false text, but brings truths with it about a different perspective, where imaginary worlds and characters are created. Truths that are sometimes very difficult to be faced, in the light of reason, so I make use of a fictional text, which will dilute the harsh reality in creativity. Fiction is an excellent resource to protect the feelings of informants and the author, guaranteeing security and secrecy to the former. In this way, I create a fictional character, very peculiar and ineffable, sometimes comic and questioning, who takes on the role of the ethnographer describing a day in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), in a city in the interior of Brazil. Thus, the character merges the boundaries between Foucault's biopolitics and Agambian tanatopolitics, as well as Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, denouncing the genocide that is taking place in Brazil with a disease as a device: Covid19. He also questions the death rites that the disease provokes, ending all the pompous tributes and honors to the dead, making people disappear in a genocide so well structured that it erases any trace of human existence.