The Social Life of Corpses / Vida Social dos Mortos

Abstract

Death and life are carried out through the institutional construction of the dead and through the presence (or absence) of papers and bodies. This chapter presents an ethnography of organizing, classifying, and controlling dead bodies. Public institutions, such as the offices of the civil police of Rio de Janeiro and the courts, are used here to describe and analyze mechanisms that work toward a politics that kills and lets die. The chapter highlights a civilian whose body disappeared inside the Medical-Legal Institute to discuss how forgetfulness and deletion (re)produce death and suffering by the state. The description and ethnographic analysis of the management of deaths and the institutional building of the dead demonstrate how the dead are produced by race and violence, as well as by the technical-bureaucratic and moral practices that express the centrality of death in the daily lives of the living.