The funerals in the affected community of Paracatu de Baixo

• Grant number: 18/07693-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2018
• End date: July 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Rural Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Jorge Luiz Mattar Villela
• Grantee: Gabriela de Paula Marcurio
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project intends to do an ethnography about caring for the deceased people and do funerals at home, posteriorly burial at the cemetery of the Paracatu de Baixo rural community. Those rituals were impeded along with a series of compulsory transformations submitted to the population, due to the rupture of Fundão dam on November 5, 2015. In view of the territorial displacement to the municipal headquarters of Mariana, in the state of Minas Gerais, the community was dissolved in the urban area, their ways of life based on farm activities were disabled, as well as the established rituals and relationships continuity. My main hypothesis is that the funeral rituals were ways to congregate the community members in front of the suffered uprooting, considering such rituals like a way to reaffirm the meaning of "community". For these reasons, I intend to report how the population articulates to organize the funerals in a displaced area from the original, evidencing the interpretations and strategies to the funeral rituals and their consequences to the living people, the community and the deads. (AU)