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Etnográfica

 ISSN 0873-6561

OLIVEIRA, Everton de. Death and life in Brazilian colônias: some issues about suicide in the German colonies of southern Brazil. []. , 26, 2, pp.351-369.   19--2022. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.11725.

This paper analyzes the suicide problem in German colonies of southern Brazil. It describes the relationship between the house, as a moral and relational composite, and the phenomenon of suicide. To this end, the ethnography deals with the colonies in the south of Brazil, an area of mountains and hillsides that, for a century and a half, has been inhabited by German descendants and presents, year after year, a considerable number of suicide cases. Starting from the presumption that it is also a problem that has become central in the health policies agenda we will move through different discursive frameworks. In one hand, the house framing, as an expression of the everyday life, specifically moral life. In other hand, the medical and psychosocial framing, showing suicide as an expression par excellence of a psychosocial disorganization. This work understands suicide in its relational perspective, composing the house’s logic, especially related to a moral life based on pain (in its narrative, shared memory and overcoming perspectives), even though it is its categorical limit, its exhaustion, but not its “disorganization”.

: suicide; Germans of Southern Brazil; house; public health policies; governmentality.

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