Abstract

MOTTA, Eugênia. A good house, a bad house and death in everyday life. Etnográfica [online]. 2020, vol.24, n.3, pp.775-795. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.9603.

The purpose of the text is to reflect on death as a lived, shared, lasting and everyday process. It deals with two deaths, that of a woman and her son. The distinction she made between a “good” house and a “bad” house reveals a moral universe around the aspiration for a good future, the construction of good people and the maintenance of relationships of proximity. I show how the attribution of a reciprocal agency between houses and people, expresses the success or failure in maintaining the flow of life in this direction. These collective aspirations and plans are articulated to the government of and in the favela, expressed by a specific spatiality linked to the prohibited drug trade. I also describe how houses participate in dying in everyday life by mobilizing people, things, and money around the caring for the dying. A person’s death is consid¬ered a critical process, capable of revealing the truth of affections, promoting new relationships and breaking others. This criticality extends to doing ethnography by placing suffering as a central factor in the relationship with interlocutors in the field. I argue that the text promotes a double interpretive movement, both ethnographic and intimate, in search of meaning for death.

Keywords : death; house; everyday life; favela.

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