Death, far from representing a final point, inaugurates unequal paths in the social life of the dead. In modern Western society, who dies, how they die, and which social and political markers cross the deceased in life directly impact the...
moreDeath, far from representing a final point, inaugurates unequal paths in the social life of the dead. In modern Western society, who dies, how they die, and which social and political markers cross the deceased in life directly impact the rituals mobilized, the recognition granted to the death, and the possible destinations of their remains. These processes lead to a reconfiguration of the values attributed to their bodies and identities, which are transformed as they are hierarchized in their dying, producing deeply unequal trajectories between individuals even post-mortem. This dissertation investigates the social life of the dead through a multi-sited ethnography that follows the paths, uses, and destinations of cadavers and human remains in different institutional and social contexts. This study, centered on the practices and relations established with the dead after the biological end of their lives, tracks the circulation of these bodies through laboratories, universities, museums, cemeteries, documents, and archives. Social networks, regimes of value, and the symbolic and institutional disputes that cross the deceased—frequently marked by anonymity, disappearance, and the continued violation of their bodies—are observed and discussed in this paper. The dissertation was developed through fieldwork and participant observation, bibliographic and documentary research, analysis of institutional materials, and monitoring of news in online media. To deal with a field marked by fragments and displacements, the metaphor of sewing and the notions of suture, lines, fabrics, and meshwork are employed as theoretical-methodological resources, articulating the contexts and spaces entered into ethnographic production and analysis. In conjunction, the production of drawings and chronicles based on field data is mobilized as a way to grasp the materiality, affects, histories, and silences that compose the social life of the dead. By discussing conceptions of the body, person, object, technique, science, education, memory, and reparation, I argue that the dead, far from being purely inert elements, continue to act in the world of the living, reorganizing practices, instating ethical dilemmas, and evidencing persistent inequalities. Thus, this dissertation argues that death configures itself as a continuous field of social, political, and affective negotiations, in which posthumous dignity, memory, and forgetting remain in dispute.