Águas passadas: uma etnografia entre desastres e zonas assombradas na cidade imperial

Abstract

There is a curious and recurrent phenomenon, observed, reported, and researched internationally in the aftermath of disasters: the proliferation of narratives and stories involving ghosts and hauntings in the affected and devastated regions. These are not metaphors: people recount apparitions in those areas and avoid frequenting them, as has been observed in Thailand, Japan, the United States of America, Vietnam, China, Argentina, and many other countries. Although also frequent in Brazil, no study had sought to address it until now. This ethnographic work aims to analyze and understand these specific experiences and narratives within the context of Petrópolis, a city that has lived with disasters for centuries. Known as the “imperial city,” Petrópolis is a municipality in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro, historically shaped and scarred by disasters. While this research was being carried out, the largest disaster ever recorded in the city occurred in 2022, which then also became a field site, alongside the earlier one of 2011. In both cases, narratives emerged, and I was able to listen to and experience them from my situated perspective as someone from Petrópolis, as well as through my active implication in revisiting my own ghost stories. Grounded in socio-anthropological and decolonial perspectives, in dialogue with psychoanalytic theories that guided – and at times disrupted – the fieldwork, this ethnography has been constructed as an invitation to hospitality toward ghosts, out of a concern for justice, as Jacques Derrida once argued. I understand haunting and the ghost as operative concepts, sustained by sociologist Avery Gordon, which constitute, respectively, both a social experience and a social figure endowed with agency. By critically distancing myself from theoretical approaches that tend to medicalize these social phenomena, I advance the thesis of “haunted zones” as a liminal non-place of transitions, passages, and deaths, where social bonds extend beyond the living, traversed by fears, intersectionalities, uprootedness, and disputes over belonging. Within these zones, such narratives configure themselves as collective memory-work and as a strategic resource against forgetting, with women as their main articulators. This thesis also requires a critical examination of the place we occupy as researchers, as well as of our potential role as harmful and even traumatizing agents for populations affected by disasters.