The Management of Loss

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Disasters such as the outbreak of a pandemic and the unforeseen collapse of an infrastructure have so far been investigated independently of one another in anthropology. Research was divided into various sub-disciplines such as disaster research, medical ethnology or the ethnology of infrastructures. This project proceeds differently. It focuses on the connections that arise when different types of crises occur in a specific local context and asks to what extent these events shape expectations of government action and the associated duties of care in a post-colonial and post-dictatorial context. In the small town of Brumadinho, in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, public and private reactions to the current corona pandemic complement and compete with another central and so far unresolved crisis: the collapse of the retention basin of an iron ore mine, which in January 2019 costed the lives of 270 people. The current situation in Brazil is understood as an opportunity to reflect on how successive exceptional situations relate to one another through different moral evaluations - of suffering, life and death as well as the right to receive state care. It investigates the reconfigurations of the moral economies that connect the state with its citizens and the living with the dead. The aim is an anthropological contribution to the theoretical understanding of the complementarity and the competition of different layers of time and meaning of disasters from different actors' perspectives.