Haunted zones: brief notes from na ethnography of ghosts and disasters in Petrópolis-RJ

Abstract

In the aftermath of disasters, the proliferation of narratives about ghosts and hauntings in devastated areas is a widely documented phenomenon that has been studied across different countries. These are not merely metaphors: people report apparitions in such places and avoid visiting them, as has been observed in Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, China, Argentina, and elsewhere. This paper presents brief reflections drawn from the doctoral dissertation Águas Passadas ("Water Under the Bridge"), defended at IMS/UERJ, which examined these experiences in Petrópolis, a municipality historically marked by recurrent catastrophes. Socio-anthropological and decolonial perspectives, in dialogue with psychoanalysis, both guided and unsettled the fieldwork, shaping this ethnography as an invitation to hospitality toward ghosts, motivated by a concern for justice, as advocated by Derrida. Haunting and the ghost are understood as operative concepts, drawing on the work of sociologist Avery Gordon, who conceives them, respectively, as both a social experience and a social figure endowed with agency. Critically distancing itself from approaches that tend toward condescension and the medicalization of these social phenomena, the notion of "haunted zones" refers to a liminal non-place constituted by transitions, passages, and deaths, where social bonds extend beyond the living and are traversed by fears, intersectionalities, uprootings, and contested forms of belonging. Within these zones, such narratives emerge as a collective work of memory and a strategic resource against forgetting.