Pandemic All Souls' Day: From the circumscription of a historical series to cemetery allegories.

Abstract

This article analyzes the symbolic and political transformations associated with All Souls' Day celebrations during the pandemic years of 2020, 2021, and 2022, based on a cemetery ethnography conducted at the Consolação Cemetery in São Paulo. Through participant observation, visual records, and interactions with visitors, the study proposes a reflection on collective mourning and the dispute over meanings surrounding death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to tracing a historical series with official mortality data, the article aims to explore the role of monuments, offerings, and funeral rites as expressions of social memory and symbolic coping with death. Cemetery allegories, treated as visual and affective devices, are analyzed in light of the anthropology of death, aesthetics, funerary art and the politics of memory. The text concludes that, in Brazil, collective mourning was permeated by denialist discourses and necropolitical practices of the Brazilian State, during the government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, being partially reconstructed by symbolic actions of resistance in cemeteries and on social media.