Aiming to understand the ways of coping with a daily routine that involves the professional familiarity with violent death, I developed an ethnographic research, from 2007 to 2010, at the Criminalistics Department (CD) of the General Forensics Institute (GFI) of Rio Grande do Sul. Interviews and simple and participant observation were the techniques selected for data collection, as the analysis of field findings follows the guidelines of ethnographic studies approaching the interlocutions among the emic view, the etic view, and the theoreticians referred. The theoretical framework on death is supported by the studies of DaMatta (1987), Ariès (2000), Elias (2001), and Bauman (2008). Elias (2001) claims that death in contemporary times has been concealed in two spheres: the individual and the social ones. The individual concealment imposes a distancing from the dying people, as the social concealment deals with death as being part of the social life’s backstage. In the case of the CD professionals, coping with the conscience of death and violence involves an emphasis on the afterlife, the world of the souls; through deconstruction, uncovering the causes of violent death via the search for truth, using scientific methods and techniques; through trivialization, where the victim’s body is seen as an "object" or a "doll"; through laughter, black humour; coping with a violent death in the personal sphere through the professional performance that demands the person to be face to face with this reality. The works of Marta et al. (2009), Combinato and Queiroz (2006), and Brêtas, Oliveira, and Yanagutu (2006) show that the subjects they investigated have not been trained to deal with death in the work sphere, and the same situation has been found among the CD professionals, being Kovács’s educational proposition (2005) applicable to the case concerned. The contribution of this research to organizational studies consists in calling attention to a topic that is little discussed in the area, as well as emphasizing how important it is for the organizations to find supporting mechanisms for those who deal with violent death as a professional daily routine.
Death; Violence; Fear; Forensics; Ethnography