Paper short abstract:

This is an ethnographic paper that focuses on the problematic of the souls of dead people haunting the living in general (their relatives or not), drawn from fieldwork carried out in the Brazilian Northeast semi-arid region.

Paper long abstract:

My paper intends to contribute to the understanding of people's relationships with the remains of humans, given that "mal-assombros" (ghosts) are precisely a remain of human beings, in this case, the spiritual remains. These remains have a powerful and real presence in the everyday life of living people. They help to build a cosmology of the worlds of the living and the dead, where the dead are only considered something to be truly feared where they are not the spiritual remains of a family member. It is through these remains of the humans - the ghosts - that a complex cosmology is built (in relation to Christian and Spiritist religions), together with the (re)making and (re)definition of family identity through the exercise of remembering dead family group members.

It is known that the vision of a ghost regularly causes great fear. The fear is not intentional in the case of some ghosts (for example, the ghosts that feel lost in the dead people's world, a family member recently deceased, etc), but it is intentional (and even premeditated) in the case of the naughty mal-assombros. From a typology of "mal-assombros", we will particularly work on the naughty mal-assombros, the ones that have fun at the expense of the living people's fear. It appears possible to say that the mal-assombros which have fun causing fear in the living people are the ugliest and most dreadful, as well as the ones that escape all forms of kinship bonds. On the other hand, although a subject of fear, the ghosts of family members can be subject to other kinds of relationship with the living people, where for example, companionship, pity or closeness can be experienced and are not recognized as naughty mal-assombros.

The text draws considerations that may be of interest for researchers that work on the analyses of religion, kinship, festivals and entertainment; as well as researchers that have an ethnographical interest in this geographical area. It will be of special interest to the Panel 'Encounters with the past: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains' discussions given that it is discusses precisely the panel's thematic area: The presence of human remains amongst the living.