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Chapter 5 The Semantics of Dead Bodies Dead Faces, Dead Bodies, and the State Staring from the back page of my local Brazilian newspaper are the faces of the dead-bloated, crushed, streaked with blood. The photos invite unpleasant fantasies. They spur uneasy questions. Who is this? Who did that? How did it happen? Could this ever be me? Is this something I could ever do? During my mid-1980s stay in Sao Luis, most ofthe city's several dailies featured such images of violent death. The yellowest journals displayed grainy, often grotesque photos on page one, and would run particularly gruesome shots repeatedly, whenever a story resurfaced. On the back page or on the front page, the photos were easy to find. Unlike the mundane news of politics, floods, and high society hidden away in the inner folds, they were, indeed, inescapable. I have observed children on city buses miming the visages they spotted in an exposed page of a passenger 's tabloid. The publishers certainly saw photos of the dead as a selling point. But it would be a mistake to draw the facile conclusion, chalking up their appeal, if that is the right word, to a perverse popular fascination with violence and mortality. Matters are much more complicated than that. As I suggested above, photos of the dead raise questions. They open proliferating lines of disturbing thought. They demand explanations. Beneath a lurid headline ("GUNSHOTS EXPLODE VICTIM'S HEAD"; "BELLY PERFORATED BY EIGHT STAB WOUNDS"), the papers give names or nicknames and a sketchy account of a fit of jealous rage, a knife fight, a police shooting, a drowning at sea, a reckless accident. Readers must use their imaginations to fill in the rest, elaborating stories of anger, revenge, malice, negligence, miscalculation, coincidence, irresponsibility , bad luck. I heard many such stories in Sao Luis, woven around skeletal newspaper reports, a neighbor's misfortune, a friend's recounted adventure, a terrifying first-hand experience (Linger 1992). I 112 Chapter 5 discovered through extensive interviews that the stories often drew on widely shared complexes of thought and feeling. In them people expressed common fears and frustrations; assumptions about human goals, vulnerabilities, and passions; and perceptions of powerful, often intractable, external forces-the police, the economy, politics, the state, and the cosmos. The dead body in the newspaper confronts readers with a condensed, compelling riddle, challenging them to unravel the meanings compressed into a stark photo. This chapter examines not the meanings evoked by a photo of a corpse, but an analogue, the meanings evoked by a public debate over a death. I look at the uncontrollable meaningmaking around a bullet-riddled body at the center of a 1985 Sao Luis murder trial, in which a young man named Di6genes (nicknamed Didi) was charged with killing another young man named Nonato (called by the diminutive Natinho). I consider in particular the ironic meanings mobilized by Natinho's death, which inspired a host of stories grounded ultimately in a common sense that condemned both Didi and the state that had brought charges against him. Criminal trials, usually thought of as jeopardizing a defendant, can also be hazardous undertakings for the prosecution. From the prosecution 's perspective, a successful criminal trial demonstrates the state's ability to apprehend a miscreant, subject his actions to impartial scrutiny , obtain a conviction, and impose appropriate penalties, removing the danger from society. The state must emphasize its efficacy and its protective role, posing convincingly as the guarantor of public safety. But much can go awry, as this case shows, for rhetoric, the stuff of criminal proceedings, does not construct realities de novo. It is launched into a net of already existing understandings; its reception cannot be closely controlled. In every criminal trial the state, not just the accused, comes under scrutiny, and runs the risk offinding itself condemned along with the prisoner. As Emile Zola (1996 [1898]) understood, there are times when the state should be put into the dock for its own criminal acts of prosecution. No Brazilian Zola published a citizen's indictment against Didi's prosecutors; but then, Didi was no Dreyfus. At any rate, for the local citizens in attendance no Zola was needed. The prosecution, I will argue, hanged itself, along with Didi, in their court of common sense.1 In Chapter 4 I proposed that certain elements in sao-luisense common sense present obstacles to change in the clientelistic political structure . Those commonsense understandings allow elite political contests to proceed...

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