Call for papers 2025.1 - Finitude and human responsibility in History

2025.1 - Finitude and human responsibility in History

Mara Regina do Nascimento (UFRGS)
Mauro Dillmann (UFPel)

Death and the dead are present in different ways, at different times and societies. The loss, absence, finitude of human beings can be experienced through a series of feelings, such as lament, claim, acceptance. It mobilizes and affects, or doesn’t, the individuals, who respond to it in accordance with their beliefs, expectations or ideologies. As the furthest As the furthest thing from natural or innate manifestations, the expressions in the face of death result in specific cultural constructions, often times differing from each other in a single social universe, varying on the condition of economic, racial, ethnic and gender inequality. Beyond thinking of the often-contradictory ways society and the state view the death of the other, there is a necessity to problematize that which promotes death, who dies who dies and who kills, how and who protects life (which lives?) and the memory of the deceased (which deceased?), who takes responsibility for non-natural deaths, violent ones, suicides, massacres, genocides, who profits from death. It is pertinent to ponder on which was the symbolical and material importance of life and death, specially when we select a social universe and identify the bodies: the loved one, the stranger, the enslaved, the unhoused, the indigenous person, the criminal, the terrorist, the old person, the war enemy, the people of all gender identities. How and why the lives of these persons come to an end, how they were and are protested represented, pictured. Are their deaths avoided or desired, publicized or silenced, grieved or celebrated? This dossier aims to congregate texts which reflect upon finitude and human responsibility  in different moments of History, from Antiquity to present time.