To Be Forever Absent: A Case Study of Unclaimed Bodies in Contemporary Brazil

The article examines the case of a donation of corpses to a medical school with the aim of discussing the condition of the unclaimed dead in Brazil. It focuses on the ordinary practices that produce such condition and suggests that, rather than being characterized by the absence of living relatives, as the term may imply, the condition of the unclaimed dead replicates the depreciated social status of these people before they passed away. It thus extends the relations of exclusion and the lived experience of being a “non-person” to the world of the dead.