Sight and smell of corpses: an ethnographic experience in the Forensic Medicine Institute

Abstract

In this article I will present and analyze two different circumstances in “ethnographic experience” that got me while performing fieldwork in the Medical-Legal Institute in Rio de Janeiro. The “first impression” being in touch with the field and see the dead bodies; and “revelatory experience” that occurred when the research was already underway , and showed me how the smell is a constitutive element of the relationship among people that circulate daily in the hallways and rooms of the IML. For this, I use my perception of two human senses: vision and smell. And I analyze them as tools that I mobilized for conducting fieldwork with informants whose main activity was handling with dead bodies. Thus, I present how conducting fieldwork among the dead I have identified my visual and olfactory perceptions as central methodological tools for reflection for my ethnographic experience.