ABOUT MOURNING AND PAIN, EMOTIONS AND PANDEMIC: encounters with the thought of Mauro Koury

Abstract

This text pays tribute to Professor Mauro Koury (1950-2021), on his death. It is the printed version of a Live entitled “A tribute to the life and work of Mauro Koury: the goodbye ceremony”, held by Revista M. Studies on death, the dead and dying (UFRJ), which took place in 2021. There is a consensus among colleagues that his academic legacy is immense, especially for his academic production and for his work in the training of social scientists, even after his retirement. As a colleague at the Department of Social Sciences and the Graduate Program in Anthropology/UFPB, I sought to approach his thinking from the encounters I had with his work, as we approach the theme of death, but from different perspectives. One of these moments involves the reading of his work on death, mourning, pain, fear and the urban, in the configuration of the anthropology and sociology of emotions. Another moment concerns the reflections on the health crisis, systematized in three publications in which the author updates his thinking in the face of the tragedy of the pandemic. Finally, I invite the reader to dedicate themselves to the thought-provoking thought of Mauro Koury, a social scientist of emotions.