OF FORESTS AND HAUNTINGS: memories about contact with beings from another world in Caldas, Minas Gerais

Abstract

This work deals of the presence of beings from the other world in the daily lives of residents of Caldas, a municipality in Minas Gerais. The belief in hauntings has been built up over the centuries through cultural permeability and remains in the present time from apparitions and the circularity of narratives present in the collective memory. These beings make up a symbolic system that I identify as popular Catholicism and manifest themselves in various environments and on different occasions. In this sense, some forests are interpreted by the population as places where certain types of hauntings appear and, therefore, should be avoided. Because it is a rural region, the natural environment is part of social life, the way people observe reality and is embedded in religiosities. For this purpose, the methods and techniques used to collect ethnographic data that elucidated the object of study focused on participant observation and oral history. As for the first, it enabled direct and close contact with the Caldenses in order to build proximity to this symbolic system. Likewise, oral history allowed the recording of narratives present in individual and collective memory. This methodological convergence resulted in the perception that, even in the face of environmental changes, hauntings live on and, furthermore, revealed the dynamics and plasticity that constitute them as aspects that guarantee their permanence over time.