What does one mean when one says chacina? Configuration of a violent event through eventful reports
Event. Configuration. Eventful report. Violence. Chacina
As an actual occurrence and part of the knowledge regarding violence and public security in Brazil, the topic of
chacinas, especially those perpetrated by state agents, has invited to a reexamination of a myriad of facets the phenomenon has. We try to face it through the point of view of event analysis, taking into account its public
experience and collective action facets surrounding the event, which in turn leads us to speak about eventful configuration when considering an intense work of interpretation and explanation for that which had happened. To do so, we carried out a study of the Chacina de Belém, as it became known, that happened on November 4th and 5th, as we follow a year of reverberances around it within texts published on the internet. The theoretical and
methodological framework brings together both the notion of an eventful course, a methodology native to the field of event analysis, and of eventful reports, as part of the forms such work is shaped into. Besides a concern with
the eventful configuration, it is of interest to reinstate how chacinas are part of a broader social landscape, paying attention to its identification as racialized violence and state terror, in order to understand how these characteristics manifest themselves or are hidden as the eventalization takes place.