Morrinhos’ lynching (rumor, stigma and violence)

Abstract

In 2014, in Baixada Santista, a coast city of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, a young woman, aged 33, was lynched. The event received much attention due to the sharing on social networks of a rumor regarding a witch living in Morrinhos neighborhood, in the city of Guarujá, São Paulo, who kidnapped children and performed “black magic rituals”. This episode has gathered important attention of the national press, and a substantial amount of the related news reports announced that the victim, who was spanked and killed, was notorious among the neighborhood’s inhabitants and underwent treatment for a psychiatric illness that provoked crises in which she “lost control of reality”. This study aims to analyze the sociocultural context related to this event: the lynching of a mentally ill woman. Traditional anthropology research methods were utilized, among them ethnographic observation and indepth interviews with Morrinhos’ inhabitants. The data analysis allowed us to point out that violence is vividly present there and is directly related to everyday conflicts and social disputes of all possible contexts in the neighborhood – especially those manifested through violence against the mentally ill. The spreading of those rumors is frequent in Morrinhos and has an important role in maintaining a certain balance in social relations. In this context, this lynching can be understood as a fact that, to a major extent, was able to represent a condensation of these elements – rumors, stigmatization and violence – and thus uncovered them in their rawest form.