Figure 1 : Death certificate from the nineteenth century (Coleção Brasiliana Itaú)
Researchers Oscar Palma Lima and Alexandre de Pádua Carrieri of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais concentrated on the social construction of death and the role of bureaucracy as an element of cohesion.
They analyze the rationality of the registration systems, considering their role in population control, investigate how successive governments have developed these monitoring mechanisms and debate the categories of the death certificate and how this document establishes preliminary elements of a social organization of death.