Life and death make dirty the moralized town: barks, mooings, hygienism and Diamantina’s newspapers (turn of the 19TH/20TH centuries)

Abstract

I am analyzing here what intervention the hygienism, lawyered by the Diamantina’s press at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, implied the presence of non-human animals in this Minas Gerais town. A potential paradox is revealed. If by one side, in anticipation of this animal life as filthy, the hygienism implied in making it target banning practices, to the extent until the extermination, in the other side the negative position of the hygienism before bloodshed in the city tended to condemn the killing, apparently by redeeming this life morally. What denominator commom justifies this impasse that condemns both principles of animal life and death in the city? Aware that human beings (through the prominence of the press) build their relationships tied to webs of meaning that they themselves spun, I analyze the common substrate to these representations, coming close to approaches of the New Cultural History. Such focus however should not dispense a contextual analysis of the ontological humananimals relations, for non-human animal’s reality, from its brokerage materials with human beings – undertaking a critical transit between such analytical dimensions.