Thursday, 10/13/22, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT
- Presenter--Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.
- Moderator: Yovanna Pineda
Abstract:
Eating animal meat is an act inseparable from human history, topologically dispersed, immersed in different historicity, and by a multitude of things: evolutionary, biological, gustatory, cultural, technological, aesthetic, economic, ecological, ethical, and perceptual elements. It was throughout the 19th century that public slaughterhouses emerged, places built by the State where killing animals for human consumption was regulated and conducted. Public slaughterhouses were also environments of constant interaction with the biophysical world and spaces constituted by the insertion and development of technologies, techniques, and gradual recognition of aesthetic elements that combined, aligned with the production and distribution of meat in Rio de Janeiro.
My essay explores three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1854 and 1882. It was during this period that Rio de Janeiro underwent intense transformations and where we can find three public slaughterhouses in operation. Analyzing this junction illuminates how the State, conceptions of modernity, technology, and aesthetics played a significant role in the history of one of the activities most rooted in Brazilian culture and still neglected in Brazilian historiography, in the history of technology and the history of Brazil."