Deixai morrer, deixai viver: as mudanças no sentido da morte na cidade de Vitória-ES, durante a segunda metade do século XIX e os primeiros anos da república

Abstract

The present work had the objective of elucidating the disputes, consensuses and dissent around the meanings of death and dying vis-à-vis the advent of modernity in the city of Vitoria-ES between the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. Based on a critical and non-linear reading of the phenomenon of modernity and of the different modern forms of dealing with time, this work was aimed at understanding the peculiarities of this process in the local reality, investigating how the modernizing experience of the city was able to produce a change in the representations of funerary customs, in the ways of experiencing the moment of death, and especially in the new – and increasingly mundane – ways of experiencing death among politicians, doctors, engineers and others holders of contemporary scientific knowledge in the capital of Espírito Santo. Taking into account local specificities, we also seek to explore what we believe to be the manifestation of certain forms of resistance to such changes, when we also analyze the role played by the Catholic Church and its brotherhoods in their struggle for the maintenance of rituals and certain habits related to more traditional ways of understanding the afterlife among the inhabitants of the urban perimeter of the city. These objectives were pursued through an analysis of newspapers, administrative reports, official documents and medical records, as well as a series of ecclesiastical documents that confirmed to a great extent the central thesis supported in the present work, namely, the permanence of some practices and representations of death and dying in Capixaba territory – such as the belated maintenance of an intramural cemetery in the city of Vitoria – was much more the result of a very "negotiated" or "incomplete" way of experiencing modern temporality, than the expression of a "delay" or a "mistake of course" in the process of modernization of the state of Espírito Santo during the end of the Empire of Brazil and the early decades of the Brazilian Republic.