From bats and death's heads to crosses and books: the representation of death at 19th-century cemeteries in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Following the assumption that spaces alloted to the dead specularly reflect the world of the living, both of them under the rules of the same Iogics, the A. considers the cemeteries as the loeus of tne symbolic reproduction of social universe and, henceforth, as a favoured domain to infer the processes through which bourgeois values are introduced and strengthened in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro's society. Within the framework of the disruption of the proslavery state, in the 1880s, as well as of the emergence of a growing capitalistic republic, she detects eventual changes of the collective imagina ire concerning death, at Rio's cemeteries. The results of her fieldwork are dis- cussed, related not only to the nature of changes, but also to the underlying mechanisms that pro-voked them.