Morte, rituais fúnebres e epidemias: as implicações na criação do Cemitério Público do Recife (1850-1860)

Abstract

This paper aims to assess historically the attitudes of several western societies on facing death and epidemics, in order to present the changes and continuities of these attitudes on the conception of the off-wall cemetery in Recife city. It relates the conception of this space to the European influence in taking prophylactic measures on the social sphere as well as measures of urban reorganization, changing the relationship of the social actors and religiosity in their practices and funeral rituals in the second half of the nineteenth-century. In the 1800’s, the funeral practices in Recife and their relation to life’s finitude are influenced by different societies in different historical periods. The purpose of this work is to present a historiographical review of the theme, following, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth-century, the approaches to death, funeral rituals and epidemics along with the suggested debates about these issues, trying to present fears and problems induced by them in to the societies, the transformations and resistances to changes and the solutions pointed, with in a hygienist model in the nineteenth-century Recife. It is based on the theoretical support offered by Phillipe Arriès and Jacques Le Goff, renowned writers of this subject. Socially, death presents itself strangely and inconveniently. In the various historical periods the finitude of life has been questioned, but this unknown did not prevent individuals from presenting the most varied array of explanations, according to their historical age, using their socio-cultural interactions and the perception of the world around them. The daily presence of death reveals its importance so that we can live with it without so many fears, being aware of the measures able to delay it that exist in societies excelling on the concerns and actions of hygienic matters that guarantee the improvement of the population’s quality of life. These measures reshaped the death rites in Recife in the eighteen-hundreds, shifting the burials to the public cemetery of Recife, pointing out the relevance of this work.