The invention of difference: the animalization as self-other distinction in the western imaginary during the XVIII and XIX centuries

• Autor(a) principal: Pires Junior, Arnaldo Lucas
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Esboços (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/esbocos/article/view/2175-7976.2018v25n40p317

In this paper, we propose a theoretical discussion about one of the most common expedients of differentiation between men, the animalization of the “other”. By the analysis of travel reports and Natural History works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we seek to demonstrate how challenging the notion of humanity as static attribute had hit directly the conceptions about the origin of man and raised the possibility of a hierarchy of human experience in World. Our efforts led us to face a curious paradox. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – who have seen flourish the egalitarian ideals of bourgeois revolutions – will be at the same time, the period in which these values be confined to smaller and smaller groups and that wield a difference and servitude of some under the discourse of equality and freedom by others.