ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Between internal imperialism and post-imperial crossroads: Rethinking disease ecology within Brazilian rural communities (1920-1950)

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 3 - (Post)-Imperial Ecologies

English Abstract

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Brazil was pitted against a new sanitary phenomenon: diseases usually associated to urban spaces, such as plague and yellow fever, started to move to the hinterland, infecting rural communities and wild animals, a process that ultimately gave place to what I suggest calling the “wild diseases”. The wild diseases attracted the attention of Brazilian doctors, zoologists, and ecologists as well as of their North and South American, and European counterparts, who visited the Brazilian hinterland in different occasions. This national and international scientific interest ultimately placed several rural communities at the intersection of Brazilian projects of conquering, civilizing, and sanitizing the hinterland, and international competition on subjects such as disease ecology and animal reservoirs of disease. Going against the historiographical grain of centring the history of disease ecology on White male figures, in this presentation I focus instead on the Brazilian rural populations affected by the wild diseases, how they navigated these national, international, and (post)imperial disease ecology networks, how they collaborated with and reacted against the experts, and ultimately how the rural communities reworked the problem of wild diseases in their own terms.

Author

• Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, King's College London