O cotidiano da morte nas freguesias de Cabaceiras e São João do Cariri - PB (1856)

Abstract

The year 1856 brought many changes to the daily life of death with the arrival of an “undesirable guest”, cholera. The cholera epidemic was strongly felt in some Provinces of the Brazilian Empire, notably in Paraíba, and especially in the countryside, from the parishes of Cabaceiras and São João do Cariri. Changes and/or even permanence, in that epidemic context, profoundly affected funeral rites. This can be observed in the documentation consulted by us, which we highlight: the Reports of the President of the Province, newspapers, Death Books, Wills and Inventories. In this way, we observe the statistics of the disease; what preparations imminent death brought to the lives of the dying; how their wishes were fulfilled after their departure and what social transformations were brought into the realm of burials. It was based on the research line History and Regionalities, from the PPGH/UFPB, that we realized how the documents allowed us to show how Cabaceiras and São João do Cariri still breathed the Christian customs that dictated the rites of the “good death”, through their funeral wishes. Throughout the work we noticed how the study of death, and its contexts, for a long time was observed only with a pathological look and with purely medical sources. Starting to problematize illnesses as sociocultural products opens up a broad panorama of research and references. Thus, analyzing the daily life of death is, ultimately, an issue that also concerns the social aspect, since it permeates the life and reality of any person, to the detriment of class, race, gender, age, among others, making it, therefore, a connecting factor in any part of the globe, as an insurmountable event that it is.