Abstract

PEREIRA DE OLIVEIRA, Ricardo Alexandre. Culture with an expiry date? Human and equine work and the vertigoes that gripped cart-drivers, veterinaries and animal liberation activists in an early Twentieth Century controversy. Rev. urug. Antropología y Etnografía [online]. 2021, vol.6, n.2, pp.13-28.  Epub Dec 01, 2021. ISSN 2393-7068.  https://doi.org/10.29112/ruae.v6i2.991.

This article addresses the controversies around animal traction involving gypsies, “quilombola” communities, veterinaries, biologists, anthropologists, parliamentary figures and animal rights activists. By exploring the description of a period that witnessed two attempts to criminalize horse-drawn carts and a dispute around the type of horseshoe to be used by working horses, I unfold the diverging concepts about work, animality and humanity put forth by different actors involved in these controversies. This text is the result of fieldwork, extension and assessment with cart-drivers and horses, from participant observation, compiling documents and laws, to the foundation of a social movement and recording a process of dispute escalating into laws being passed to criminalize horses, horse-driven carts and horse-driven cart-drivers.

Keywords : Anthropology of human and non-human collectives; equine work; cart-drivers; controversies; animal liberation.

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