Animals and politics in the modern city: threats, fables, and the excesses of animal life in Buenos Aires (1871-1910)

Abstract

Between the final decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, Buenos Aires faced a series of wide-ranging transformations that would culminate in its consolidation as a modern city. Within this larger process, a heterogeneous series of reorganizations and redefinitions surrounding animal life also took place, altering both its material presence in urban space and its multiple cultural and symbolic inscriptions. This paper aims to explore specific interconnections between politics and animal life that intensified and renewed at this specific moment in Buenos Aires' history, and in which we can read clues about the places that urban modernity would bring to animal life. To this end, two axes of analysis will be addressed. First, a set of municipal and provincial initiatives that were intensively deployed in Buenos Aires between the 1870s and 1910, in response to a widespread perception of animal life as a threat to urban order and the health of the human population. Secondly, an update of the rhetorical strategies and narrative procedures of the classical fable to transform them into means of intervention in current political issues.