Discourses of human sensitivity to animal cause in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

The project intends to improve and consolidate our analyzes of discourses on human sensitivity to the animal cause, with a view to better developing the proposal of our doctorate in Brazil: to analyze discourses of sensitivity to animals produced in the last fifty years in texts from the legal, scientific and third sector fields, in order to identify, describe and interpret specificities and differences in constancy and intensity in affirmations and denials that these beings are endowed with qualities such as sensations, emotions, intelligence and language. We tried to verify the hypothesis that, even in pro-animal statements, the recognition of their pain and sensitivity is more constant and intense than that of their cognitive and linguistic skills. This deepening will be carried out above all by incorporating to the foundations and notions of Discourse Analysis, with which we work, assumptions and procedures derived from the History of Sensibilities and the History of Animals, as practiced by our supervisor. The conjunction between our field of action and the knowledge arising from these other areas is fundamental for us to understand what is said about the sensitivity of humans to animals and how the statements about them are formulated in our material. More precisely, this association will help us to understand these aspects: to identify from which discursive formations the utterances that are the object of our research derive; to apprehend the greater or lesser conservation or ephemerality of the already said about the sensitivity to the animal cause in these statements, verifying which are those considered pertinent, debatable or null, from what times, places, subjects and institutions they come and to what extent this provenance consists of its euphoric or dysphoric valorization; analyze resumptions, rebuttals, reformulations or deletions of other discourses about animals. (AU)