Entre a história e a memória, o crime de Donária dos Anjos - 1877.

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the cannibalism that occurred in the city of Pombal - PB in 1877, when the migrant Donária dos Anjos promoted an act of non-ritual anthropophagy on the girl Maria. Around that year, the Agrarian North of the Brazilian Empire suffered an implacable and scorching drought. In the Province of Paraíba do Norte, the human, ecological and economic situation was bleak. The initiatives designed for “public aid”, in turn, were not enough to save a large part of the people from the scourge. The landscape of fields and cities is drastically affected. In its specificity, the event we studied is linked, in its trajectory to the social and historical formation of a time that marked, in an immediate and sudden way, the fate of thousands of men, women and children with a severe and violent, drastic survival at your destination. When the historian encounters the uniqueness of these events, his investigation, supported by documentary work, moves between the analysis of events and contexts, analyzing and conjecturing. In our investigation, the fact that caused, in a tragic way, the death of the girl Maria gained treatment and an interpretation. It moves from history to memory, from memory through affection, through feeling - a pathos - to the present time of the city's inhabitants, embraced in popular religiosity, in a sphere of sanctification. Our investigation path sought to analyze and understand this movement of a crime between history and memory, around the suffering, death and memory of the girl Maria.