Conquests of death: Disease, health and hygiene in the formation of a social body (Puerto Rico, 1880--1929)

Historically, death and disease have had a great constitutive power in Puerto Rico. These phenomena occupied a "vital", if negative, place in the local and colonial tasks of Modernity on the Island. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural texts and social commentaries, from fictions to scientific and official documents, this study shows something of that constellation of images, texts and practices in which and through which a discourse and form of pathological thinking was articulated between 1880 and 1929. Turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico constituted a historical threshold: a moment of foundations in which frameworks and categories for conceptualizations of what it means to live and exist socially were created based on the conviction that death, and all its real or figurative associations, could be and ought to be conquered and exiled from the spaces of life. This exercise in cultural sociology incursions into those castaway dimensions that mark social existence.; The dissertation also traces a definition of society and social subjectivity that has been crafted and carved up in the problematization and language of death and disease. It argues that the Puerto Rican letrado signposted the sociological domain both as a field of knowledge and intervention. The criollo dreams of Modernity and fascination with disorder had a stake as well in the constitution of the colonial subject before and after 1898. At this point, the North American colonial drive and narratives of pollution intersected criollo desire. Together even if not always in accord, they built a discursive landscape and an institutional itinerary for establishing physical and social boundaries on the Island. Taken as zones of exception in the emerging landscape of 'the social', the body of blacks, the sick jibaro and the urban poor foreshadowed the intrinsic impossibility of Society and of the concept of Life on which it rested. This dissertation has implications for the present as the fears and concerns aired in the early problematization of death and disease shape Puerto Rican culture and politics even today.