ABSTRACT
At least since the Hippocratic theories, a diet had a prominent position for the understanding of some of the people’s transformations occurring in individuals. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the justification of the Greco-Roman tradition about the consumption of certain foods had lost some of its argumentative force, and other understandings of food arose. The importance and role of food have been reformulated to serve other discursive contexts and new demands. In this sense, once allied to the theory of the stages of society, which considered the subsistence mode a central factor to explain the diversity of cultures and peoples, eating habits did not anymore explain just the mutability of the body, but rather the degree of civilization of societies. This article highlights the emphasis given to food within the articulation of the theory of the four stages made by Robert Southey in his History of Brazil (1810-1819) as a discursive argument about the civilization of Natives and the survival and/or degeneration of gauchos and platenses.
Keywords:
Robert Southey; History of Brazil; four stages theory; food