El significado de las últimas palabras: las notas suicidas como acciones comunicativas. Buenos Aires, 1859-1888

• Main Author: Julián Arroyo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2020-12-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Suicide; Death; Buenos Aires; 19th century; Cultural history
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/82661

In this article we study, from a historical and sociocultural perspective, a set of suicide cases that occurred in the city of Buenos Aires between 1859 and 1888 to analyze the letters left by those who committed suicide. We understand these writings as communicative actions that had different meanings, and transmitted messages to the members of the deceased's social network. Also, one of our specific objectives is to explore the circumstances, concerns and conflicts that were part of the context in which these texts were produced. In other words, we seek to answer the following question: in which situations did suicide notes appear more frequently? Based on the evidence from the the judicial summaries, in this paper we show that letters appeared more frequently in files that narrated a series of particular events. Likewise, we argue that these plausible explanations of suicidal acts, and the notes associated with them, were stated based on the expectations of men and women from Buenos Aires during the last third of the 19th century.