| dc.description.abstract | This research analyzes the concepts of humanity and animality in the Hispanic Early
Modern period from an interpretation of the social processes of exclusion and
domination as processes of animalization and domestication.
This interpretation follows the problematization of humanities and
interdisciplinarity posed by Animal Studies. This interdisciplinarity combines ethics,
literature, politics, and ethology. Also, this work is inspired by the literary genre of
bestiaries, in which both the notion of animal and the disciplinary division are blurred
and shown as constructs. This research analyzes four «beasts» or specimens (animal,
human, canine, marrano).
The first specimen is the animal, which is defined in the Modern Period in
opposition to the human. This definition operates negatively: the animal is defined by
human characteristics allegedly absent in animals. In this analysis I criticize the animal
as an abstract and singular concept, in favor of a non-dichotomous definition of human
and other life forms.
I analyze the human specimen from the humanist project and the humanities, on
one hand, and from the Conquest of the Americas and the evangelization of the
indigenous population, on the other.
In the case of the canine specimen I focus on its position of a threshold, in
between human society and natural world. In this study I explore the implications of this
intermediate position that has been interpreted as both the dangers of savage inhumanity
and the liberation of social limitations.
The forth specimen, the marrano, it is a paradigmatic form of animalization. It
gives a special perspective not only because Marrano is an anti-Semitic term in relation
to pigs, but also because it indicates the process of the communitarian closure based on
an identity and how this closure operates either by conversion/assimilation the different,
or by its expulsion/persecution.
The conclusion of this research can be summarized in the rejection of the modern
concept of the animal, and in the transformation of humanities, considering animals and
the contemporary posthumanist historical context. Likewise, I conclude in favor of the
inclusion of animals into the juridical system of guarantees in a non-anthropomorfizing
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