Casas de pasto e restaurantes no Rio de Janeiro: uma análise comparada através dos periódicos (1809-1890)

Abstract

The investigation was guided by key analytical pairs — modernity/tradition, foreign/national, urban/suburban, and elite/popular — which, rather than being mere descriptive oppositions, express the social tensions and disputes of nineteenth-century society. These dichotomies engaged with the theoretical reflections of Norbert Elias and Bruno Latour on modernity; Benedict Anderson and Stuart Hall on national identity and colonial legacies; Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere; and Pierre Bourdieu on social distinction. By articulating these frameworks, the research demonstrates that food establishments not only mirrored social values but actively shaped hierarchies and symbolic boundaries. Within them, the legitimate and the inferior, the civilized and the backward, were defined, revealing public dining as a strategic arena for disputes over prestige, belonging, and power in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Among the main findings, the consolidation of Restaurants as prestigious spaces — associated with European values of hygiene, refinement, and distinction, symbols of an ideal of modernity — stands out, while Casas de Pasto came to be increasingly distrusted by authorities and the press, linked to popular strata, and converted into symbols of tradition and resistance.The rigidity of police control and the selective enforcement of the Codes of Postures, more intensely applied to the Casas de Pasto, revealed strategies of disciplining the so-called “dangerous classes.” These dynamics show how eating practices and public dining spaces functioned as instruments of reproduction — but also of tension — within the racial, social, and gender hierarchies of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.