Por amor às Serpentes: Histórias, Encontros e Ciência no Brasil Oitocentista

This article aims to tell a history of snakes in Brazil based on the accounts of foreign travelers who crossed the country during the 19th century. At the intersection of environmental history and human-animal studies, this reflection seeks to identify the place of snakes in the writing of Brazilian history and to recount encounters between humans—in this case, literate travelers—and non-human animals, whether wild or predatory, specifically reptiles of the order Squamata, namely snakes or ophidia. This history also seeks to understand the sciences that emerge from the identification, description, and inventory of species and individuals encountered, their main characteristics, possible uses, the dangers of venomous snakes, and the interspecies relationships that these encounters produced. The accounts of the travels of Grigori Ivanovich Langsdorff (1774–1853), Heinrich W. Adalbert of Prussia (1811–1873), Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826), and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1811–1873), Maximilen Alexander Philippe zu Wied-Neuwied (1782–1867), and Richard Francis Burton (1821–1980).