Equivocal Connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the Origins of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology

• Autor(a) principal: Roque, Ricardo
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/50880

This article is about the equivoques of anthropology’s colonial encounter as well as the story of intellectual artefacts. [1] It addresses an old debate on the genealogy of anthropological knowledge, at the core of which is a shared assumption: anthropologists and historians today perceive the history of anthropology as intertwined with colonial history. Few, if any, anthropologists or historians would disagree that the anthropology of non-Western peoples is genealogically embedded in imperial expansion or colonial contexts, and that we can hardly imagine colonial power without some sort of anthropological knowledge as bedside company. It is also true that this assumption has not been at all devoid of strong moral convictions about the evil nature of colonialism and its friendly anthropologies, a moral impetus particularly evident in earlier approaches to the subject in the 1960s and ’70s. Since that time, though, with the exception of Talal Asad’s seminal assessment in 1973, historians have given it little systematic attention as a subject in its own right. [2] As George Stocking noted in 1991, the ‘assumption that anthropology was linked to Western colonialism’ seems to have survived in the professional culture of anthropologists more in the form of a ‘commonplace of disciplinary discourse’ than as a ‘serious interest in the history of anthropology in colonial context’. [3] Although the Portuguese case has been entirely left out of this picture by English literature, Stocking’s remarks apply to the Portuguese anthropological discourse since the 1970s. Having its professional identity closely associated with political opposition to the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, Portuguese social anthropology, born into institutional autonomy out of the April Revolution in 1974, has been eager to accuse earlier generations of (physical) anthropologists of racial prejudice and complicity with the imperial state. Very few have undertaken a serious and critical historical approach to such a pervasive disciplinary assumption.