Memories of faraway visitors to Southeast Asia: the ‘Portuguese fort’ in Amurang

• Autor(a) principal: Schouten, Maria Johanna Christina
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7178
• topic: Postcolonialism; Fortifications; Folk memories; Oral history; Portuguese maritime voyages; Indonesia; Minahasa; Amurang; Ternate

This article examines today’s perception among Indonesians of the Portuguese presence in Eastern Indonesia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite evidence of the often violent pursuit of supremacy and material benefit by European navigators, the local population has different understandings of the past. An assessment of these from an anthropological perspective is guided by twin concepts such as emics and etics, and memory and history. Our case study combines documentary research and fieldwork, focusing on a colonial fort in Amurang, on the island of Sulawesi. The present-day accounts of the local population and of some official organizations attribute a Portuguese origin to this fort, and narratives about the Portuguese abound in folk memory, often contradicting the findings of scientific research. Significant is the positive image of the Portuguese prevalent among the population. The article includes historical data on the Portuguese and Spanish presence in Indonesia and ethnographic data of Amurang, as well as architectural and archaeological details of the fort.