Equivocal connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the origins of Portuguese colonial anthropology.

Publication: Portuguese Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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This article is about the equivoques of anthropology's colonial encounter as well as the story of intellectual artefacts. 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. (1) 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'. (2) 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. (3)

Anthropology's colonial history retains its attractive power, but the commonplace does not satisfy historians and anthropologists anymore. Quite recently the study of the roots of colonial anthropology or, more specifically, ethnography, has received careful and novel critical attention. Pels and Salemink's Colonial Ethnographies of 1994 and two recently published volumes of 1999 are devoted to exploring and re-working the agenda opened up by Asad's volume. (4) Crucial in the new impulse for objectifying anthropology and colonialism are Pels and Salemink's programmatic formulations. Restoring Stocking's historicist appeal to debunk the 'presentist' bias of disciplinary history, Pels and Salemink argue for a wider and non-disciplinary understanding of practitioners and forms of anthropology. (5) The genealogy of ethnographic theories and methods is now regarded as located in the heterogeneous and plural realms of 'colonial practice' and 'colonial subjects', well beyond the boundaries of the academic profession. Colonial contexts such as missionary work, settlement, war and pacification, government or trade re-emerge as crucial moments and agents of anthropology's past. (6) At the same time, their idea of a 'practical history of anthropology' offers an important attempt to depart from the literary reductionisms of discourse and intertextual analysis. We are asked to turn our energies instead to the study of practices, locating text in its situations of (co)production and 'material mediations'. (7)

However, as often occurs with every programmatic formula, not all is equally developed by other scholars, even by the proponents themselves. The effort to shake disciplinary histories seems to have come to the fore, while other lines of enquiry appear to remain in its shadow. Historians of anthropology are especially concerned with reviewing the canons of genealogical narratives and restoring its 'excluded ancestors'. (8) In this sense, one may recognize that Pels and Salemink's volumes are successful attempts to expose the biases of disciplinary genealogies, as well as to provide new understandings of non-academic professionals and practices in their historical contexts of ethnographic production. But there is at least one important aspect in the 'fourth thesis' of Pels and Salemink's programme which historians, and the authors themselves, have not investigated. (9) I refer to the neglect of practices of consumption, by which one can follow the ways anthropological inscriptions and objects are put (or not) to colonial use. As they themselves wrote, elaborating on reductionisms of Edward Said's approach to the power of orientalist representations: 'before assuming that the content of the ethnographic text is an example of intellectual colonization of "others", one first has to analyse the ways in which it was consumed by different audiences, both within and outside of the colonial situation'. (10) However, the prospect for a joint exploration of the production and reception of texts is omitted in Pels and Salemink's more recent 'update' to their programme. It appears to have been displaced by the debunking of professional genealogies in the authors' programme. The practical history of anthropology they propose turns, in fact, into an analysis of the contexts that preclude and situate the writing of the anthropological texts, an approach they epitomize in the analytical sequence of preterrain, ethnographic occasions and ethnographic traditions. (11) Yet, one still knows very little about how anthropological textual artefacts are actually read and why and how they are used, or not, by colonial agents. (12) Thus, in this sense a question remains to be asked: how do anthropological texts become, and fail to become, connected to colonial projects, events and materials across their discontinuous processes of production and reception?

This article tries to address this question, offering an attempt to discuss the history of production and consumption of textual anthropological artefacts as unstable trajectories of circulation materially performed in multiple sites. In so doing, I will try critically to retell the genealogical story of a scientific discipline: colonial anthropology. This story takes us to the particular experience of Portuguese anthropology aligned with a physical and racialist tradition. In 1934, Artur da Fonseca Cardoso (1865-1912), an army captain who died from malaria in the jungles of Portuguese Timor in 1912, was celebrated as the 'founding father' of colonial anthropology in Portugal. The occasion for this celebration was the First Congress of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology, held at Porto as part of a first national exhibition entirely devoted to the Portuguese colonies. In the opening pages of the congress proceedings Cardoso's ceremonial portrait, undertitled 'Fonseca Cardoso, iniciador da Antropologia Colonial Portuguesa', was exhibited as an icon of the discipline. He was acknowledged in a laudatory biographical sketch: 'Fonseca Cardoso'. Mendes Correia wrote, 'foi inegavelmente uma das figuras mais eminentes da antropologia portuguesa. [...] Na India Portuguesa fez um magnifico estudo sobre 'O Indigena de Satari' [...] Infelizmente, a morte nao o deixou concluir a sua obra esplendida'. (13) To complement this narrative, one of Cardoso's publications was taken as the founding bibliographical event of the science of colonial anthropology in Portugal: a twelve-page article discussing the anthropometry and racial types of Satari's native population, an inland district of Goa, former Portuguese colony in India. (14) The article, 'O Indigena de Satari. Estudo antropologico' was published in 1897 in a Portuguese scientific journal, Revista de Ciencias Naturais e Sociais, but fieldwork was carried out while Cardoso campaigned as military officer in the colonial 'pacification' of the Ranes' rebellion of 1895-96, in Goa. (15) This 1930s narrative produced a genealogy and a founding father for a scientific discipline explicitly linking anthropology and the imperial project, which would exist in Portugal under the heading 'colonial anthropology' for about fifty years. Both man and text were thought of as the origins of Portuguese colonial anthropology.

Although this story concerns the trajectory of a specific intellectual artefact (the text 'O Indigena de Satari') and the heroic tale of its author, as well as the particular experience of Portuguese anthropologists, it is hoped this will contribute to the broad debate on anthropology's colonial roots to which I referred at the beginning of this article. (16) It does so in three principal strands of argument. Firstly, and most immediately, it helps to fill in a gap on the subject of historiography, restoring, as it were, an 'excluded ancestor' of Western colonial anthropology. Much that is known and discussed about anthropology (especially ethnography) and colonialism concerns the British colonial experience, and to a minor extent perhaps the French, German, Dutch, Russian, and even Japanese experience. (17) Portuguese imperial experience has been excluded in this respect. (18) For these reasons I hope to contribute to putting the Portuguese case on the map. Secondly, I would like to add my voice to those who critically explore the genealogical trope of anthropology and colonialism's association by underlining some of the possible consequences of taking into account both production and consumption as jointly constitutive of the colonial condition of anthropological texts. I argue that the above notion of a practical history of anthropology, which I think is a fruitful one, should be extended to the practices of consumption. As such, consumption has to be understood as a set of practices actively involved in producing the texts. Anthropologists, historians and sociologists of reading have long stressed that readers and every situated material or narrative practice that enacts a text have an important role to play in the conduct of discourses through time. (19) I thus propose to follow anthropological texts as intellectual artefacts along their various locations of material and practical production--not only preterrain, occasions of contact in the field, or cultural resources, but also the processes of circulation of the text, that is the temporally emergent practical performances of intellectual artefacts in their multiple contexts of use, within and outside of the colonial realm.

Once one concentrates the analysis on the full practical process of the production-reception of anthropological artefacts we will be in a position to problematize the way anthropology and colonialism are imagined as historically and locally connected. (20) Thus, thirdly, this text argues that anthropological artefacts and colonial elements have to be re-networked through processes of translations by the participants themselves, if anthropology is to emerge as associated or disassociated with colonialism. (21) I am thus suspicious of the assumption that 'anthropology and empire were never separated', which critical historians such as Pels and Salemink have difficulty in denying, at least 'in principle'. (22) By contrast, it is my intention to enhance the fluctuant process by which anthropology becomes and fails to become colonial. The irregularity, precariousness and contradiction inscribed in the association between anthropology and colonialism can be approached with the insightful notion of 'partial connections' put forward by Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern. (23) 'Partial connections', Strathern says, 'require images other than those taxonomies or configurations that compel one to look for overarching principles or for core or central features. [...] they would be maps without centers and genealogies without generations'. (24) A central argument of this essay is that connections between anthropology and colonialism are partial--but, also, that they can be equivocal. In what follows, I will try to give evidence of the unsteady binding of anthropology and colonialism across time, as well as of the equivocal translations along which connections or disconnections between anthropological science and colonial projects are performed. I hope to show that the establishment of these dis/connections depend on the mutable intervention of a disparate collective of participants and contingencies, so that in the specific case of Fonseca Cardoso and 'O Indigena de Satari' anthropology's attachment to colonialism emerges as a chain of equivocal connections.

I develop these arguments in four sections, which roughly follow a chronological order. I begin in the years prior to Cardoso's move to Goa in 1895, and try to set his connection to anthropology in the context of his scientific programme, social relations and patriotic ideology. It describes Cardoso's strong involvement in a programme of anthropology as an attempt to regenerate the nation and unveil the ethnogeny of Portugal. I then move to the imperial setting where Cardoso was forced to participate as a consequence of his military profession: the 'pacification' campaign of 1895-96. Here, I try to show the weaknesses of Portuguese imperial power in the peculiar conflict with the Ranes of Satari, one in which the range of possibilities for Cardoso to succeed with anthropometric fieldwork was, in fact, very restricted. Generally, colonial power relations, I argue, did not provide a supportive structure for the practice of anthropology. The third section focuses on the ambivalent contingencies that led to the imprisonment of forty-four Satarians, later subjected to anthropometric observation. I here argue that Fonseca Cardoso took advantage of an equivocal demonstration of imperial inefficiency to enlist living subjects for anthropological study. I finally attempt to follow the practical production of the text throughout the writing and circulation of 'O Indigena de Satari' in succeeding years, from 1897 to 1934. I here confront contemporary silences, Cardoso's strategies of scientific credibility and later genealogical appropriations of him and his text for the professional benefit of a new generation of anthropologists. Colonial dis/connections of text and author were put in relief or cut away as they were performed in often contrasting narratives on anthropology, empire and the nation.

ANTHROPOLOGY AT HOME: FONSECA CARDOSO AND ANTHROPOLOGY IN PORTUGAL

Fonseca Cardoso was born in the city of Porto, northern Portugal, into a family with strong military traditions. He did not deceive the social and professional expectations of his parents and relatives, and soon followed a military career as army officer. Yet, his heart and personal vocation pointed elsewhere. In his early twenties, along with a...

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