The sciences of anthropological classification in 'Portuguese Timor' (1894-1975)

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Publications

Descrições portuguesas das línguas de Timor-Leste na transição dos sécs. XIX e XX

Publication . Cardoso, Hugo C.

Na segunda metade do século XIX, em resposta a um crescente interesse académico pelos povos e línguas do mundo mas também a um projecto de dominar as línguas das colónias europeias para fins de administração e missionação, começam a surgir as primeiras descrições de línguas de Timor-Leste, à data colónia portuguesa. Este estudo reconstitui a sequência de gramáticas, dicionários e obras didácticas produzidos em língua portuguesa, entre essa altura e a ocupação japonesa no contexto da Segunda Guerra Mundial, apresentando os seus autores (principalmente missionários mas também outros agentes coloniais) e analisando o contexto, motivação e metodologia da sua produção. Aborda ainda as dinâmicas de colaboração ou competição que é possível entrever nestas obras de natureza linguística e noutros documentos complementares, nos quais se percebem a dimensão e constrangimentos da polinização entre as diversas fontes, e ainda o impacto da sua publicação no processo de (re)conhecimento da diversidade linguística do território timorense.

2017Journal article

Open access

The colonial ethnological line: Timor and the racial geography of the Malay Archipelago

Publication . Roque, Ricardo

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia’s work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia’s classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace’s famous ethnological line.

2018Journal article

Restricted access

Gouvernement colonial, technologies mimétiques et ‘droit coutumier’ au Timor Oriental

Publication . Roque, Ricardo

Le présent essai cherche à approfondir le ‘complexe thématique’ de la mimèsis comme une donnée fondamentale de la théorie et de la pratique coloniales européennes. Ainsi s’agira-t-il de conceptualiser les pratiques du savoir associées au gouvernement colonial de la justice et du droit en tant que technologies mimétiques. Je me servirai ici d’un exemple spécifique, à savoir le programme colonial d’étude des ‘us et coutumes’, voire du droit coutumier des sociétés autochtones, tel qu’il fut promu et partiellement appliqué dans la colonie portugaise du Timor oriental par le gouverneur José Celestino da Silva, au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles.

2016Book part

Restricted access

The name of the wild man: colonial arbiru in East Timor

Publication . Roque, Ricardo

In this chapter I explore the indigenous incorporation and critique of colonial outsiders through nicknaming. I draw on the history of colonial warfare in Timor-Leste, a former Portuguese colony, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to consider naming practices as a way through which the mimetic excesses of colonial agents could be simultaneously acknowledged, feared, criticized, and even cursed as a form of savagery. For this purpose I follow the cross-cultural history of the term arbiru. East Timorese people used this term as a nickname for a Portuguese colonial officer in the 1890s. Portuguese colonial accounts understood this usage as Timorese recognition of European supremacy and supernatural powers. Nevertheless, the colonial viewpoint failed to capture the veiled negative meanings that the Timorese name conveyed. In contrast, this chapter argues, the term arbiru entailed hidden indigenous criticism and cursing of the colonizers’ excessive, threatening, and transgressive actions. It was a linguistic gesture for naming the wild and wicked nature of colonial mimesis.

2020Book part

Restricted access

Lost traces: hunting the past in the colonial archives of Timor-Leste

Publication . Roque, Ricardo

2017Book part

Restricted access