Abstract
Portugal is considered marginal in relation to the European scene. And yet it was in this country, thirty years ago, that European anthropology began to think of and formally constitute itself as such. This chapter presents a historical overview of the evolution of the various traditions of anthropology in Portugal from the end of the nineteenth century, the period of disciplinary consolidation, to the present. The discussion of the main theoretical and methodological perspectives is reflected in the events of a country undergoing transformation. The proposed path—dialoguing with different histories, traditions and schools of thought—entails multiple stages, from the move to study popular culture in order to consolidate national identity to anthropology’s role in constructing the colonial empire, from disciplinary revitalisation in the years of democratic transition to the present, a moment characterised by processes of internationalisation and crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
From the Russian word тройка, (“trio”), in the framework of European Union policy Troika represents the set of official creditors who act during negotiations with the various member countries. It consists of representatives of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
- 2.
The authors presented here recognise the necessarily incomplete nature of their choices in terms of enumeration, description and analysis. As it could not be otherwise, we agree with their statement: a complete history of Portuguese anthropology would require a long list of authors and many volumes to be exhaustive. Therefore, we apologise to the colleagues omitted from this overview, as everyone is important in this discipline with its aspirations of being humane and interventionist.
- 3.
Giacomo Pozzi began visiting Portugal in 2010 thanks to an Erasmus grant. From that experience, he collaborated with ISCTE-IUL and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He then obtained a PhD in Urban Studies in Portugal in co-tutorship with a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Milano-Bicocca. Since 2020, he has been conducting fieldwork in Cape Verde. Chiara Pussetti’s link with Portugal began in the 1990s, following fieldwork among the Bijagó of Guinea Bissau. Chiara Pussetti and Lorenzo Bordonaro were among the first Italian anthropologists to start a career in Lisbon, opening a path that ended up being heavily trodden in the following years. She is currently a researcher with the Instituto de Ciências Sociais at Universidade de Lisboa.
- 4.
The following reflections on the book Antropologia em Portugal: Mestres, Percursos e Tradições are a re-elaboration of a text by Clara Saraiva published in the journal Etnográfica (Saraiva, 2008).
- 5.
Analysing, for example, Consiglieri Pedroso’s compilations of folk tales and myths published in English as Portuguese Folk Tales (Consiglieri Pedroso, 1882).
- 6.
Such as Max Muller, Foustel de Coulanges, Spencer, Renan, Mommsem, Benfey, James Frazer and E.B. Tylor (Leal, 2000, pp. 31–33).
- 7.
This argument is confirmed in the writings of Teófilo Braga. See, for example, Braga (1867).
- 8.
Leal analyses four fundamental stages of Portuguese anthropology between 1870 and 1970 (1870–1880; 1890–1900; 1910–1920; 1930–1970). In the first, he identifies the study of Portuguese ethnic originality; in the second, an interest in the country’s internal diversity emerges (some journals, such as Portugália and the Revista Lusitana, had a national scope while others such as A Tradição, A Ilustração Transmontana and Revista do Minho and Lusa had a more local scope and regional circulation) (Leal, 2000, pp. 32–35); in the third, the republic and optimism about national destiny gave rise to nationalist ethnography with a folkloristic character; in the fourth, Jorge Dias and his team, coining the concept of “ethnography of urgency”, are concerned with preserving the material and immaterial heritage of different local communities.
- 9.
The Society still exists today and publishes the journal Trabalhos de Etnologia e Ethnologia.
- 10.
Mendes Correia (from the University of Porto) and Eusébio Tamagnini (from the University of Coimbra) were part of the political elite of the time: the former became President of the Lisbon Geography Society and the Colonial School; the latter was a minister in the Salazar regime (Bastos & Sobral, 2018, pp. 4–5).
- 11.
Rui Pereira recounts how, in November 1945, Santos Júnior gave a speech to the settlers of Beira (Mozambique) entitled “How to study a Negro: a lesson on how to observe the descriptive characteristics of an indigenous person, identify and take the body measurements of greatest anthropological interest” (Pereira, 2005).
- 12.
- 13.
Through which the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo, in force since 1933, was deposed and a process began that would end with the establishment of a democratic regime and the establishment of a new Constitution (on 25 April 1976) marked by a strong socialist orientation
- 14.
The same thing happened with the architects who, on the basis of Ribeiro’s tripartite division (Ribeiro, 1963), examined popular architecture in the country from the end of the 1950s until the beginning of the 1960s (Associação de Arquitectos, 1988). The second part of Etnografias Portuguesas deals with this topic in a masterful way (Leal, 2000, pp. 145–223).
- 15.
Initially with José Carlos Gomes da Silva, a scholar who graduated in Belgium but shortly afterwards founded the Anthropology course at ISCTE and later encouraged the transfer of young teachers from FCSH to ISCTE.
- 16.
Going “abroad” in those years meant leaving a country closed to the world by a fascist-inclined dictatorship, in addition to the many cases where people went into exile to escape persecution by the political police or to avoid going being sent to fight in the colonial war.
- 17.
In one of its special issues (Cardeira da Silva, 1997), the periodical featured a portrait of the vitality of the department headed by Jill Dias. A specialist in ethnohistory, Dias combined deep historical knowledge with remarkable ethnographic sensitivity and, in addition to numerous publications on Africa, she also curated one of the most important exhibitions at the National Museum of Ethnology, África and Brazil, Nas Vésperas do Mundo Moderno (Dias, 1992).
- 18.
Other significant scientific journals include Antropologia Portuguesa by the University of Coimbra (founded in 1983); Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia, a journal founded in 1918 and published by the Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia (SPAE); Arquivos da Memória, created by CEEPA in 1994; Análise Social, founded in 1963 by the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon.
- 19.
This replaced the former Junta Nacional para a Investigação Científica (JNICT).
- 20.
It was mainly after the 1990s that Portugal and Brazil developed very close relations, thanks to the research work of Portuguese anthropologists in Brazil (Cristiana Bastos, Miguel Vale de Almeida, Susana Viegas and João de Pina-Cabral, among others) and of Brazilian anthropologists in Portugal (e.g. Feldman-Branco, 2001).
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Pozzi, G., Pussetti, C. (2023). From the Regime Ethnologists to the Democratic Generation: Histories of Portuguese Anthropology. In: D'Agostino, G., Matera, V. (eds) Histories of Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21258-1_7
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