Abstract
This book explores two interconnected topics: headhunting in the context of colonial wars, and the collection of human heads for European museums, between the 1870s and the 1930s. It is an enquiry into the interactions between European colonialism and indigenous cultures, and an investigation into the relationships between colonial violence and the science of anthropology in that historical period. By looking closely at Portuguese colonialism in East Timor, it aims to understand how indigenous peoples and colonial powers interacted in a mutually dependent way, and how collected remains came to be seen as objects of political, symbolic, and scientific significance. As such, this work combines imperial history and historical anthropology with the history and sociology of science. The social life of collections, the relations between colonizers and colonized, and the nature of indigenous ritual violence, or headhunting, have been studied by scholars of the history of science, imperial history, and social and cultural anthropology. However, these topics have not been investigated as a connected whole. This study brings them together through an interdisciplinary approach that examines the circulation of human skulls and the stories told about them to offer a broader understanding of how colonialism, headhunting, and anthropology become mutually intertwined. Hence this book is an attempt to use skulls and their webs of documentation as a prism through which to view how these different processes intersect.
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Notes
On nineteenth-century debates on Portugal and its imperial project (especially concerning the turn to Africa), cf. Valentim Alexandre, ‘A Questão Colonial no Portugal Oitocentista’, in V. Alexandre and J. Dias (eds), O Império Africano 1825–1890 (Lisbon: Estampa, 1998), pp. 21–132
João Pedro Marques, Os Sons do Silêncio: o Portugal de Oitocentos e a Abolição do Tráfico de Escravos (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 1999), ch. 6. Since the 1970s–80s the (un)economic character of Portuguese colonialism in Africa has been controversial amongst historians.
Cf. R. J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa, 1815–1910. A Study in Uneconomic Imperialism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966)
Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).
Joseph Schumpeter, ‘The Sociology of Imperialism,’ in Imperialism and Social Classes (New York, 1919, reprint New York: Meridian Books, 1951), pp. 1–98.
Cf. Valentim Alexandre, Velhos Brasis, Novas Africas. Portugal e o Império (1808–1975) (Porto: Afrontamento, 2000).
Cf. for example, Afonso de Castro, As Possessões Portuguezas na Oceânia (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1867)
Bento da França, Macau e os seus Habitantes. Relações com Timor (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1897)
A. Leite de Magalhães, ‘Timor, a Desventurada’, O Mundo Português, IV, 45 (1937), 391–5
G. Pimenta de Castro, Timor (Subsídios para a sua História) (Lisbon: AGC, 1944), p. 10.
J. A. Fernandes, Timor. Impressões e Aspectos (Porto: Tip. A Tribuna, 1923), pp. 6–8
Ribeiro da Fonseca [R.F.], ‘Timor’, Revista Militar, 19 (1895), 577.
Raphael das Dores, ‘Apontamentos para um Diccionario Chorographico de Timor’, BSGL, 7–12 (1903), 821. I provide a more detailed account of this imagery of East Timor in Ricardo Roque, ‘The Unruly Island: Colonialism’s Predicament in Late Nineteenth-Century East Timor’, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 19 (2010), forthcoming.
J. P. Oliveira Martins, O Brazil e as Colónias Portuguezas (3rd edn, Lisbon: Livr. Bertrand, 1887), p. 12.
See also Rui Ramos, A Segunda Fundação (1890–1926) (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1994), pp. 145–6. Rumours of negotiations for selling East Timor to Holland, albeit readily disclaimed, reappeared in the years to come—for example, in 1920, and 1934. In Australia, some also expressed interest in the acquisition of Timor by the late 1910s. See C. M. Pilliet to Foreign Office of the Australian Government, 12 Dec. 1919, Canberra, National Archives of Australia, Timor (Portuguese) Purchase of, A11804/1;
Anonymous, ‘Uma atoarda absurda acerca de Timor’, BAGC, 106 (1934), 108–9.
See A. Teodoro de Matos, Timor Português 1515–1769. Contribuição para a sua História (Lisbon: Inst. Histórico Inf. D. Henrique, 1974), pp. 177–85
André Teixeira, ‘Comércio Português na Região de Timor na Segunda Metade do Século XVII’, Oriente, 4 (2002), 83–95.
Cf. Fernandes, Timor, p. 29; Armando Pinto Correia, Timor de Lés a Lés (Lisbon: AGC, 1944), p. 63.
J. S. Vaquinhas, ‘Timor. Cartas de José dos Santos Vaquinhas’, BSGL, IV, 6 (1883), 284–5; Castro, As Possessões, pp. 369, 371.
Since the sixteenth century, the Portuguese in Africa and Asia secured the allegiance of local rulers by means of vassalage treaties and still in the nineteenth century they remained a principal means of guaranteeing the dependence of indigenous princedoms from Portuguese authority. Many sobados in Angola and the Ranes princedoms in Goa continued to be linked to Portugal by vassalage contracts. See B. Heintze, ‘Luso-African Feudalism in Angola? The Vassal Treaties of the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century’, Revista Portuguesa de História, 18 (1930), 111–31
Jill Dias, ‘Angola’, in V. Alexandre and J. Dias ( eds), O Império Africano 1825–1890 (Lisbon: Estampa, 1998), pp. 354–7
Ricardo Roque, Antropologia e Império: Fonseca Cardoso e a Expedição à Índia em 1895 (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2001), pp. 50–4.
See also Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
For the theory of collaboration, cf. Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 118–40
for the notion of ‘vulgarisation of power’: John Lonsdale, ‘The Conquest State of Kenya 1895–1905’, in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: J. Currey, 1992), I, pp. 13–44
for collaboration and indirect rule in Southeast Asia: J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice. A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948)
A. J. Stockwell, ‘British Expansion and Rule in South-East Asia’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Nineteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), III, pp. 371–94
Carl A. Trocki, ‘Political Structures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in N. Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. From c. 1800 to the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), II, pp. 75–126.
The notion of indirect rule has also been (inadequately) used to describe Portuguese administration in Timor. See for example: Cf. Hélio Felgas, Timor Português (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1956), pp. 307–11 Matos, Timor Português 1515–1769, p. 103
René Pélissier, Timor en Guerre: le Crocodile et les Portugais (1847–1913) (Orgeval: Pélissier, 1996), p. 65; Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, ‘The Portuguese Colonization and the Problem of East Timorese Nationalism’, Lusotopie (2001), 190.
A vast body of literature on the territory has recently appeared but no significant historical research work has been produced on Timorese colonial history. Typically, descriptions of East Timor’s colonial history appear in introductory and superficial overviews that tend to portray the colonial past as a virtuous ‘history of resistance’ characterized by the ‘resilience of the Timorese’ to outsiders over the centuries, and/or by Portugal’s inability to bring about an effective, modern, colonization. For example: James Fox, ‘Tracing the Path, Recounting the Past: Historical Perspectives on Timor’, in James Fox and Dionisio Babo Soares (eds), Out of the Ashes: Destruction and Reconstruction of East Timor (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), pp. 1–29
Geoffrey C. Gunn, ‘Five-hundred-year Timorese Funu’, in R. Tauter, M. Selden and S. R. Shalom (eds), Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers. East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 3–14
But for a state of the arts on East Timor studies since 1999, see Geoffrey C. Gunn, ‘The State of East Timor Studies Since 1999’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37, 1 (2007), 95–114.
Cf. Pélissier, Timor en Guerre. Previous professional historiography on colonial East Timor has focused on the 1500s–1700s period. See Matos, Timor Português 1515– 1769, C. R. Boxer, ‘Portuguese Timor: A Rough Island Story, 1515–1960’, History Today, 10, 5 (1960), 349–55.
In the current state of historical research the 1911–12 Manufai revolt was the last ‘anti-Portuguese’ rising, followed only decades later by the Viqueque revolt of 1959. On the Viqueque rebellion see Janet Gunter, ‘Communal Conflict in Viqueque and the “Charged” History of ’59’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 8, 1 (2007), 27–41
Geoffrey C. Gunn, Timor-Leste: An Anthropology of War and Liberation (Nagasaki: The Research Institute of Southeast Asia, 2006).
Micro-history is a well-established style of historical research grounded in the significance of the singular. See Carlo Ginzburg, A Micro-História e Outros Ensaios (Lisbon: Difel, 1989), ch. VI
Giovanni Levi, ‘Les Usages de la Biographie’, Annales, 6 (1989), 1325–36
Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 93–113.
See also Jacques Revel (dir.), Jeux d’Échelles. La Micro-Analyse à L’Expérience (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1996).
John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), p. 16.
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life. The Limits of the Possible (London: Collins, 1981), pp. 23–24, 31.
For example: A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002).
But cf. Lara Putnam, ‘To Study the Fragment/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World’, Journal of Social History, 39, 3 (2006), 615–30.
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. Global Comparisons and Connections (London: Blackwell, 2004), p. 2.
See for example: Michel Callon, ‘Pour une Sociologie des Controverses Technologiques’, Fundamenta Scientiae, 2, 3/4 (1981), 381–99.
Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 151.
These networks also traded indigenous people intended for public display. See Ibid.; Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch, Éric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), Zoos Humains. De la Vénus Hottentote aux Reality Shows (Paris: Découverte, 2002)
Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn (eds), Body Trade. Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Stocking and Jacknis have also mentioned the existence of a ‘commodity economy of evolutionary anthropology’ moving ethnographic artefacts to museums. George W. Stocking, ‘Philanthropoids and Vanishing Cultures: Rockefeller Funding and the End of the Museum Era in Anglo-American anthropology’, in George W. Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 2
Ira Jacknis, ‘The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas’, in George W. Stocking (ed.), Volkgeist as Method and Ethic. Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 192.
Cf. for example: Thomas Bolsi and Larry Zimmerman (eds), Indians and Anthropologists. Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997)
David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars. Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
Megan J. Highet, ‘Body Snatching & Grave Robbing: Bodies for Science’, History and Anthropology, 16, 4 (2005), 415–40. For a viewpoint less committed to these agendas, see Paul Turnbull, ‘“Rare Work Amongst the Professors”: The Capture of Indigenous Skulls within Phrenological Knowledge in Early Colonial Australia’, in Creed and Horn (eds), Body Trade, pp. 3–23.
Cf. Andrew Bank, ‘Of “Native Skulls” and “Noble Caucasians”: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, 3 (1996), 387–403.
Science studies and social anthropology have been pursuing this thread from different perspectives. For overviews of science studies approaches to objects that draw inspiration from actor-network theory, see Bruno Latour, La Science en Action. Introduction à la Sociologie des Sciences (2nd edn, Paris: Folio, 1995)
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
For recent works that express the need for anthropology to re-engage with material culture from new angles, compare Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Nicholas Thomas, ‘The Case of the Misplaced Poncho: Speculations Concerning the History of Cloth in Polynesia’, Journal of Material Culture, 4, 1 (1999), 5–20
Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things. Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007).
For insightful works on the talkativeness of things, see Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things That Talk. Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
Cf. Marilyn Strathern, ‘Artefacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Images’, in Jukka Siikala (ed.), Culture and History in the Pacific (Helsinki: Finnish Anthropological Society, 1990), pp. 25–44
Amiria Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3–63; Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodification as Process’, in Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, pp. 64–94
Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 9.
This approach draws inspiration from the attempts to situate knowledge in sociomaterial networks in science and technology studies. Cf. for example Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999f).
Cf. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
But for a critical and informative review of different theories and recent work on ‘archives’, see Penelope Papailias, Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–41.
The encounters between historians, anthropologists, and archives have recently emerged as an object of reflection. Colonial archives (namely public or state archives) are now the object of stimulating ethnographic approaches in the context of colonial studies. See Nicholas Dirks, ‘Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History’, in B. K. Axel (ed.), From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 47–65
Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005)
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Thinking Through Colonial Ontologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Rare studies have denoted an interest in following the documentation of collections. See M. R. Bouquet and J. Freitas Branco (eds), Melanesian Artefacts: Postmodernist Reflections (Lisbon: Museu de Etnologia, 1988)
Robert L. Welsch, ‘One Time, One Place, Three Collections: Colonial Processes and the Shaping of some Museum Collections from German New Guinea’, in M. O’Hanlon and R. L. Welsch (eds), Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 155–79.
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Roque, R. (2010). Introduction. In: Headhunting and Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230251335_1
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