The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal
In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.
Brief communication: the collection of identified human skeletons housed at the Bocage Museum (National Museum of Natural History), Lisbon, Portugal.
A large collection of identified human skeletons curated at the Bocage Museum (National Museum of Natural History, Lisbon, Portugal) has remained in relative anonymity since its collecting protocol was initiated in the 1980s. This collection originates from modern cemetery sources and is comprised of 1,692 skeletons with basic documentary data (age at death, place of birth, occupation, place of residence, and date and cause of death). At present, this information is more readily available for 699 individuals. The remaining 993 are in the process of being fully documented. The skeletons consist largely of Portuguese nationals who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries (1805-1975) in Lisbon. Both sexes are equally represented, and ages at death range from birth to 98 years, including 92 subadults (<20 years old).
Espetáculos da diferença: a Exposição Antropológica Brasileira de 1882
The Brazilian Anthropological Exhibition, celebrated in 1882 in Rio de Janeiro's National Museum, is analyzed here as a monumental and spectacular attempt to re-evaluate the indianist iconography of the imperial state, which seemed to have become redundant at the time. The material evidence of indigenous "reality" demanded a reappraisal of the Indian's utility as a symbol of the modern nation. Yet, just as indianist discourse cannot be reduced to a single, univocal ideological stance, scientific reinscriptions of native life and culture sent out contradictory messages, which were further complicated and diversified in the uses that were made of the Anthropological Exhibition in the public sphere of Rio de Janeiro. The spectacle of science that supposedly replaced literary and artistic myths of the Indian, in fact reproduced traditional dichotomies between noble and ignoble savages, tupis and tapuias, past and present. The present article charts the emerging field of anthropology as a symbolic arena for the tensions over the identity and status of self and other to be played out, first by counterposing the new discourses on race and pre-Columbian civilizations to the indianist tradition, and then by looking more closely at how their different stances operated at the level of the order of display. It goes on to discuss the proliferation of visual representations of the objects and of the indigenous men and women present at the exhibition in painting, sculpture, photography and caricature