http://cscsarchive.org/irps/irp.2007-02-23.7520077316
Culture and Colonial Histories: II - Modernity in Portuguese colonialism Last modified 2007-03-12 15:29 Coordinator: Rochelle Pinto The study of Portuguese colonialism in Goa often suffers the same fate as that of its colonial empire from the eighteenth century on – a reliance on terms set by British colonial rule in India. While the enumeration and regulation of cultural difference in colonial India (British) has now acquired a rich history, the most fundamental categories through which colonial culture was viewed by the Portuguese have scarcely been theorized in the case of Goa. This project traces the interpretive structures through which questions of caste, religion, and cultural practices, took shape under the distinctive pattern of Iberian colonialism. This involves examining the negotiation of cultural difference through categories generated by the Catholic Church, by the Portuguese colonial state, and its associated institutions. Portugal's particular situation vis-à-vis the enlightenment and its forms of knowledge, did not make for any direct transition between these early imperatives for knowledge production about colonial society, and those prompting orientalist and colonial enterprises of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This study traces texts and practices when the production of categories and ethnographies had not entirely become a science that informed colonial governance.
