Lusotopy as Ecumene

In order to avoid the sociocentric proclivity to identify language with culture and nation, thus echoing the language of empire, this paper follows the suggestions of Kroeber, Hannerz, and Mintz in taking recourse to the concept of ecumene. It aims to show that the concept can be applied profitably to the spaces and moments that integrate the vastly differentiated worldwide network of relations resulting from the historical expansion of the Portuguese. To that extent, Lusotopy is a space of human cohabitation structured by amity

On the Resilience of Superstition

The concept of “belief” has always been taken seriously by anthropologists and philosophers; nevertheless, it has led to a long series of perplexities. To the contrary, the concept of “superstition” has simply been discarded as ethnocentric. The first has been pushed aside for its logical uncertainty; the second for its ethical uncertainty. Yet, the two concepts seem to be surprisingly resilient in face of the continued exercise of anthropological questioning. Furthermore, their capacity for survival appears to be connected precisely to that which connects them: superstition is unfounded belief but the issue of the foundation of belief is at the centre of the anthropological and philosophical perplexities that have haunted the concept of belief. In this paper I examine two examples – one of them a short story by Joseph Conrad – in order to show that today we can look differently at what superstition may be

Xará: Namesakes in Southern Mozambique and Bahia (Brazil)

In Maputo (Southern Mozambique) and Bahia (Brazil), the most commonly used word to refer to namesakes is xara´ – a word of Amerindian origin. Although the institutions in question diverge considerably in each of these contexts, the two usages come together in that the sharing of a personal name establishes an alliance not only between the two persons involved but also among their relations. In this way, it is argued that the namesake institution is both supervening upon filiation and is a way of closing the local universe of relatedness upon itself. By superimposing a set of crossing ties, the namesake institution consolidates the entities at play and their relations. Nevertheless, much like filiation, upon which it is dependent, the namesake relation is one of co-responsibility and fusion between the partners, not of reciprocal responsibility. The latter is the product of the triangulation that such relations of alliance produce

Portugal and the Dynamics of Smallness

The problem of smallness is no longer one that countries like Portugal have to face alone, but one that faces the whole world. The world today is small in the sense that there are no empty spaces out there anymore; we have reached the limits of the model of growth that drove modernity. That model was imperial and wasteful of resources, and it has increasingly turned against itself. The smallness of Portugal, both in political and economic terms, is no longer alone a Portuguese problem, but one of global dimensions: in environmental, legal, financial and social terms

“La soglia degli affetti: considerazioni sull’attribuzione del nome e la costruzione sociale della persona”

This is an article (in Italian) about name attribution and the social construction of persons in Bahia (NE Brazil

Dona Berta’s Garden: Reaching across the colonial boundary

This is a paper about continuity in change; about inertia and unconscious resistance. Situations of rapid political change, such as independence from colonial domination, lead to a total reconstruction of the political discourse. Whatever the specific status of these ideological projects, they will always have to confront the resistance of the lived world and its immense inertia and complexity. In the middle of post-Independence Maputo, Dona Berta’s Park is a symbolic reminder of the indivisibility of Mozambican history and of the inescapability of a historically constructed world that functions as a referent for communication.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Minhoto counterpoints: On metaphysical pluralism and social emergence

In his classic work Contrapunteo cubano, Fernando Ortiz shows how two different plants and the products they yield can be at the base of two distinct forms of life. The fascinating revelation in his essay is how these two products (tobacco and sugar), which are central elements in the emergence of consumer society at the global level, give rise in their local mode of occurrence in Cuba to distinct social environments. In this article I ask, beyond its empirical relevance, what methodological and analytical lessons can we take from his essay? In reinterpreting Ortiz’s essay in the light of the forms of life that I studied in Alto Minho (northwest Portugal) in the later 1970s, I hope to draw lessons that can illuminate our own present take on the still momentous matters of social emergence and metaphysical pluralism.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Familial Persons in Dark Times

A whole generation of Europeans who came to adult life in the 2000s in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone have had to construct their adult lives within a recessive financial regime that is now widely known as ‘austerity’. In relation to earlier generations, they have been subjected to high rates of permanent unemployment, to recurrent situations of working poverty, to a significant reduction in citizenship rights and ultimately to the tragic fate of having to emigrate to perform underpaid jobs in richer European countries. Theirs are dark times in the sense given to the expression by Hanna Arendt, for whom darkness is produced by acts of communication that, instead of informing, de?inform. The millennial generation was robbed of a sense of future in that they are caught up in a social system where working and the means for sustaining life as a familial person in a consumer society have moved apart. This paper is based on the life history of a young historian in southern Portugal and his struggle for making sense of his life condition

Ethnography as tradition in Africa

“Ethnography as tradition in Africa” is our way of stressing that our discipline’s favoured methodology is an embodied engagement with the human world with roots in forms of curiosity that are very ancient; they emerged long before academic anthropology was constituted in the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnography, thus, is not open to being reinvented at every new juncture, either as a mode of scientific analysis or as a mode of reporting on experience. In this sense, we too stand in the shoulders of giants. Only seen from the perspective of that historical succession can the contemporary ethnographies we collect in this dossier achieve the full plenitude of their meaning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

When ethics runs counter to morals

In the present conjuncture, Brazilian social anthropologists are facing a major challenge to their work. I suggest that this happens because of anthropology’s central dependence on the ethnographic method. The ethnographer’s direct contact with the people they study gives rise to an ethical response that moves the ethnographer beyond abstract moral principles. But, in the world of Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, ethics counters morals: the objectivized, legalistic formulas favored by these autocratic ideologues (supposedly representing “tradition” and “identity”) turn out not to correspond to the actual conditions that face the persons that anthropologists meet in the field, who experience oppression and suffering in their lives