‘Ethnographically Intimate: Notes from the Colonial Field’

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

I thank the artist and researcher Catarina Simão for curating this installation with me, and for serving as an interlocutor between South African and Portuguese partners. I also thank the artist and scholar George Mahashe, Director of the Wits Anthropology Museum at the time, for so kindly convening this installation. It was thanks to Simão’s and Mahashe’s keen ethnographic and artistic insights and relentless questioning that this installation could avoid the trappings of the exhibition format. Thanks to Simon Gush for assisting our team in the setting up of the installation. I also thank the National Museum of Ethnology and the Portuguese Cinematheque, in Lisbon, for allowing us to use the photographs and films from their respective archival collections, at no cost. Special thanks to Paulo Costa, Director of the National Museum of Ethnology. Finally, thanks to the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at Wits for their institutional support, and to the Governing Intimacies Project, of Wits University, and the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg for their funding of this project.

Note on the contributor

Caio Simões de Araújo is a research associate with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), which hosted the workshop and exhibition this special section of the journal draws from, and a grantee of the Governing Intimacies Project at the same university. His research interests revolve around histories of decolonisation, race, sexuality and social sciences in the Global South. He is the editor of A Luta Continua: Histórias Entrelaçadas da África Austral (Maputo: Alcance Editores, 2017).

Notes

1 A. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

2 A. Bank, ‘The “Intimate Politics” of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and Her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34, 3 (2008), 557–574.

3 A. Waterston, ‘Intimate Ethnography and the Anthropological Imagination: Dialectical Aspects of the Personal and Political in My Father’s Wars’, American Ethnologist, 46, 1 (2019), 7–19.

4 Volume IV was compiled by Manuel Viegas Guerreiro, who worked as a part of the research team in the missions to Angola and Mozambique.

5 ‘Wits Gets £60,000 Endowment’, Rand Daily Mail, 23 January 1953.

6 J. Dias, Portuguese Contribution to Cultural Anthropology (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961).

7 C. Castelo, ‘Scientific Research and Portuguese Colonial Policy: Development and Articulations, 1936–1974’, História, Ciência, Saúde-Manguinhos, 19, 2 (2012), 391–408. R. M. Pereira, ‘Conhecer para Dominar: O Desenvolvimento do Conhecimento Antropológico na Política Colonial Portuguesa em Moçambique, 1926–1959’ (PhD thesis, NOVA University Lisbon).

8 Because the reports were circulated by various government institutions, copies can be found in several archives and libraries, such as the Historical-Diplomatic Archive, the Portuguese National Archives and the Historic Overseas Archives, based in Lisbon. In addition, the reports have been published as annexes to Rui Pereira’s doctoral dissertation. See Pereira, ‘Conhecer para Dominar’, Annexes.

9 The films produced by Margot Dias in Angola and Mozambique, as well as her interview, have recently been organised in a DVD set. See Margot Dias: Filmes Etnográficos, 1958–1961, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema/Direcção-Geral do Património Cultural e Museu Nacional de Etnologia, 3 DVDs, 2016.

10 M. V. Guerreiro, Os Macondes de Moçambique: Sabedoria, língua, literaturas e jogos, Vol IV (Lisbon: Junta de investigação do Ultramar, 1966), 310–311.

11 This included the notorious Massacre of Mueda, of 1960, in which a still disputed number of people were killed at the hands of the Portuguese administration. In the interview excerpt with Margot Dias, included in this installation, she recalls the rising tensions in the field upon her return to Mozambique in 1961. For a recent historiographic problematization of the Mueda Massacre, see: P. Israel, ‘The Mueda Massacre Retold: The “Mater of Return” in Portuguese Colonial Intelligence’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46, 5 (2020), 1009–1036.