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This article analyzes one kind of colonial equipment designed in the early twentieth century for the purpose of providing medical assistance to the indigenous populations of Angola and Mozambique. I will refer to it as a 'hut-hospital', although it had several forms and designations. The layout of hut-hospitals consisted of a main building and a number of hut-like units that were supposedly more attractive to the indigenous population and therefore more efficient than the large, rectangular buildings of the main colonial hospitals. Using different sources, including three-dimensional plaster models of hut-hospitals, photographs, legal documents, and 1920s conference papers and articles, I will investigate the relatively obscure history of this colonial artifact while exploring the use of imitation as part of the repertoire of colonial governance.

Bastos C. (2017). Migrants, inequalities and social research in the 1920s: The story of Two Portuguese Communities in New England, History and Anthropology 29 (2), 163-18 ; In this article, I analyse the production and reception of a 1923 social monograph on migrant communities in New England and in doing so: (1) outline an archaeology of the social sciences in the U.S., by analysing aspects of their development, dynamics, institutional politics and research agendas; (2) discuss the tensions between social, racial and cultural interpretations of inequalities in the political economy of the 1920s; (3) analyse the pervasiveness of racialist thinking in science, society and politics, its impact in the hierarchization of groups for purposes of border control, and how the targeted groups responded to it. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

AbstractAll through the nineteenth century, Madeirans migrated from their Atlantic island to places as remote as Hawaii, California, Guyana and, later, South Africa. Scarcity of land, a rigid social structure, periodic famines and rampant poverty made many embark to uncertain destinies and endure the harsh labour conditions of sugarcane plantations. In the 1880s, a few hundred Madeirans engaged in a different venture: an experience of "engineered migration" sponsored by the Portuguese government to colonize the southern Angola plateau. White settlements, together with military control, scientific surveys and expeditions, contributed to strengthen the claims of European nations over specific territories in Africa. At that time, the long lasting claims of Portugal over African territories were not matched by sponsored colonial settlements or precise geographic knowledge about the claimed lands. There was little else representing Portugal than the leftover structures of the slave trade, the penal colonies and the free‐lance merchants that ventured inland. In fear of losing land to the neighbouring German, Boer and British groups in south‐western Africa, the Portuguese government tried then to promote white settlements by attracting farmers from the mainland into the southern plateau of Angola. As very few responded to the call, the settlement consisted mostly of Madeiran islanders, who were eager to migrate anywhere and took the adventure of Angola as just another destiny out of the island where they could not make a living. Their bodies and actions in the new place became highly surveilled by the medical delegates in charge of assessing their adaptation. The reports document what were then the idealized biopolitics of migration and colonization, interweaving biomedical knowledge and political power over displaced bodies and colonized land. At the same time, those records document the frustrations of the administration about the difficulties of the settlement experience and the ways in which colonial delegates blamed their failure on the very subjects who enacted and suffered through it. The eugenicism and racialism that pervade those writings, a currency during the age of empire, may now be out of taste both in science and in politics; however, they are not fully out of sight, and the subtle entrance of social prejudice into the hard concepts of biomedical science is still with us. Learning from this example may help analysing contemporary processes of medicalizing diversity or pathologizing the mobile populations, or, in other words, the biopolitics of migration in the 21st century.

In the northeastern Algarve, Portugal, semi-dispersed settlements and property fragmentation evidently had coexisted with a predominantly nuclear family household pattern since the midnineteenth century, suggesting that a small holding pattern of land tenure need not always lead to a stem-family household as is so often true in other areas of Iberia. Other comparisons, drawn between the Algarve and the adjacent region of Alentejo, suggest that regional variation is strong on all measures and poses an interesting challenge to social scientific explanation.

Cristiana Bastos a mené ses travaux aux États-Unis et au Portugal sur la biopolitique en contexte colonial, l'histoire de la santé, les dynamiques de populations liées aux mobilités transnationales et la production de catégories racialisées. Cet entretien revient sur les origines de son travail conceptuel en mettant l'accent sur les découvertes empiriques qui l'ont conduite à repenser les liens entre les migrations portugaises et la colonisation. Sont évoquées les expériences de terrain qui l'ont détournée de l'étude des colons dans l'empire portugais, pour explorer plutôt les vies des travailleurs engagés portugais, pris dans les flux transimpériaux de main-d'œuvre vers les économies de plantation telles le Guyana ou Hawaï. L'originalité de sa contribution au champ de recherches anthropologiques et historiques sur les plantations réside dans l'articulation de plusieurs régimes d'exploitation de la force de travail importée dans son analyse de la construction sociale des différences, ce qui est rendu explicite par l'étude du cas peu connu des travailleurs engagés portugais. Le projet de recherche ERC Advanced Grant The Colour of Labour. The Racialised Lives of Migrants qu'elle conduit actuellement à l'Université de Lisbonne est l'aboutissement de cette réflexion : celui-ci interroge les racines historiques de la racialisation dans la forme coloniale spécifique de la plantation agricole.