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Machine generated contents note: -- Illustrations and Maps -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Glossary -- Introduction -- PART I: ENCOUNTERS WITH PARASITES -- Parasitism in Colonial Interactions -- The Order of Ceremonial Government -- The Circulatory System of Colonial Headhunting -- PART II: SKULLS AND HISTORIES -- Trajectories of Human Skulls in Museum Collections -- Human skulls as anthropological objects -- History and Classification in Timorese Anthropology -- Collecting and the Dramas of Colonial Hostility -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This article is about the equivoques of anthropology's colonial encounter as well as the story of intellectual artefacts. [1] It addresses an old debate on the genealogy of anthropological knowledge, at the core of which is a shared assumption: anthropologists and historians today perceive the history of anthropology as intertwined with colonial history. Few, if any, anthropologists or historians would disagree that the anthropology of non-Western peoples is genealogically embedded in imperial expansion or colonial contexts, and that we can hardly imagine colonial power without some sort of anthropological knowledge as bedside company. It is also true that this assumption has not been at all devoid of strong moral convictions about the evil nature of colonialism and its friendly anthropologies, a moral impetus particularly evident in earlier approaches to the subject in the 1960s and '70s. Since that time, though, with the exception of Talal Asad's seminal assessment in 1973, historians have given it little systematic attention as a subject in its own right. [2] As George Stocking noted in 1991, the 'assumption that anthropology was linked to Western colonialism' seems to have survived in the professional culture of anthropologists more in the form of a 'commonplace of disciplinary discourse' than as a 'serious interest in the history of anthropology in colonial context'. [3] Although the Portuguese case has been entirely left out of this picture by English literature, Stocking's remarks apply to the Portuguese anthropological discourse since the 1970s. Having its professional identity closely associated with political opposition to the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, Portuguese social anthropology, born into institutional autonomy out of the April Revolution in 1974, has been eager to accuse earlier generations of (physical) anthropologists of racial prejudice and complicity with the imperial state. Very few have undertaken a serious and critical historical approach to such a pervasive disciplinary ...

Racial conceptions pervaded modern colonial regimes of power throughout Southeast Asia. Scholars working today on colonial histories in this region would hardly contest this statement. European imperial expansionism and European racial imaginaries are each part of the same political field; they share a common history and as such they should be examined together. In this vein, in recent decades there has been increasing interest in how the production and circulation of race constructs—whether evocative of purity or mixture, of an elusive whiteness, or of primitive aboriginality/ies, for example—might frame, even construct, colonial and national regimes of power. In particular, scholarly interest has been growing in the historical study of the so-called racial sciences, a plastic designation under which one may encompass a variety of selfproclaimed scientific knowledge practices—from medicine to (physical) anthropology, the nineteenth-century science of race par excellence ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of 'Portuguese Timor'. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

This article explores the conjunction between mimesis and parasitism as a colonial mode of relating with forms of 'savagery' in state administration in relation to both the colonial Self and indigenous Others. The article examines the participation in 1861 of Portuguese Governor Afonso de Castro in a headhunting ceremony, the 'feast of the heads', which was held in colonial East Timor. By following a dispute concerning the problems and merits of the governor's compliance with this ritual, it conceptualizes the trade with savagery within colonial government praxis as a parasitic form of mimesis. In this context, the dangers of bracketing the self and surrendering to the forces of otherness allowed for headhunting ritual energies to be extracted and exploited to the colonial state's advantage.

AbstractThis article explores the mimesis of indigenous "customs and law" as a theory of and strategy for colonial government in the period of late imperialism. I draw on the case of colonial administration in the Portuguese colony of Timor during the second-half of the nineteenth century. I introduce the concept of "mimetic governmentality": the art of governing the Other through the productive inclusion of institutions, symbols, cultural materials, or social forms understood as other than one's own. In Timor, the imperial establishment was characterized by fragility and isolation, and a pragmatic style of colonial action thrived. In Europe, modern doctrines of colonial law rejected assimilationist policies and advocated "specialization." In this context, between 1860 and 1910, administrators on Timor devised a system of colonial justice that required the colonizers to slip into the indigenous world and govern others from the others' position and perspectives. To efficiently govern the "natives" and apply colonial justice in courts—the so-calledjustiças—Europeans had to release themselves from European principles and embrace indigenous law, as they understood it. The essay uses the case of Timor to assert the analytic importance and potential of mimesis for the comparative study of colonial administrations during the period of imperial expansion.

This article reflects on a significant dimension of the modern history of race in Europe and the world: the processes of mobility of humans as things that accompanied the scientific pursuit of the immutable racial condition of humans. It asks what it might mean to approach racial conceptions as historically embedded in, and shaped by, racial regimes of mobility, that is, the regimes encompassing the practices and apparatuses for the displacement of human bodies (or parts of bodies) as "scientific things" of racial significance for museum and laboratory networks. The article articulates race in Europe as entailed in a history of national, colonial, and postcolonial regimes of mobility. First, it is suggested that the history of race in science can be understood as the history of regimes of mobility of humans as things. It is then discussed how this history of mobility regimes connects with the making of collectives within and beyond Europe—national, imperial, indigenous, and postcolonial. Finally, the article investigates the contemporary expressions of racial regimes of mobility.

Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern Southeast Asia as have other fabled imagined communities