Ricardo Roque

Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge

In the long history of European overseas expansion, an immense and diverse collection of texts, images, drawings, and maps has been produced and accumulated, part of which survives today in archives and libraries around the world. As a legacy of colonization and empirebuilding, the ‘knowledge’ embodied in this diverse material has been identified with projects of imperialist or colonialist domination, and as such simply labelled as ‘colonial’. This designation, however, hides considerable complexity. As we enter these archives, we enter a heterogeneous documental world, spanning distinct languages, literary and artistic genres or conventions, historical moments, geographical settings, varied human purposes and agendas. Along the way a proliferation of subjects, objects, categories, stories, events, personal and collective dramas, either experienced or imagined, is brought into being. This is not a neat and orderly world infused with transparent and unambiguous meaning. It constitutes a tensional, discontinuous, and uncertain formation of documents, categories, stories, and images. In their very dispersion and unevenness, these may be seen, as Michel Foucault observed, as productive political ‘fields of force’ that selectively make

A voz dos bandos: colectivos de justiça e ritos da palavra portuguesa em Timor-Leste colonial

This article examines the relations between juridical discourse and ritual practice in the bandos issued by the Portuguese colonial government in East Timor between the second-half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Bandos consisted of orders and instructions of command issued by the Portuguese governor in Dilly and ceremonially transmitted by colonial officers to the populations of the various Timorese kingdoms. Bandos were a principal tool of colonial governance with regards to indigenous matters. They were used by the Portuguese to arbitrate conflicts, punish transgressions and, generally, to institute realities in the Timorese world. However, this institution also came to acquire a singular expression in the indigenous cultures, such that the Timorese traditional authorities, the liurais, also used it to communicate their own instructions and commands. The essay conceptualizes bandos as colectives of justice and explores their colonial and indigenous variants. In thus considering the bandos as collectives - heterogeneous associations in which both linguistic and non-linguistic elements combine to produce power effects upon the populations - the article proposes a conceptual alternative to linguistic and literary perspectives in the analysis of colonial discourse.

Mountains and black races: anthropology’s heterotopias in colonial East Timor

This paper explores the pivotal status of mountain spaces in the 19th-century imaginary of wild peoples and black races in island Oceania. It adopts the notion of ‘heterotopia’ in order to examine how arrangements of human difference and spatial alterity were productively brought together in racial anthropology and in colonial praxis. Taking the example of the Portuguese former colony of East Timor, the author argues that anthropological theories of ‘mountain Negroes’, local categories of ‘mountain enemies’ and experiences of colonial hostility were mutually reinforcing.

Race and the Mobility of Humans as Things

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.

Entangled with Otherness: Military Ethnographies of Headhunting in East Timor

The Timorese who cuts one head off is considered assuai(brave) and is entitled to a reward from his regulo[indigenous chief or ruler]. The moment one Timorese takes a head, the arraial[warriors, Timorese irregulars] of his kingdom immediately sings the Loro Sai, the warrior chant, full of quite remarkable melody and harmony. Severed heads also make for great ceremonies, which begin by looking after [the heads] and end by kicking them countless times. As soon as one arrives at the encampment the arraial of each kingdom collects the heads decapitated by his people and hangs them by the long hair worn by the Timorese, on bamboos stacked on the ground, and puts in the mouth of each of them a chew of betel and areca so that they do not miss the pleasures that they had in life. At night all the arraiais form a circle, each of them around the heads they had cut off, and then start a peculiar ceremony. The chief, standing up at the centre of the circle, commences the Loro Sai, which the Timorese sing only when they have cut heads off. In this chant the chief begins by presenting the head with a thousand apologies for having cut it off; then demonstrates to the head why its decapitation was necessary, but tells it not to worry, because it will never fall short of anything, not even the chew! From time to time, the arraial choir confirms these apologies, and when they are fed up with apologizing, they start incriminating the heads, and it is then that the heads pass through harsh times! The arraial chief turns towards the heads with his sword in hand and, very angry, sings to them, asking: ‘But why have you armed yourselves against us? Why did you want to kill us? For didn’t you know that we are stronger than you?’ And as the heads do not respond to these questions the arraial gets furious, screeches, jumps up and down and finally throws the heads down to the ground and kicks them madly, frenetically. This ceremony is repeated over many nights, always in the same way.

Human Skulls as Anthropological Objects

The previous chapter followed the contingent emergence of a collection of human skulls in the context of a collection of commercial and industrial products sent from Macao to museums in Lisbon and Coimbra. In Macao, the concern with coordinating a heterogeneous consignment in the light of rigid principles of classification and description resulted in a collection with wordless material things. The collection of skulls was one set of objects affected by this process. As a consequence, a link crucial to the scientific value of human remains as anthropological collections was dramatically affected. In 1882, the skulls arrived at Coimbra museum without ‘histories’ and dissociated from the reports written by the original collectors in Timor. This chapter continues the analysis of the trajectory of the attachments of skulls to words and ‘histories’. The object is to describe the process through which the human skulls sent unpredictably from Macao were to reappear in the words of Coimbra academics as ‘objects of anthropology’.

The Circulatory System of Colonial Headhunting

The previous chapter examined how distinct strategies of hospitality could articulate the indigenous other and the European stranger in a common world. In the contact zone between Timorese cosmology and Portuguese praxiology, colonial rule was exercised as the ceremonial government of jural life, and colonial power emerged as a form of charisma. The same contact zone enabled the indigenous ritual life to be governed by the Timorese ritual lords. In this process headhunting became included in colonial forms of justice and government. Colonial wars activated ritual violence, and, in the event of victory, intensified the Portuguese power. The last chapter, then, revealed how mutual parasitism in colonial interactions was possible through certain theories and strategies of mutual inclusion. The current purpose is to approach mutual parasitism from the perspective of the circulation of human remains. By following the ways in which the heads of enemies circulated in Timor, this chapter aims to describe headhunting as a ‘circulatory system’.

The Order of Ceremonial Government

The previous chapter argued for a new theoretical approach to colonialism as symbiotic relationship between the European and indigenous worlds. The concept of mutual parasitism called attention to the double reciprocations of hospitality and parasitic appropriation and to how doubles of unequal exchange might generate asymmetries of power. Hostility, it was also suggested, is not alien to the workings of parasitic dynamics. In fact, given the continuous state of war between Dili and the Timorese kingdoms, indigenous hostility seemed to prevail in Timor. Furthermore, as observed in the Introduction, the colonial establishment displayed dramatic traits of weakness. Portuguese Timor was an isolated dependency ran by a minimalist administration that struggled with extreme financial and military debility, and the enmity of the surrounding kingdoms. However, this did not signify that, under these conditions, political order and alternative processes of colonial rule and power did not exist in Timor. The state of apparent weakness and the hostility of the kingdoms also expressed an alternative form of government, whose force derived from the strength of the parasitic ties between the European and indigenous collectives, in the realm of justice and violence. It is the purpose of this chapter to explain the main epistemic strategies of inclusion that made this form of government possible. It seeks to expose these strategies as the principal theories according to which the workings of mutual parasitism were most crucially and distinctively framed and interpreted in Timorese and Portuguese terms. The intention is also to

Histories and Classification in Timorese Anthropology

The preceding chapters have analysed the epistemic trajectory of the Coimbra collection by focusing on the connections between things and words. This chapter continues this analysis. At Macao, as we saw, practices of classification and description oriented to a commercial framework divorced the human skulls from texts and information. This separation between words and things attested to the absence of historiographical work. Skulls without ‘history’ were, therefore, received at Coimbra Museum. At Coimbra, skulls and words were reconciled, but Macao’s missing historical information was not recovered. The scholars presumed the indigenous identity of the skulls. Anthropology’s coming of age as a scientific discipline at the university paved the way for studying the skulls as evidence of the human races. A student at Coimbra, Barros e Cunha, produced a craniological text about the collection. The purpose was to classify the races of Timor. Consequently, the location of the skulls doubled. Physically, they inhabited the Coimbra museum storerooms, while, epistemically, they found their place in the scientific text enveloped in anthropological language. Therefore, it is the circulation of this text that we must now principally follow, if we are to understand further epistemic developments in the collection.

Trajectories of Human Skulls in Museum Collections

The preceding chapter described colonial headhunting in Timor as a circulatory system that interconnected European and indigenous societies. The ritual circuits of severed heads could empower the Portuguese and their allied Timorese communities. This close contact was also organized by boundaries of purity and dangers of pollution, and the Portuguese pragmatic principle of preservation of customs. Accordingly, severed heads as physical things were expected to circulate strictly within Timorese territories and to remain in the possession of Timorese communities. Thus, if the pace of colonial warfare in the nineteenth century increased and intensified the ritual circuits of decapitated heads, these tended to remain local, confined to the island. These ritual circuits, however, could be evaded, and severed heads re-networked in European circuits, outside of Timor. The following chapters of Part II will examine why and how that could succeed. This chapter initiates this inquiry with the analysis of two large consignments of Macanese and Timorese collections sent from Macao in 1880-82. The intention is to explain the travels of these collections as ‘trajectories’ of things attached to, or detached from, words.