Abstract
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.
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Notes
Wallace’s anthropological considerations first appeared in 1863–65, and were then later re-published in The Malay Archipelago in 1869. See for example: Wallace, ‘On the Varieties of Man in the Malay Archipelago’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 3 (1865), 196–215.
The ‘Malay Archipelago’ comprised the Malay Peninsula to the Philippines on the north, the Nicobar Islands on the west to the remote Solomon, beyond New Guinea, on the east. For Wallace’s line and the traditions of biogeographical mapping, see Jane R. Camerini, ‘Evolution, Biogeography, and Maps: An Early History of Wallace’s Line’, Isis, 84 (1993), 700–27. For a review of recent work on Wallace, see Jim Endersby, ‘Escaping Darwin’s Shadow’, Journal of the History of Biology, 36 (2003), pp. 385–403.
Cf. Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (London, 1869, reprint New York: Dover, 1962), p. 7.
C. Staniland Wake, ‘Report on Anthropology at the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1871, at Edinburgh’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, II (1872), 268–74.
This approach derived from a tradition of inquiry into the regional distribution of human races that had been combining geography and ethnology in a common project of knowledge since the early nineteenth century. In Britain, those interested in the ethnic imbroglios of the ‘Indian Archipelago’ turned attention to ethno-geography, notably John Crawfurd. See J. Crawfurd, ‘On the Connexion between Ethnology and Physical Geography’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 2 (1863), pp. 4–23.
On Wallace’s ethnological line see Jeremy Vetter, ‘Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial Tropics’, Journal of the History of Biology, 39, 1 (2006), 89– 123.
On the emergence of an Anglophone anthropology of the Papuan race in the nineteenth-century, see Chris Ballard, ’“Oceanic Negroes”: On the Origins of Papuan Anthropology, 1820–1869’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, ANU E Press, 2008, http://epress.anu.edu.au/
A. H. Keane, ‘On the Relations of the Indo-Chinese and Inter-Oceanic Races and Languages’, JAIGBI, 9 (1880), 255.
See also for the debates on the genealogies of Polynesia and the Pacific, Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
John Crawfurd, for instance, influentially suggested that the Timorese ‘seem [ed] to be of a race intermediate between the Malay and Papuan Negro, but partaking most of the first’. Still, the Timorese mixture was so peculiar that it likely represented ‘an aboriginal and distinct race’ more than an ‘admixture of these two’. John Crawfurd, A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands & Adjacent Countries (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1856), p. 433. See also Crawfurd, ‘On the Connexion Between Ethnology and Physical Geography’, 11
J. Crawfurd, ‘On the Malayan and Polynesian Languages and Races’, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, I (1848), 331. Cf. Dusseau, Musée Vrolik, pp. 87–8.
See George W. Earl, The Native Races of the Indian Archipelago. I. Papuans (London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1853), pp. 179–81. Earl visited Dili apparently during the governorship of colonel Cabreira. Timor’s brown-coloured races should have been the subject of Earl’s second volume of The Native Races of the Indian Archipelago, titled Brown Tribes of the Moluccas, Timor and Celebes. This work, however, never reached publication.
In 1778, J. Reinhald Forster seems to have been the responsible for first converting the dichotomy Beajous-Alfouros into a racial divide of the Archipelago, treating the Alfouros as the ancient aboriginal races. See Granroth, ‘European Knowledge of Southeast Asia’, ch. 2; Bronwen Douglas, ‘Science and the Art of Representing “Savages”: Reading “Race”’ in Text and Image in South Seas Voyaging Literature’, History and Anthropology, 11 (1999), 157–201.
Cf. T. N. Harper, ‘The Politics of the Forest in Colonial Malaya’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 1 (1997)
These accounts comprised the works of the British sailor William Dampier (c. 1700s), and of the French naturalists L. de la Tour (1811), François Péron (1807), and L. de Freycinet (1825). As a rule these travellers were limited to the surroundings of Kupang. Nineteenth century ethnologists did not explicitly mention Portuguese sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—eventually the first European texts to mention ethnological aspects of the region. For this reason, I do not discuss early Portuguese sources. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, p. 312. For a bibliography of the relevant travel accounts used as proofs for the existence of dark races in Timor, see E. T. Hamy, ‘Documents pour servir à l’Anthropologie de Timor’, Nouvelles Archives du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, X (1874), 247–53.
The term Alfouros, for example, was in the process of being conflated with the Papuan category in scientific classifications of man. See Armand de Quatrefages and E. T. Hamy, Crania Ethnica. Les Crânes des Races Humaines décrits et figurés d’après les Collections du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris et les Principales Collections de la France et de l’Étranger (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1882), pp. 241–2, 262–3; and Keane, ‘On the Relations’, 263.
Valentyn in 1724 was credited with the first proper ethnological use of ‘Papua’ to refer to black varieties of Oceania. See Earl, The Native Races, p. 3; Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania ethnica, pp. 238–9. But Gelpke alternatively suggests that the term Papua originated in Portuguese sixteenth century accounts: Cf. J. H. F. Sollewijn Gelpke, ‘On the Origin of the Name Papua’, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 149 (1993), 318–32.
See Nicholas Thomas, ‘The Force of Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia Division’, Current Anthropology, 30, 1 (1989), 27–41.
The argument for the presence of Negritos among the mountain tribes of Timor was made by Hamy in 1874–75, and later incorporated into Crania Ethnica. See Hamy, ‘Documents pour servir à l’anthropologie de l’île de Timor’; Hamy, ‘Sur l’Anthropologie de l’île de Timor’, Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 10 (1875), 224–7. Hamy’s arguments on Timor reappear in Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania Ethnica, pp. 271–4, 193–4.
See also Armand de Quatrefages, Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1884), p. 195, n. 2.
Henry O. Forbes, ‘On Some Tribes of the Island of Timor’, JAIGBI, 13 (1884), 405; Forbes, A Naturalist’s Wanderings, p. 465. Forbes did not encounter ‘any true Papuan’, yet he held paradoxical positions as regards Timor’s Papuan connection. He initially suggested in 1884 that Timor presented ‘a mixture of Polynesian and Malay races, in about equal proportions’, but modified his statement in 1885 into ‘a mixture of Malay, Papuan, and Polynesian races.’ See Ibid., pp. 466–7; Forbes, ‘On some tribes of the island of Timor’, pp. 405–7. Cf. Forbes, ’On the Ethnology of Timor-Laut’, JAIGBI, 13 (1884), 8–31.
William H. Flower, ‘President’s Address. Address delivered at the Anniversary Meeting of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, January 27tn 1885, on the Classification of the Varieties of the Human Species’, JAIGBI, XIV (1884–5), 379, n. 1.
In his Australasia of 1879, Wallace continued to hold to a Papuan classification of the Timorese; A. H. Keane classified the ‘mixed Papuan peoples’ of Timor as’SubPapuans West’. See Wallace, ed., Australasia (London, 1879), pp. 429–30; Keane, ’On the Relations of the Indo-Chinese and Inter-Oceanic Races and Languages’, p. 263.
See also Keane, ‘Appendix. Philology and ethnology of the interoceanic races’, in A. R. Wallace (ed.), Australasia (London: E. Stanford, 1879), pp. 593—659
Keane cit. in ‘Discussion’, JAIGBI, 13 (1884), 31.
Cf. Londa Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23, 4 (1990), 387–405.
A previous study has revealed that another contemporary pioneer text in colonial physical anthropology—Fonseca Cardoso’s O Indigena de Satary—followed a similar international trajectory. See Ricardo Roque, ‘Equivocal Connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the Origins of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology’, Portuguese Studies, 19 (2003), 80–109.
For the problems of Anglo-Saxon anthropology by 1890s–1900s, see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, pp. 161–94. For growing opposition in the Anglo-Saxon anthropology to physical anthropology and racism, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientiftc Racism. Changing Concepts in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For changes in German physical anthropology: Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde’.
The exception that proved the rule was a dry and short review by Fonseca Cardoso in 1899. See A. da Fonseca Cardoso, ‘Joâo Gualberto de Barros e Cunha, Noricia sobre uma série de crânios da ilha de Timor, Coimbra, 1898’, Portugdlia, I (1899), 428.
Mendes Correia, ‘Timorenses de Okussi e Ambeno (Notas Antropol6gicas sobre Observações de Fonseca Cardoso),’ Anais Scientificos da Academia Polytechnica do Porto, XI, 1 (1916), 36–51. The paper used unpublished anthropometrical data collected in situ by the late captain Fonseca Cardoso, reputed anthropometrist and former officer in Timor. For Fonseca Cardoso and colonial anthropology in Portugal, see Roque, Antropologia e Império.
In turning to anthropometry, Correia was in line with the major methodological move taken by physical anthropologists loyal to the French anthropological tradition. Cf. Mendes Correia, ‘La Dispersion de l’Homme dans la Surface Terrestre’, Scientia (1927), p. 213; Mendes Correia, A Escola Antropológica Portuense (Porto: Instituto de Antropologia da Universidade do Porto, 1941), pp. 35–6; Topinard, Éléments.
His early international reputation built to a large extent on these papers. The papers on Timor were praised in L’Anthropologie, in 1916. See R. Verneau, ‘A. A. Mendes Corrêa, Timorenses de Okussi e Ambeno; et Antropologia timorense, 1916’, L’Anthropologie, XXVII, 12 (1916), 480–2
Mendes Correia, Antropologia Timorense (Porto: Separata da ‘Revista dos Liceus’, 1916).
For further references to Correia’s papers in international literature, see Rui de Serpa Pinto and Hugo Magalhâes, Bibliografia do Professor Mendes Correia (1909–1942) (Porto: Instituto de Antropologia da Universidade do Porto, 1942).
In the 1930s-40s, Correia achieved political prominence as the ideologue and driving force of the Estado Novo’s ‘scientific occupation’, a vision for statesponsored scientific research in the colonies under the direction of metropolitan academics and institutions. For Mendes Correia’s colonial anthropology, see Roque, ‘A Antropologia Colonial Portuguesa c. 1911–1950’, in Diogo Ramada Curto (ed.), Estudos de Sociologia da Leitura em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: FCG/FCT, 2006), pp. 789–822
Rui Pereira, ‘Introduçâo à Reediçâo de 1998’, in Jorge Dias, Os Macondes de Moçambique (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1998), I, pp. V–LII.
Ten Kate was not mentioned by Cunha, though his investigations were first published in French in 1893–94. Herman Ten Kate, ‘Contribution à l’Anthropologie de Quelques Peuples d’Océanie’, L’Anthropologie, IV (1893), 279–300
Ten Kate, ‘Mélanges Anthropologiques. III. Indigènes de l’Archipel Timorien’, L’Anthropologie, 26 (1915), 519–64.
Correia, ‘Timorenses de Okussi e Ambeno,’ p. 47. However, this opinion contradicted Deniker, another of Correia’s main references. Deniker suggested that, except for Malay influence on the coast, the ‘Papuan blood’ prevailed among the ‘Ema-Belos of the middle of the island’. Correia disregarded this point for the sake of his argument. Cf. Jean Deniker, The Races of Man. An Outline of Anthropology and Ethnography (London: Walter Scott, 1900), pp. 491–2; Correia, ’Timorenses de Okussi e Ambeno,’ 38.
Eventually, Mendes Correia first made this point in an article of 1916. Correia, Antropologia Timorense; A. Leite de Magalhães, ‘Subsidios para o Estudo Etnológico de Timor’, TSPAE, 1, II (1920), 46.
Correia, ‘Relatório dos trabalhos de 1919’, TSPAE, I (1919), 78; Magalhães, ‘Subsidios para o Estudo Etnolôgico de Timor’, 49. See A. Leite de Magalhães, ’A Origem Étnica das Populaçbes de Timor e o Mito da Árvore Sagrada do Reino de Cová’, Diãrio de Notícias, 28 Feb. 1935, p. 2.
Magalhães, like Correia, advocated that the ‘primitive inhabitants’ of Portuguese Timor were of the ‘yellow’, ‘Malaysian race’. Magalhâes, ‘Subsidios para o Estudo Etnológico de Timor’, 48. See also: Leite de Magalhães, ‘Provincia de Timor. A Ilha de Ataúro. Notícia sobre a ilha e seus Habitantes’, BSGL, 36, 1–3 (1918), 47, 61–2.
Castro, As Possessdes, pp. 311, 327–8; Castro, ‘Une Rébellion à Timor en 1861’, p. 390. Castro’s argument resumes in França, Macao e os seus Habitantes, p. 221; Almeida Pinheiro, ‘Timor’, BAGC, 21 (1927), p. 182
Humberto Leitão, ‘Algumas Indicaçbes sobre a nossa Colónia de Timor’, BAGC, 54 (1929), 3–31
Faria de Morais, Subsídios para a História de Timor (Bastorá: A. F. de Morais, 1934), p. 59. By 1908, even Fonseca Cardoso apparently conceded to the ‘clearly Indonesian mass of the population’ in East Timor, though suggesting a ‘primitive Australian background’. Castro, Flores de Coral, p. 409.
Hereafter I follow Whyte’s distinction between historical and fictional stories based on content rather than on form, a distinction which preserves the possibility of ‘imaginary discourses’ to be ‘real’ if taken as ‘true’: ‘The content of historical stories is real events, events that really happened, rather than imaginary events, events invented by the narrator. This implies that the form in which historical events present themselves to a prospective narrator is found rather than constructed.’ Hayden Whyte, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History & Theory, 23, 1 (1984), p. 2. [emphasis in the original]
See Mendes Correia, ‘Antropologia de Timor’, BAGC, 108 (1934), 206. A short description of four Timorese skulls in 1925 also referred cautiously to Cunha’s contribution and followed Magalhâes in declaring to be ‘uncertain whether the crania studied by Barros e Cunha have belonged to Timorese’. Joaquim Pires de Lima and Constâncio Mascarenhas, ‘Contribuição para o Estudo Antropológico de Timor’, Arquivo de Anatomia e Antropologia (1925), p. 452.
See also: Anonymous, ‘Estudo Antropolögico do Indigena de Timor’, BAGC, 54 (1929), 149–51
Joaquim Pires de Lima, Os Povos do Império Português (Porto: Livr. Civilização, 1938), pp. 115–30.
Gentio de Timor received immediate praise and in that same year was granted the First Prize in the national Colonial Literature contest. Hero of the First World War and avowed right-wing nationalist, Correia was one of the army officers behind the military coup of 1926 from which the Estado Novo came out in 1933. He served in Timor from 1928 to 1933 as Military Commandant of Baucau, Director of Public Works, and President of the Dili City Council. Cf. A. Pinto Correia, ‘Notas de Etnografia Timorense (Região de Baucau)’, BGC, X, 106 (1934), 35–52. Hereafter my biographical sources for Pinto Correia are: Processo individual do Capitâo Armando Eduardo Pinto Correia, Lisbon, AHMiI, Box 666; Teôfilo Duarte, ‘Prefâcio’, in Correia, Timor de Lés a Lés, pp. 8–10.
H. V. V., Barros e Cunha (J. de), A autenticidade dos cranios de Timor do Museu da Universidade de Coimbra e o estado actual dos nossos conhecimentos sobre o problema da composiçâo étnica da População de Timor (L’authenticité des crânes de Timor du Musée de l’Université de Coimbra, et l’état actuel de nos connaissances sur le problème de la composition ethnique de la population de Timor)’, L’Anthropologie, 48 (1938), 619.
Barros e Cunha, ‘Notícias Recentes sôbre a População de Timor’, in AAVV, Associaçâo Portuguesa para o Progresso das Ciências. IV Congresso, celebrado no Porto de 18 a 24 de Junho de 1942 (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1943), V, pp. 559–60. [emphasis in the original]
Mendes Correia, Timor Português. Contribuição para o seu estudo antropológico (Lisbon: Ministério das Colônias/Junta das Missões Geogrâficas e Investigaçôes Coloniais, 1944). The work was published with the official support of the Junta das MissOes Geogrkficas e de Investigaçôes Coloniais (Geographical Missions and Colonial Research Council), over which Correia was about to preside.
Mendes Correia, ‘Los Timorenses y la Posición Sistemática de los Indonésios’, Investigaciôn y Progreso, XV (1944), 257–61.
Mendes Correia, Sobre um Problema de Biologia Humana em Timor Português (Lisbon: AGC, 1945), p. 9; Correia, Timor Português, pp. 213–5.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970, reprint London: Routledge, 2006), pp. xxiii, xxi.
The attempts of Western science to resolve classificatory problems posed by monstrous, hybrid, or paradox objects of nature have been an object of study by historians and sociologists of science. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile (New York and London: Norton, 1985), pp. 78–95
Giolio Barsanti, ‘L’Orang-Outan Déclassé. Histoire du Premier Singe à Hauteur de l’Homme (1780–1801) et Ébauche d’une Théorie de la Circularité des Sources’, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1, 3–4 (1989), 67–104
Harriet Rivo, The Platypus and the Mermaid: and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Anna Maerker, ‘The Tale of the Hermaphrodite Monkey: Classification, State Interests and Natural Historical Expertise between Museum and Court, 1791–94’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39, 1 (2006), 29–47.
But for a perspective on natural history as ‘culture’ rather than overarching episternes, see Nicholas Jardine, James Secord and E. C. Spary (ed.), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Cf. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Thomas, Entangled Objects; George W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Essays on Museums and Material Culture’, in Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others, pp. 2–14.
Cf. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 151–2.
See John Law, ‘On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology, and Interpelation’, Configurations, 8 (2000), 2
John Law and Vicky Singleton, ‘Performing Technology’s Stories’, Technology and Culture, 41 (2000), 765–75.
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© 2010 Ricardo Nuno Afonso Roque
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Roque, R. (2010). Histories and Classification in Timorese Anthropology. In: Headhunting and Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230251335_7
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