Event Description
How the "Natives" Make Colonial Archives: A Research Project
with Ricardo Roque, PhD – Institute of Social Science, University of Lisbon
The notion of 'colonial archives' commonly refers to Western-made products and repositories, associated with European colonial domination. But can colonial archives instead be defined as an indigenous cultural and political creation? This talk raises these questions, and outlines the first steps of a historical research project on indigenous archival practices of production, preservation, and circulation of written documents, in the context of the long-lasting Portuguese colonial empire.
Ricardo Roque, PhD, is a research fellow at Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and is now Honorary Associate in the Department of History of the University of Sydney. At ICS heads the Research Group Empires, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Societies (http://gi-imperios.org/blog/) and teaches in the Doctoral Programs in History and Anthropology.
Roque works on the history and anthropology of human sciences, colonialism, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese-speaking world, from 1800 to the twentieth-century. His first book (Antropologia e Império, 2001) analyzed the colonial origins of physical anthropology in late imperial Goa. His second book (Headhunting and Colonialism, 2010) explored headhunting, colonial violence, and the circulation of human skulls to anthropological museums in Europe, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century |
