Corpos colonizados: Recursos com paisagem em fundo. Uma agenda de pesquisa

Abstract

The photography of the colonized bodies purported to record the racial stigmata that character- ized them under the light of the Portuguese Anthropobiology moulded after the northern-european paradigm, but duly revised and adapted from the standpoint of the Portuguese colonial exploration. The study focused on the measurement of indigenous intelligence in order to evaluate their susceptibility to assimilation, on the anthropometric and ergographic evaluation in order to make good use of labour force and on the detection of pathologies that might jeopardize it or be transmissible to settlers. The colonized populations were integrated as human material in the overall framework of survey of natural resources, flora, fauna, ore, farming assets, in such way that their bodily resourcefulness mediated the relationship between the settler and the natural environment of the occupied territories. Fully integral to the racialization process that was instrumental to the success of the colonizing endeavour, the photographic recording isn’t merely a document in the Portuguese Colonial Archive, but above all na epistemopolitical tool of the harm that was inflicted by the colonization to its historical victims, first and foremost as an operator of the construction of the racialized exotic Other that, while defining the thresh-old beyond which the primate becomes human, also delineates the boundary that cannot be crossed by the inferior races, made visible by the physical and behavioural stigmata of their simian ancestry. Such photographic indiciology was instrumental in the justifying and legitimazing of the Portuguese “white man’s burden”, translated into the terms of our own civilizing mission that was taken up as an ages-old historical design, one that, in the aftermath of the “Pink Map” dispute and the engagement in World War I, rose to the level of a struggle for the safeguarding of national identity and independence.