Preliminary Programme

The aim of my paper is to discuss the utopian theory of "racial democracy" propagated by the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the first half of the twentieth century. In his opinion, the patriarchalism, mixing of races and biological and cultural miscegenation in the colonial period of Brazil turned out to be exceptionally positive for the emerging racially mixed society. The Portuguese colonizers were supposed to overcome social, cultural, climatic and geographical difficulties by biologically mixing with Indian and African women.

My research objective is, however, to contradict the racial democracy and by emphasizing the multicultural dialogue between the colonial residents and the central administration. I have noted that certain social groups, such as descendants of Native Indians and African slaves, were allowed to establish such a dialogue at the institutional level with the Portuguese monarch in Lisbon. Interestingly, these relations intensified after the expulsion of the Dutch from the north-east of Brazil in the middle of the 17th century.

I believe that the relations between Lisbon and the colonial communities were based neither on racial democracy nor on the conflict, but on the new, multicultural dimension of the modified concept of the late medieval feudal lord-vassals relations, mutual obligations, and patriarchal relation between the monarch and his subordinates. (Show less)

Thousands of German-speaking men migrated to Southeast Asia in the service of the Dutch and British East India companies during the eighteenth century. This paper examines the wide range of family formations and the diverse, often competing practices of family ordering that resulted from this new form of transcultural mobility. Using the lens of inheritance practices, the paper draws on wills of German-speaking emigrants in the East Indies and analyses these documents as emotional practices and practices of power. The case studies include testators who bequeathed almost everything to relations “at home”, as well as those who left everything to their “new” families in Southeast Asia. An advantage of this approach is that it makes visible actors of early modern globalization who remain hidden in other archival sources. These include non-European women, free and enslaved, out-of-wedlock children and enslaved boys and girls, people who were an integral part of German migrants’ households, but who, at the same time, challenged European Christian notions of the family. The paper concludes that we can gain new insights into imperial families by de-Europeanizing our perspective on the family, comparing competing family practices to each other, and locating families in Europe and Southeast Asia within the same analytical field. (Show less)

Even the first intercultural encounters of the Portuguese in the First Global Age (1500-1800) identified a great variety of practices regarding gender relations, sex and the experience of sexuality as practised within different African and Asian communities. Some of them transcended the binary, heteronormative and androcentric pattern dominant in the West. In order to interpret those practices different meanings were ascribed to them.
The aim of the paper is to investigate the response of Portuguese civil and religious authorities who sought to impose their Western values, trying to build a family model that would support a project of colonial domination. For this, the paper will focus on the way the expression of desires, emotions, fantasies, behaviours and bodily practices imposed in order to build a normative/western sexuality model. Other aspects of colonial identity which came into play in this process will have to be taken into account such as race, religion, and ethnicity.
The paper is based on narrative sources such as travel books and chronicles, as well as collections of published letters. Seeking to comprehend aspects of social, symbolic and psychological realities, it will also analyse identifiable individual sensorial experiences, together with contexts, practices, discourses, and norms. (Show less)