Asia-Europe Cultural Transfers and Assessment in the Early Modern Age Research Papers (original) (raw)

Using an expression used by Fr. Rafael Blueau in his “Vocabulário português e latino”, «Dares e Tomares» gives a brief panorama of the Portuguese Orientalism connected with Asia since the early modern age until today, focusing on its three main agents:
a) The State, with its pragmatic outlook to collect information needed to take decisions in its Asian Empire, never felt the need to create institutions in Portugal or in India dedicated to teach languages or any other knowledge, as it relayed heavily on the recruitment of local agents to fulfil that task until the nineteenth century. Therefore the history of state-sponsored Orientalism in Portugal is but a sad record of continuous resumptions and breaks, with no institutional continuity;
b) The Church, with a more enduring and complex approach, was the most important agent of Orientalism in Portugal thanks to its missionary activity in Asia. Despite its final objective being the conversion of Asians, which led its members to learn languages and write the first dictionaries and grammars, the missionaries provided a rich and varied picture of the Asian societies and cultures in their writings, which were divulged in Europe through print or circulated in manuscript form in the intellectual circles of the continent. They remained active for over 300 years, though it was noticeable a decline in their activity and production after 1700; but the final blow was given by the State with the extinction of the religious orders: first the Jesuits (1759) and later the remaining still active in Asia (1834);
c) And finally the “Topaz”, either the interpreter, the mestizo or the Asian converted to Catholicism, who worked as a cultural broker between his society of origin and the one created by Portugal in Asia. First as interpreters, they evolved in time and some of them accompanied the change of paradigm in Orientalism in the nineteenth century, and became very active in the field of Indology, and most of them came from Goa.