History of Anthropology Research Papers (original) (raw)

During the first half of the twentieth century, anthropology tended to neglect the historical condition of the societies it studied, thus camouflaging the conflictual and contingent dimension of their colonial condition. Since the forties, however, a group of anthropologists born in South Africa developed an unprecedented perspective, analyzing native African societies in the context of the modern economic and political structures in which they were established and in their relationship with groups of European origin. Isaac Schapera, Hilda Kuper and Max Gluckman are among the most striking names of this turn, becoming in this circumstances the target of distrust of the South African authorities. In a sense, and according to researchers like Jan-Bart Gewald, Robert Gordon or Bruce Kapferer, this is a phase in which the work of some anthropologists in Africa is in discrepancy with the very ideology of colonialism, although it is the colonial reality itself that allows the development of these new anthropological approaches.
By this time, António Rita-Ferreira (1922-2014), a Portuguese colonial official in Mozambique, writes Os Azimba, the ethnographic monograph that allowed him to advance in his career. After this first approach to anthropology, Rita-Ferreira continued to nourish interest in the discipline, developing several researches throughout the 1950s and 1960s, namely on the migratory movements in southern Mozambique. By then he was reading Schapera, Kuper and Gluckman as well as other anthropologists who did field work in South Africa and Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia).
In this paper, we intend to analyze the way in which the ethnographic practices and writings of this official dialogue with an anthropology often critical of the colonialism practiced in Africa, and simultaneously express his professional, social and political position within the Portuguese empire. Following a close approach to recent contributions on the relationship between science and empire (e.g.: Hodge, 2007; Tilley, 2011) -- and in particular the theoretical developments on the connections between anthropology and colonialism (Kuklick, 1991; Pels, 1997; Schumaker, 2001; Stocking, 1991; Tilley & Gordon, 2010) – we will evaluate the anthropology of António Rita-Ferreira taking into account the precise context in which it was structured.
Therefore, we will try to understand how his ethnographic work relates to his role within the Colonial State. We will assess the scope and configuration of his contacts with South Africa's Anthropology, and we will also examine how his research intertwines with the political and social specificities of Mozambique in the post-war period; the way they responded to the political transformations that were taking place throughout Africa; and to the changes in the Portuguese colonial ideology. We are also interested in understanding the insertion of his anthropology into the conflictual dynamics that were established in the colony itself, between groups of different political sensitivities and different positions in the social hierarchy.