African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 713
such as the size of the African cranium, the reaction times of Africans, and the physical
build of Africans. While meeting some of the concerns of the colonial authorities, the
interest in physical anthropology was more dominant within the ranks of anthropologists
themselves. The change of emphasis from physical to cultural anthropology came much
later with Jorge Dias, a Portuguese language teacher in several European universities,
who had completed a doctorate in folklore studies at the University of Munich. Dias was
invited by Mendes Corrêa to lead a research group that was expected to carry out an
ethnographic and ethnosociological survey of the country. His marked interest in cultural,
as opposed to physical, anthropology led Dias to finally introduce an ethnographic
section within the Portuguese Anthropological and Ethnological Society (see Pereira
1989).
As far as the society was concerned, there were three major ways in which it mediated
between anthropology and colonialism. The first was through scientific expeditions to the
colonies. These were major undertakings involving not only anthropologists, but also
(and mainly) geographers, cartographers, oceanographers, and natural scientists from a
whole range of disciplines. In 1936 and 1937–8, two anthropological missions led by
Rodrigues Santos Júnior, an anthropologist, were sent to Mozambique, where they mostly
collected archaeological material that was complemented by a few kinship studies and
observations of burial rituals. Later, in the 1950s, further missions were sent to Guinea-
Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique under the supervision of Jorge Dias. Chief among the
objectives of this later mission was an attempt to find out the reasons behind the budding
nationalism in nearly all the Portuguese colonies, which in Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau soon translated into armed rebellion against the Portuguese.
These anthropological missions were significant in two important ways. First of all,
they bore testimony to a closer cooperation between academic anthropology and the
colonial authorities. This had been made possible by institutional developments within
the colonial bureaucracy with the creation, in 1954, of a research unit on colonial
ethnology at the Center for Political and Social Studies in Lisbon. Jorge Dias, who had
been teaching cultural anthropology at the Center, seems to have aroused colonial
officials’ interest in the role that cultural anthropology could play in furthering the goals
of colonial administration. Indeed, most dissertations written by final year students were
social-anthropological monographs with a heavy functionalist bias that reflected Dias’s
own analytical inclinations and were consistent with the colonial concern of reinventing
traditional African society.
Secondly, this cooperation signalled a paradigm shift within Portuguese anthropology
itself, which up until then had seen its contribution toward the colonial enterprise more in
terms of physical anthropological. The emphasis on cultural factors reflected the growing
importance that cultural anthropologists had acquired since Jorge Dias had introduced an
ethnological section into the Portuguese Ethnological and Anthropological Society in
1949.
Whereas physical anthropological research had emphasized an interest in the physical
features of subject peoples, which often translated in the presentation of actual people as
exhibits in the colonial exhibitions, interest in cultural anthropology focused attention on
native artifacts. Dias’s influence was behind the rise of Makonde art (wood carvings),
Tchokwe ritual artifacts, and, to some extent, Tchopi music (xylophone). These were
increasingly seen as manifestations of a vibrant cultural life, which Portugal had the