Author: Cruz, Alice

Source: Portuguese Studies, Volume 25, Number 1, 15 March 2009 , pp. 7-29(23)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

Abstract:

This article makes an anthropological reading of those voices reaching us from the dawn of the Portuguese maritime expansion, through Zurara's A Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta and Cadamosto's Viagens de Luís de Cadamosto e de Pedro de Sintra. Following the interpretative approach sketched out by Mary Douglas (1991), which finds a correspondence between the cultural formulations of purity and impurity and a dialectic of social order and disorder, this article will examine, in the two works, the processes by which symbolic frontiers are erected against the threat of alterity. It will discuss on the one hand the dependence on the fabrication of the Other in the construction of the Self and on the other hand the ductility that the latter introduces into the inscription of an ontological impurity onto the former, in the substantiation of its own epistemological and political metamorphosis towards modernity.

Portuguese
Este ensaio lança uma leitura antropológica sobre as vozes que nos chegam dos alvores da expansão marítima portuguesa através de Zurara em A Crónica da Tomada de Ceuta e de Cadamosto em Viagens de Luís de Cadamosto e de Pedro de Sintra. Percorrendo o caminho interpretativo traçado por Mary Douglas (1991), que sinaliza a correspondência de formulações culturais de pureza e impureza com a dialéctica entre ordem e desordem social, examinar-se-ão, em ambas as obras, os processos de edificação de fronteiras simbólicas perante a ameaça da alteridade, discutindo, por um lado, a dependência do fabrico do Outro na construção do Mesmo e, por outro, a ductilidade que o segundo introduz na inscrição de uma impureza ontológica no primeiro, no lastro da sua própria metamorfose epistemológica e política em direcção à modernidade.

Keywords: Purity; impurity; alterity; frontier; modernity; exclusion; Zurara; Cadamosto; Pureza; impureza; alteridade; fronteira; modernidade; exclusão; Zurara; Cadamosto

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of Coimbra

Publication date: 2009-03-15

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• The only English-language journal devoted to the literature, culture, and history of Portugal, Brazil, and the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. Launched in 1985, it received the 'Best New Journal Award' of the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals in 1987. It publishes articles, translations, previously unpublished historical and literary texts, bibliographical information, and a survey of research and reviews.

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