Degeneration in the Portuguese colonial anthropobiological photography

Abstract

Assuming a common agenda linking the Portuguese anthropological missions in Africa of the mid-20th century, this paper analyses the unpublished iconographic spoil of Angola’s Anthropological Mission (1948, 1950, 1952, 1955). I aim to point out both the main goals of the Portuguese colonial anthropology use of the photographic apparatus and its epistemopolitical matrix, gathering the human sciences of anthropology (physical/criminal) and psychiatry. I take the concept of degeneration — the idea of a biological defect or evolutionary delay affecting some people — as being still operational in studying those populations under colonial administration. I argue that colonial anthropology, tecnocientifically supported by the photographic image production of stigmata — physical/psychical marks of degeneration, which are visible on the body surface — has attended so much or less to the rationalisation of the colonial labour exploitation (in what would be a primary economic agenda) than to the construction of the idea of a multicontinental and multiracial Nation, which, nevertheless, has never ceased to affirm the physical inferiority of the colonised bodies as a way to justify the Portuguese colonisation. Bearing in mind Portugal’s general delay and the political necessity of facing the anticolonial movement of the post-II World War, I conclude that the same degeneration that had lost its force in some epistemological domains — e.g. psychiatry, which paradigm transition has mainly to do with to psychoanalysis’ apport —, still appears as the conceptual guideline of the approach to the colonised bodies, proving itself co-opted by a eugenic political agenda. The photographic medium task is crucial here: having presided over the visual construction of the mentally ill, photography presides over the optical construction of the racial Other.