Wholes and Parts

Oblivious Legacies From the Photography of A. Carreira’s Angolan Missions for a Portuguese Colonial Metropolitan Museum Amid the Liberation War (1961-74)

Abstract

This article recuperates an overlooked history of a photographic archive created in 1965 to document the cultural diversity of the Portuguese colonies for an ethnological museum in Lisbon during the concluding decades of the country’s last colonial regime (1933-74). Five decades after the country’s democratic transition and the decolonisation that accompanied it, I explore this stillborn archive, which has remained in its institutional successor, and historicise a systematic practice of field photography created as a resource for ethnographic research in a late-colonial setting. I investigate the development of this research-based ethnological museum by examining the case of António Carreira (1905-1988), who, as a metropolitan-based colonial field officer, colleague and subordinate, played a series of critical roles in its institutionalisation. Thinking through Carreira’s five annual missions to Angola (1965-69) conducted during the Portuguese colonial wars (1961-1974), in this article, I engage with images and archival devices rendered obsolete by a capricious political transition to demonstrate their potential to unravel some of the paradoxes of developing modern sociocultural anthropology in a late and contested colonial context.