Event Announcement -- Maria Cardeira da Silva, 12/3

Wednesday, December 3
5:30pm
Joukowsky Forum
Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

Heritage, Tourism and Society around Portuguese Castles Abroad
Maria Cardeira da Silva, Universidade Nova de Lisboa


Remains of Portuguese Empire are being monumentalized in different places of North and Atlantic Africa. Maria Cardeira da Silva will show how processes pertaining to archaeology and patrimonialization, generated by current practices of cooperation and diplomacy between Portugal and some Arab/African countries and/or assisted by international tourism, re-enact ethnic and national configurations based on new figurations of identity. It is clear that in each situation there is a mutual interest in official terms, both on the part of the Portuguese and local agents, to rehabilitate heritage that bore witness to a Portuguese past. She will use the cases of Mauritania, Morocco and Brazil to illustrate how Portuguese remains keep on traveling along and across the Atlantic and how local daily management of international tourism and heritage politics in contexts of scarcity shapes - and it is shaped by - previous cultural norms and categorizations, revealing unexpected new actors in new social arenas.

Maria Cardeira da Silva, a Professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, is an anthropologist interested in Arabic and Islamic contexts, and in Anthropology of Tourism and Heritage. She has conducted intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the medina of Salé, and currently in Portuguese historical sites like Mazagão and Azzamor (Morocco), Ouadane (Mauritania) and Mazagão (Amapá, Brasil), under the scope of a research project on Heritage, Tourism and Cultural cooperation between Portugal and Arab/African Contexts.

Sponsored by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and FLAD (Luso-American Foundation).