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Abstract
This article focuses on the case study of an ethnically and culturally mixed Eurasian Macanese community through their phenomenological experience of identity ambivalence. Our thematic framework includes the structural impact of colonial and postcolonial political regimes in Macao, historical influences on contemporary identity and sociocultural expressions of creolisation. It is argued that the Macanese people illustrate the memory of the ambivalent encounter between the two extremities of the Eurasia (China and Portugal) which started in the 16th-c. and never ceased moving forces to the present day. Furthermore, in the context of fieldwork with the Macanese community in Portugal, an ethnographic approach helps reveal the ambivalent dynamics of similarities and differentiation with respect to food practices and commensality as expressed over dinner by a group of close friends in Lisbon.
Abstract
This paper addresses a specific aspect of the social and cultural life of the Luso-Chinese in Mozambique, whose first contingents came from the Chinese province of Guangdong in the second half of the 19th century. Most settled in the city of Beira. By the 1950s, the Chinese community was already well integrated into modern life in colonial Beira. The city was going through an unprecedented urban and architectural boom. At that time, the Luso-Chinese, who were essentially merchants, also began to stand out in the field of photography. Based on a multi-sited ethnography among the Portuguese-Chinese diaspora – and their family photo albums – this paper reflects on two inseparable aspects of late-colonial modernity: architecture and photography.