Abstract

ROQUE, Ricardo. I’d have to be infected by the savagery: Afonso de Castro and the “feast of the heads” in colonial Timor. Etnográfica [online]. 2014, vol.18, n.1, pp.159-184. ISSN 0873-6561.

In this article I explore the colonial trade between “civilization” and “barbarity” by drawing on the case of Governor Afonso de Castro’s controversial participation in the so-called “feast of the heads”, a customary ceremony associated with the celebration of headhunting raids and war victories in East Timor, in 1861. I explore the colonial mimicry of the governor in this ritual “savagery” from a double and interconnected perspective. On the one hand, I approach mimicry as a felt, practical, relation to space, a mode of a subject’s yielding into circumstances marked by a tension between assimilation to the surroundings and the creation of difference. On the other hand, I approach mimicry as part of a parasitic rationality that turns the mimetic action of being subject to alterity into a productive political gesture of abuse and extraction of the energies of headhunting rites. Therefore, I argue that colonial mimicry finds in parasitism the expression of its political productivity.

Keywords : mimesis; parasitism; lorosa’e; headhunting rites; Portuguese colonialism; East Timor.

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