IT was an honour to lead a panel discussion on a subject that is dear to my heart. I have my views on the subject, but we are here to listen also to the other invited speakers and to have the feedback of all the participants in this colloquium on Lusotopie. The subject is by its nature as much emotional as academic to a Goan like me, and therefore it requires a conscious effort on our part to keep our emotions in check. With limited time at our disposal, it requires that we be concise, and yet sufficiently clear. I shall try to introduce my presentation with a conceptual framework and then touch briefly on six points that refer directly and concretely to the Goan identity:

To start, I wish to sum up some relevant issues raised by a prominent Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos. His critique and insights could be valuable for our comprehension of the issue in hands.

He begins by stating that cultural identities are not dead realities, and as such are always undergoing change. Cultural identities are defined as transient phases of identification. Even those identities which appear well defined, presenting an appearance of permanency, are subject to changing shades of meanings and to gradual or fast transformations in their underlying contents. Besides their characteristic variety, identities have an obsession for difference and for hierarchical distinctions. When someone speaks about one's own identity, reactions to hegemonic relationships in a society are necessarily implied, or there is always an implied feeling of subordination. In fact, someone in a hegemonic position rarely cares to raise questions of self-identity. The questions arise from those who seek self-assurance and recognition from the hegemonic group or groups. From a successful response to the questionings results usually a foundational interpretation that transforms the limitations of self-image into a surplus of self-projection. Such foundational interpretations are produced by creative and inspired native figures that seek to represent their people. Tagore did it for India, and apparently also for Bangla Desh, where also his poem was chosen to be the national anthem. Camões and Fernando Pessoa did it for Portugal. We in Goa could think of Varde Valaulikar (1877-1946) or of T.B. Cunha (1891-1958) as representative figures of Goan identity builders. Their cultural creations seek to surpass time-limitations, absorbing the entire past and projecting the image into a limitless future. The resultant identity appears then as a solid construction with roots into mythical and undated past, and with an assurance of resisting challenges of the present and the future.

The new name for identity in modern times is subjectivity. It implies a twofold tension, namely between the individual and the communitarian, and between its concrete reality in time and space, and its universal concept extending beyond time and space. Modernity seeks to achieve a balance of these contending tensions through social regulations and social emancipation. The modern liberal politics favours the individual and the universal subjectivities, as against the community subjectivity.
Portugal was partly responsible for the process that set rolling this historic transformation that would put and end to the traditional communities and their heritage, replacing them with a project of globalization of ideas and structures. A new era of fanaticism, racism and centro-centrism was brought into existence. The communities that did not correspond with the hegemonic model exported from Western Europe had no right to exist with dignity, or simply to exist. The western confections of legal discourse set the criteria for individual and collective subjectivities. In 1532, the legal brain of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitória (1486-1546), justified the conquest of Aztecs and Incas for violating the basic natural law with their tyranny and practices of human sacrifices and cannibalism. Following upon the Reformation, a laicization of the natural law brought in the lay interests (which included the commercial expansion of Europe) to influence ever more the legal evolution.

There have been in the recent history of Europe romantic attempts at recovering the individual subjectivity with its ethnic, religious and environmental linkages. There was also the marxist struggle towards social utopia. Curiously, marxism replaced the State with class, keeping individual subjectivity helpless. Neither of these two attempts succeeded in providing a viable alternative to the liberal Nation-State which has been able to manipulate in its favour the rival strategies. The aborigines were classed as natives, after nature was reduced by Descartes to res extensa, which together with the western juridical concept of terra nullius, justified the process of divesting the aborigines from their lands as a sequel of the European Discoveries. The native subjectivity would henceforth survive only as a concern of the ethnologists.

The working class interests were appropriated by the Nation-States by adopting a facade of social security concerns. Its latest variant is the "Third Way" of U.K. brand of socialist liberals. The modern capitalism has succeeded in wiping out the rival alternatives to loyalty towards State. The social scientists have contributed to this process. We know how Durkheim invented "society" as a valid unit of social analysis, integrating all possible sub-units, such as the Church, the family or the local communities. For him, the earlier social formations were all primitive attempts at arriving at the modern phase of social comanisation.

Max Weber did not state the superiority of the modern European social construction, but saw it as unique or exceptional, characterised progressively by rationality, secularism, bureaucracy, jurisprudence, democracy, urbanism, globalisation, etc. However, Weber's uniqueness soon turned into a master model against which all others would have to measure their identities, or limitations. The distinction between sociology (studying "us" or civilized) and anthropology (studying "them" or natives) promoted this change. Lévi-Strauss would denounce the epistemological asymmetry of this approach with his chiding remark: we can make them "our savages", they cannot make us "their savages".

More recently there has been a come-back of identity questionings in search of roots, both ethnic and religious. Corresponding fundamentalisms are on the rise, demanding political recognition of traditional cultures, religious and languages. The politics of ethnic multiculturalism, or gender politics, seem to be tentative responses of the Nation-States. According to Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, there is a subtle strategy of the neo-liberal capitalism to ethnicize labour market at a global level, diluting race differences into larger immigrant cheap-labour blocks.

These are then subordinated to the dominant majorities in the Nation-States. It is a transformation of biological racism of colonial times into a cultural racism of post-colonial times, a neo-racism of the modern European States. This seems to be the change required by the neo-liberal transnational capitalism. Its strategy of globalisation of capital and localisation of labour is aimed at making it nearly impossible for the local identities to fight back. The multiplicity of inter-dependencies created by globalisation multiplies the oppositions that the localised identities will be unable to overcome with ease. It also makes it difficult to identify the real enemy, who appears to be everywhere, including within every subjective community.

What are the challenges of the new-old identities? No identities are limited to State boundaries, neither is any culture indiscriminately open. However, no community is free from cultural exchanges with other historic partners in the process of its evolution. Applied to Goan culture, it would not be coterminous with the present State borders, neither is the Goan culture exclusively made by long-term residents of Goa, because it contains and continues to benefit from many borrowings and influences, both in Goa and elsewhere, in India and the world at large. The origins of the Goan identity precede the arrival of the Portuguese, but four and half centuries of the colonial rule have left their marks. We shall come to this later. But could we ask now what is Portuguese culture? An answer to this question could reduce many misunderstandings regarding its influence in Goa. The Portuguese sociologist whom we have quoted here quite extensively, considers the Portuguese culture as a frontier-culture, with some shape, but with no definite contents. Hence, the Portuguese culture is not very distinct from other national cultures, and has always maintained a strong internal heterogeneity. While Portugal looked at its colonial populations as primitive and backward, it was in turn looked as backward by the north European colonial powers. The Portuguese were both, colonisers and emigrants in their colonies, at least in Brazil and in Africa. In Asia they merged into local societies in the so-called "shadow-empire", shedding perhaps more sperm than blood! They were too close to the colonies to be considered fully Europeans, and too distant from Europe to be regarded as serious colonizers. The Portuguese culture shifted between the local and the translocal, bypassing the national. The peculiarity of the Portuguese frontier is that it does not look for emptiness beyond it, but finds the emptiness on its own side.

Portuguese cosmopolitanism is made up of a multiplicity of local cultures. The Portuguese universalism has no universe with Portugal as its centre. It acted as a pseudo-centre for its colonies, because it was always peripheral in European politics. As a result of this "ex-centric" (Boaventura de Sousa Santos prefers the term "a-centric") cosmopolitanism, the Portuguese cultural mix tends to assume a "carnavalistic" make-up, truly entertaining, not threatening the vernacular cultural forms which it appropriates. This feature was transmitted by the Portuguese to its former colonies. It is because of this Portuguese "mediation", and with some reservations towards somewhat patriotic analysis of the Portuguese sociologist, I am more inclined to see "Christianotopia romana" rather than "Lusotopia" left behind in Goa by the Portuguese colonial presence. Our Portuguese sociologist does not avoid explaining some of my reservations: If direct Portuguese administrative impositions were felt in the colonies, such forms of violence are seen by him as a statement of the Portuguese cultural marginality, and not of genuine cultural power. Portugal was functioning as cultural broker of the west. It is only very recently that Portugal has begun evolving a politics of culture, aimed at cultural homogeneity and looking at Portugal as an equal and respectable partner in the European Union. A measure of cultural arrogance is implied in this new political consciousness. This again is motivated, explains the sociologist, by the growing consciousness that Portugal is being reduced to a regional identity within the European Union, condemned to play the role of a joker in the carnival of cultures. I believe that the role played by the Portuguese in Asia was more complex. They imposed themselves where they could, and tried to combine it with doing business with compromise where unavoidable.

(To be continued in the February 2001 issue)

TEOTONIO R DE SOUZA (b. 1947) from Goa (Moira, Bardez). Completed primary and seminary studies (Saligao and Rachol, Goa) before joining the Society of Jesus in Belgaum in 1967. Teotonio obtained a Bachelor's degree in Theology and Licentiate degree in Philosophy at the Pontifical Atheneum (Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune) and acquired a Master's degree and a Doctorate in History from the University of Poona. In 1979, he took charge of the then newly established Xavier Centre of Historical Research in Goa, and was its Director until 1994. He was instrumental to obtain its recognition by the Goa University as Centre for Post-Graduate and Doctoral Research in 1986. Teotonio directed Ph.D. research in History at the Goa University till 1994 and decided to opt out of the Society of Jesus and the ministerial priesthood in 1994 to settle in Lisbon. Married Elvira A. Correia in 1995. Fellow of the Portuguese Academy of History since 1983, and since 1996, Professor and Head of the Department of History, and Director of the Centre for Asian Studies at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon. Collaborates since long in the projects of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and of the Fundacao Oriente. The publications include Medieval Goa (New Delhi, 1979), Goa to Me (New Delhi, 1994),Goa: Roteiro Histórico-Cultural (Lisboa, 1996), and several other edited books and over a hundred and twenty-five research articles (see at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1503/teo_publ.

* 1. This text was my talk at the Colloquium of "Lusotopie" (Sorbonne, Paris), comanized in collaboration with the Department of Political Science at Goa University. 23-26 Feb, 1999.
2. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Pela m?o de Alice: O social e o politico na pós-modernidade. Porto, ed. Afrontamento, 1997 (6th ed.), pp. 119-137.
3. José Pereira, Konkani: A Language. Dharwar, Karnatak University, 1971, pp. 65-69. Varde Valaulikar helped the recovery of the self-dignity or asmitai of Konkani language and its speakers. His Goenkaranchi Goyambhaili Vasnnuk, 1928, and Konknni Bhaxechem Zoit, 1930, contain his ideas about Goan cultural identity.
4. T.B. Cunha, Goa's Freedom

N.B: Please ensure that the above contents should not be utilised or quoted without reference to the author and to the occasion when it was presented.