Paper Short Abstract:

Henrique de Carvalho is an “excluded ancestor” whose ethnographic work (published in Portuguese) reveals an improbable forerunner of the so-called “Malinowskian Revolution”. His fieldwork experience and methodological reflections unsettle the understanding and the teaching of anthropology’s history.

Paper Abstract:

The Portuguese military Henrique de Carvalho (1843-1909), who lived in the kingdom of Lunda between 1884 and 1888, is the author of several monographs that make him an essential reference in specialized studies on this region of Angola. Extracts from his 'Etnografia e história tradicional dos povos da Lunda' (1890) were translated by Victor Turner and appeared in the 'Rhodes-Livingstone Journal' (1955). This part of Carvalho's work is at the heart of the anthropological debate between structuralists and historians of Bantu Africa. What accentuates the singularity of Carvalho's work, however, is that it contradicts all clichés about the interior of Africa that were common in the nineteenth century. Instead of a primitive tribal continent, he described sophisticated courts with complex rules of etiquette, political intrigues, and idiosyncratic values that should not be biasedly judged. If Carvalho was a man of his time, marked by evolutionary ideas and colonial attitudes, his writings and particularly 'Etnografia e história tradicional dos povos da Lunda' may be read as anticipating the ethnographic revolution attributed to Malinowski, namely the need to immerse in a long-term, language-centered fieldwork experience. His work and his experiences in the Lunda empire present a challenge for any dichotomous categorization in the historiography of anthropology, and therefore invite us to unsettle – or “undoing” – the teaching of the discipline’s past.