Playing Portuguese: Constructing Identity in Malaysia's Portuguese Community
- Playing Portuguese:Constructing Identity in Malaysia's Portuguese Community
Margaret Sarkissian is Associate Professor of Music at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She is the author of D'Albuquerque's Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement (U Chicago P, 2000). In the series Excursions in World Music (Prentice-Hall), she is the author of three "Instructor's Manuals." In another series, A Viagem dos sons (Lisbon, 1998), she is the compiler of twelve recordings of music from the Portuguese diaspora and the author of a 141-page companion booklet to the compact disc. She has authored or co-authored fifteen articles, including "Armenians in South-East Asia," Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (1987); and "Thoughts on the Study of Gender in Ethnomusicology," Women and Music (1999).
Notes
1. Research for this article was made possible by grants from the Theodore Presser Foundation, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Smith College, all of which I gratefully acknowledge. In addition, I would like to thank the Malaysian government's Socio-Economic Research Unit and the Universiti Sains Malaysia's Pusat Seni (Arts Centre) for arranging my research permit and providing the necessary academic affiliation. Finally, I would like to thank the people of the Portuguese Settlement for putting up with my questions for over a decade; Andrea Klimt for inviting me to participate in the Portuguese diaspora conference, for bouncing ideas around, and for her patience in the face of many missed deadlines; and Jerry Dennerline for his comments and support and for chaining me to my desk and feeding me at regular intervals.
2. Serani is an old local corruption of "Nazarene," a somewhat derogatory term used to refer to a person of the Christian faith.
3. I should make clear at the outset that although I am rethinking and reworking these two ideas at an anonymous reviewer's request, this article draws heavily upon previously published work of my own (Sarkissian, "Cultural"; Liner; "'Sinhalese'").
4. The Estado da India was formally established with the appointment in 1505 of its first governor, Dom Francisco de Almeida, seven years after Vasco da Gama had first landed in Calicut, India (Villiers 46).
5. It is not entirely clear what "rights of Portuguese citizenship" meant in a sixteenth-century context. There were periodic edicts issued by kings of Portugal that bestowed various rights on cities and on people. For example, a royal charter issued on 2 March 1518 bestowed several privileges on the city of Goa, placing its "married people" (casados) on "the same footing as the inhabitants of Lisbon, Oporto, and Evora" (Silva Rego 55-6). A similar community existed in Malacca, as Villiers notes:
The relatively few Portuguese who settled permanently in Malacca, married native women and so became members of the group known as casados. These soon gained considerable wealth and influence through their trading activities and their domination of the municipal council (Câmara), the Misencordia (the charitable organization which administered Malacca's main hospital), and the other institutions of government and administration. By 1532 there were about forty casados in Malacca and this number had increased to almost 100 by 1580 and 300 by the end of the century. (49-50)
Other edicts (e.g., laws passed in 1562 and 1572) confirmed the royal position that religion, not color, "should be the criterion for Portuguese citizenship, and that all Asian converts should be treated as the equals of their Portuguese co-religionists" (Boxer, Race 69-70). According to Villiers, Only converts to Christianity became ipso facto subject to Portuguese law and acquired Portuguese citizenship, this being seen as the natural consequence of adoption of the Catholic faith and not as carrying any ethnic connotations. Not only mestiços but those with no Portuguese blood at all could, by becoming Christians, acquire Portuguese citizenship, thus satisfying Portuguese religiosity as well as helping to make up for the perennial lack of Portuguese in the Estado da India. (48)
How this was regulated or policed is unclear, since (as Villiers observes) Portuguese civil...
