期刊名称：South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
印刷版ISSN：1960-6060
出版年度：2018
期号：17
出版社：Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud
摘要：Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge by Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov provides fresh insight into the study of Orientalism. The focus of the book is on one of the earliest traditions of Orientalist knowledge production—Catholic Orientalism. The authors define Catholic Orientalism as “a set of knowledge practices geared to perpetuate political and cultural fantasies of the early modern Catholic protagonists and their communities …” (Xavier and Županov 2015:xxi). This book is a historical study of the “Orientalist” works produced by Catholic agents of the Portuguese empire. In order to bring out the influence of knowledge production by the “Catholic” empire, Xavier and Županov attempt to retrace the trajectory of Catholic knowledge as it came into contact with the colonies and developed into a massive volume of literary and cultural records. These documents are spread across various archives like the Biblioteca Nacional and the Biblioteca Publica in Lisbon, the Archivio della Congregazione di Propaganda Fide in Rome, and the Historical Archives of Goa in Panjim, among others in various European and Indian cities. The historical period addressed by the book primarily extends from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. The “knowledge practices” examined by the authors throughout the volume are illustrated through works on natural history and medical texts (pp. 77–115), administrative documents such as land records, inventories of temple lands and fortresses, and collections 1 such as the Livros das Communidades (pp. 46–77), missionary texts, and translations of mythologies (pp. 115–58, pp. 202–45).
