Dimensions
138 x 216 x 14mm
From around the mid 1500s to December 1999, Macao was the most longstanding site of economic, religious and political contact between the Chinese and the European worlds. Yet, this surprising capacity for survival has ironically resulted from the very weakness of the Portuguese presence.
In particular, since the foundation of Hong Kong (in 1840), Macao's survival has depended on a creative use of its marginality - as a centre for gambling, for opium trade, for semi-clandestine gold trade, etc. As a rear window to China, Macao provides us with fascinating examples of marginality, that allow us to study the limits of the systems that characterise the Chinese world.
In this book Joao de Pina-Cabral looks at Macao's society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the perspective of an historically informed anthropology. He focuses on the paradoxical aspects of cultural confrontation, personal construction and ethnic differentiation, and on constructed amnesia, with special attention to Macao's Eurasian population.
