Public Rituals and Otherness in the Portuguese Empire. Introduction

Abstract

The introduction to the dossier "Public Rituals and Otherness in the Portuguese Empire", which brings together six essays that examine political, religious, and diplomatic rituals in different regions of the empire, discusses the impacts of Portuguese imperial expansion (15th-18th centuries) on public rituals and the ways in which otherness was identified in them. Critical to the construction of community and identity, public rituals became privileged spaces to represent, integrate, or exclude the “others” with whom the Portuguese interacted in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The articles included analyze both the functionalization of rituals by imperial power and the forms of agency and resistance of subaltern groups, showing that public rituals were often spaces for negotiation and contestation, where staged alterities could be subverted.