Europe and India : Collections, representations, projections, ^16th-18th centuries

This year's series of lectures was devoted to examining the politico-cultural relations between India and Europe, from 1500 to 1800. Above all, we tried to demonstrate how the image of India and its society was formed in Europe, through a process of asymmetrical interaction between Indian and European actors. Rather than reverting to facile formulas of "orientalism" (in the wake of Edward W. Said), our intention was to restore the complexity of the historical processes of the time. The first two lectures took a close look at the 16th^century , a long period of Indo-Portuguese (and, to a lesser extent, Indo-Italian) interaction. They set out to show how the Portuguese adopted two general modes of understanding: one more textual and philological (well represented by chroniclers such as João de Barros or Diogo do Couto), the other more oral and ethnographic, often deriving from the experience of Christian missionaries.