Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Freyre’s travel journal was published under the title Adventure and Routine: A Journey in Search for the Portuguese Constants of Character and Action.[141] In India, Mozambique, or Angola, Freyre sought to confirm his theory by describing the adaptation of Portuguese colonists to the most disparate situations, forging a new original culture—lusotropicalism—that joyfully hybridized Tropical and European elements. Such a joyful perception also informed his description of the PEC in South West Angola:

The vision of the post combining stables and a very modern laboratory was unforgettable. In the pastures thousands of animal heads already adapted to the desert. The crossings revealed an ecological type of sheep: the desert sheep.[142]

In the conclusion of the book, Freyre recounts his delivery of a gift from the Portuguese President to his Brazilian counterpart: a chest containing an old rare edition of Luis de Camões’ Lusíadas—a sixteenth-century epic poem recounting the voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India in 1498, which launched the Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean. The materials from which the chest was made summarized Portuguese presence in the world: “Angola diamonds, ivory from Mozambique, gold from Guinea, silver from Portugal, pearls from the Portuguese Orient, wood from Cape Verde—it irradiates Portugal, the Portuguese Overseas, and the panluso affection for Brazil.”[143] The interior of the chest was lined with Karakul fur, suggesting that Karakul embodied the “Portuguese constants of character and action” and thereby making them lusotropical animals.

For Freyre, the “ecological sheep” was the result of the crossings undertaken by Santos Pereira between pureblood imported Karakul and local breeds. The hybrid sheep demonstrated the ability of Portuguese culture to adapt to conditions found in the tropics, and thus Freyre thought they deserved the same appraisal as the plants he found in the Lisbon Overseas garden (Jardim do Ultramar). Such plants were responsible for “a revolution on the plan of vegetable life sociology…. New ecological adjustments were accomplished. Those transplantation adventures were always favored by the pantropical sense of life that from very early on, and even today, characterizes Portuguese actions overseas.”[144] Freyre thus established a direct relation between plant-breeding and animal-breeding practices and the pantropicalism that allegedly constituted the nature of Portuguese presence in the world.

In a seminal article by Cristiana Bastos, the “joyful luso-tropicalism” of Gilberto Freyre is read in parallel with the better-known Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1955, which was highly influential in cultural anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century.[145] According to Bastos, Freyre offered an alternative to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, de-emphasizing notions such as “otherness, contradiction, dualism, [and] opposition.” Bastos doesn’t suggest taking Freyre’s path and looking for continuities and miscegenation where previously only otherness was seen. She invites us instead to revisit the “icons and themes” of luso-tropicalism, recommending critical distance in relation to “the myth of non racism and great humanism of the Portuguese,” and puts forward a research program exploring that peculiar iconography of imperialism made of “Albuquerque’s soldiers marrying Indian women” and “varied natives hand in hand with a permanent smile in their faces.” Karakul—whose furs accommodated the luso-tropicalist reliquary offered by the Portuguese president to the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas, with Freyre officiating at the ceremony—belong to the family of such icons that one has to explore in detail when trying to understand the nature of Portuguese colonialism during Salazar’s regime.

As has been suggested throughout this book, plant breeding or animal breeding, when examined closely, illuminate more general historical points. Apparent insignificant technicalities may suggest ways to overcome Freyre’s rosy visions of Portuguese colonialism and to place it in a continuum with the frontier experiences of other fascist regimes—a move that would have been anathema to a Brazilian anthropologist always emphasizing Portuguese exceptionalism, as is still done in most Portuguese scholarship.[146]