Objectification of the Chopi music in the “First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition” (Porto, 1934)

Abstract

The cultural objectification process is selective, as it implies the recontextualization of certain cultural objects in a different context than the one that generated them, attributing them new significance and meanings (Handler, 1984, p. 62). During the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition (Porto, 1934), this attitude was related to the discourse of invention of the “other”, where the relations between societies are governed by certain hierarchies. Mudimbe (2013, pp. 15-16) designates them as settlers, those who establish a region and dictate the rules; the colonizers, those who explore a territory under the control of the local majority, with a tendency to organize and transform non-European zones into fundamentally European constructions. At the end of this hierarchy, I would add the colonized, that is, those who obey. In the context of the colonial exhibition in Porto (1934), the Chopi music was recontextualized, and new meanings and significance were attributed, becoming a symbol of Portuguese national identity. Therefore, the Chopi music during the colonial exhibition of Porto was transformed into practices of surrender and submission of Mozambican communities, and its meanings and significance were reduced in acts of folk representation through Western performance models and the imposition of the respective aesthetic and moral models, including vertical communication from top to bottom.