The Minho: A 19th-Century Portrait of a Select Portuguese Landscape

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the role played by literary and historical discourse in the formation of the Minho region of Portugal as emblematic of Portuguese national specificity in the 19^th century. Drawing theoretical inspiration from the interpretive anthropology of such writers as James Clifford and James Fernandez, and from the historical analyses of invented traditions initiated by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1985), a key goal of the article is to make clear how deeply Portuguese ethnology, emerging at the turn of the 20^th century, depended on the prior literary problematic of national definition and destiny, which in turn was based in surprising ways on the specification of regional differences within national borders.