• 1 On the subject, see also Magalhães (1980) and Justino (2012). See also Branco (2003).

2In the first of the two narratives, which initially intersects with the histories of the monarchy and the state, of the visits of foreign scholars to the country and of the development of other forms of knowledge, such as cartography or statistics, we first encounter physical descriptions, toponymic syntheses or travel reports covering particular regions or continental Portugal as a whole (cf. Ribeiro and Daveau, 1986; Daveau, 1992).1 Such documents were produced over several centuries and represent today, depending on the case, the most distant beginnings or the most immediate precedents of university geography. In the second narrative, we first find navigation diaries and nautical routes, the cartography of the maritime expansion and the narrations of explorers in exotic lands (cf. Gaspar, 2021; Tirapicos, 2021), and later, in modern times, the products of the activity of organizations such as the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Geographical Society of Lisbon, 1875), the Comissão de Cartografia (Commission of Cartography, 1883) or the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais (Board of Geographical Missions and Colonial Research, 1936) (cf. IICT, 1983).

• 2 See also Leal (2006) and Pereira (1998). Among the works that integrate the said references, see Le (...)
• 3 See also Santos (2005).
• 4 Namely the rivalry between members of the Gabinete de Investigações Sociais (Bureau of Social Resea (...)

4This disjunctive pattern is common to other social-scientific domains, with nuances. The history of Portuguese anthropology conveniently incorporates the pre-institutional past of the discipline, with regard to its metropolitan (cf. Leal, 2000) and colonial (cf. Pereira, 2021) aspects, but the corresponding narratives, closely related (as in the case of geography) by a central figure common to both (the anthropologist Jorge Dias, in this case), have little or no dialogue between them and only exceptionally include reciprocal references.2 In either case, mentions of physical anthropology – widely present in both fields and with a relevant weight in the history of anthropology as a whole, although treated by its own historiography (cf. Roque, 2003) – are also rare.3 As for the history of sociology, it remained for a long time focused on the institutional affirmation of the discipline around the action of the sociologist Adérito Sedas Nunes, in Lisbon, from the 1960s onwards, disregarding the beginnings of empirical social research in the metropole and in other parts of the empire (admittedly scarce, in the latter case, especially if compared to geography) (Ágoas, 2013). Although there are already relatively recent studies on the colonial aspect (Ágoas, 2012) and the pre-disciplinary past of this knowledge, in both domains (Ágoas, 2020; 2021), these accounts remain, also, largely apart, although there are reasons to connect them.4

• 5 In the same volume, the remaining works refer to the geography of Portugal, properly speaking, and (...)

5In the case of geography, however, the stories of these different strands seem to have long been able to coexist, namely in specialized publications – not without relative disregard of the pre-disciplinary branches of the two core narratives (at least judging by the sample below). This is what happens in an issue of the journal Inforgeo published by the Association of Portuguese Geographers, in 1992, under the title “Portugal and the Portuguese Geography”. After a historical study on the “Geographies of Portugal” (Daveau, 1992), itself divided by the disciplinary milestone (not without reasons, of course, but with no relation between the parts, “background” and “modern geographies”), we find a detailed report on the “Thirty years of geographical studies in the ex-overseas Portuguese territories (1944-1974)”, without any mention of geography in the metropole (Brito, 1992); and a brief synopsis focused on “Teaching and researching geography in Lisbon”, which mentions only a few theses of tropical scope, here arranged according to their subspecialty (Cavaco, 1992).5

• 6 Among the annotated studies, the documents produced by administrative authorities initially stand o (...)

6This is also the case in the proceedings of the 2^nd Colloquium on the History and Development of Science in Portugal in the 20th Century, again from 1992, where the section devoted to geography includes a couple of chapters dedicated to metropolitan physical (Rebelo, 1992) and human geography (Medeiros, 1992), and another separate chapter dedicated to the geography of tropical regions (Amaral, 1992) – all of them duly provided with their respective historical frameworks, but constructed according to the institutional framework, besides being circumscribed to the chronology of the event. The additional presence, in the volume in question, of an annotated listing of the works of geographical research in Mozambique between 1900 and 1975 (Araújo, 1992) serves here as a reminder, somehow at the expense of the other texts, that, apart from the influence of Orlando Ribeiro or even before the 1940s, and in a relatively disadvantaged territory, on this matter, records of the respective geographical features were produced by official entities or scientists from other specialties – although not geography works, per se.6

• 7 The Physical and Human Geography Mission of Guinea was initially created together with the Geology (...)

8More recent works have indeed pointed out the most immediate circumstances in which this colonial drift of human geography occurs, as well as the broader context in which it takes place (Havik and Daveau, 2011; Daveau, 2014; Sarmento, 2018; Sarmento, 2022). Regarding this, one can mention the new geopolitical scenario, following World War II, the international affirmation of anti-colonialism and the imposition of developmentalist policies in the British and French colonies, in the face of this new scenario. In the same vein, and following on from this, it is also worth mentioning the reorientation of Portuguese colonial policy, under the Estado Novo, more aware of the economic potential of the colonial territories and more firmly based on the production of scientific knowledge, as can be inferred from the reorganization of the Junta de Investigações Coloniais, in 1945, and the approval of the plan for the Scientific Occupation of the Portuguese Overseas Territories, in the same year. In fact, the above-mentioned Geography Mission of Guinea was then part of a battery of similar missions devoted to the geohydrography, anthropology and ethnology, zoology and geology of that territory.7

• 8 Some years later, Orlando Ribeiro also published a brief text on Guinea in Harrison Church's book W (...)

11In this last respect, it is worth mentioning that of the four texts published by Orlando Ribeiro from the materials collected in Guinea, two of them are presented in different CIAO sessions. In fact, the most substantive are precisely those, Sur quelques traits géographiques de la Guiné Portugaise (Ribeiro, 1952), presented at the 2^nd CIAO in Bissau, in 1947, and Agriculture in West Africa (Ribeiro, 1951), presented at the 4^th CIAO in Fernando Pó, in 1951. The other two texts are Missão de Geografia à Guiné em 1947 (Geography Mission to Guinea in 1947) (Ribeiro, 1950a) – a report to the Board of Colonial Research – and Acerca do mapa topográfico da Guiné (About the topographical map of Guinea) (Ribeiro, 1950b) – a brief set of suggestions for a map to be executed by the Geo-Hydrographic Mission of Guinea.8

• 9 The survey would be applied in the field by colonial officials responsible for the civil administra (...)
• 10 See, specifically, Carreira (1947a; 1947b), among several other works by the same author.
• 11 In addition to 14 studies on the indigenous housing of the different ethnic groups in Guinea, the v (...)

13At the same time, and regarding the relevance of the CEGP for the development of the Geography Mission of Guinea, the research conducted under the auspices of the former seems to have been an important foothold, if not the primary basis of some of its conclusions. We refer to the results of the ethnographic survey (Mota, 1947) launched in the territory in 1946 by the incumbent governor, Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues, concerned with the shortage of hands and the sovereignty of the colony, and conducted by his aide-de-camp, the navy officer Avelino Teixeira da Mota.9 We also refer to the ethnographic monographs published by the CEGP and to similar studies published in the centre’s journal (the Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa) and signed by colonial officials, particularly António Carreira, born in Cape Verde.10 And we refer particularly to the survey on the “indigenous” housing of Guinea, co-coordinated by Teixeira da Mota and issued the following year (Mota e Neves, 1948).11 If the study Sur quelques traits géographiques de la Guiné Portugaise, by Ribeiro, maintains only an implicit dialogue with the conclusions reached by Teixeira da Mota in that second survey regarding the geographical distribution of the different ethnic groups of Guinea, obtained from the classification of “indigenous” houses and settlements (Mota, 1948), the geographer Francisco Tenreiro (a disciple of Ribeiro) makes the fact perfectly explicit, in Acerca da casa e do povoamento da Guiné (About the house and settlement of Guinea) (Tenreiro, 1950), where he reviews and criticizes (somewhat harshly) the study of the first, of 1947, in direct comparison with the work of the second, of 1949. On the other hand, Tenreiro's text itself will go down in the annals of Portuguese geography as one of the first studies of “tropical geography” (together with Ribeiro's four mentioned texts) and as a launching pad for a career in this area, which will begin by taking him to São Tomé and Príncipe, where he was originally from, but which will be interrupted by an early death.

• 12 See also Abrantes (2022), who associates the epistemic change referred to, namely at the Escola Sup (...)

14More broadly, these clues allow us to consider the possibility of integrating the colonial drift of Portuguese human geography in a broader national and international movement of social drift of colonial science, motivated by the uprising of colonized peoples and of which the CEGP is clearly the herald in the Portuguese case. In effect, and as we believe it has been shown on another occasion (Ágoas, 2020), the action of the CEGP precedes and affects the subsequent development of the social sciences (and anthropology and sociology, in particular) within the Escola Superior Colonial (Colonial School) in Lisbon, which was later promoted to Instituto Superior de Estudos Ultramarinos (Higher Institute for Overseas Studies, 1954) and, later still, to Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina (Higher Institute of Social Sciences and Overseas Policy, 1962), in order to modernize the governing activities of the imperial power.12 But also at the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, with the creation of the Centro de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (Centre for Social and Political Studies, 1956), which would launch several missions in those fields, as is well known, namely to address African nationalism; and additionally in the colonial territories, with the institutes of scientific research of Angola and Mozambique (1955), meanwhile created at the image of the CEGP and with responsibilities in the same areas.

• 13 In this context, another of Orlando Ribeiro's disciples, the geographer Ilídio do Amaral, stands ou (...)

16On a more specific note, the participation of Orlando Ribeiro in the Standing Committee of CIAO and in the CCTA, in which the former would be integrated in the meantime, is also yet to be fully explored; as it is the conflict that would oppose the CEGP members to the Portuguese representatives of the metropole in the CIAO, in the framework of the symbolic dispute between academics and colonial officials for the prerogative of executing fieldwork in the colonies; the relevance of African researchers and other locally recruited personnel in the production of scientific knowledge about the former Portuguese colonies; or even the importance of the Bukavu meeting for the affirmation of other provisions of Portuguese colonial geography, such as the development of urban studies, in this field, from the mid-1950s, particularly in Angola – a provision that also seems to derive from the recommendations emanating from that meeting (cf. CCTA, 1955).13 Following this, it is certainly worth considering the relationship between metropolitan and colonial geography in Portugal, taking the latter as an accessory space for the scientific and symbolic affirmation of some of its protagonists and for the institutional autonomization of the discipline as such. To retrospectively analyze, from the same perspective (and not only individually), the paradigmatic transition between the multiple geographical and hydrographic missions (strictly physical and/or cartographic) of the Comissão de Cartografia and the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais, on the one hand, and the later studies focused on the human and social dimensions of the geographical phenomenon, on the other; or even the preliminary development, in the early twentieth century, of scientific geography by Silva Telles, with simultaneous action in both domains (metropolitan and colonial), may also help to bring closer the histories of these two veins.

• 14 This would be linked to his appointment as professor at the Instituto Superior de Estudos Ultramari (...)

17Conversely, and given the position of geography in the Portuguese imperial scientific apparatus, the importance of this knowledge in the development of Portuguese colonial research, at large, also remains to be studied. Even more so considering Orlando Ribeiro's manifest prominence in this field (at the epistemic and institutional level, nationally and internationally), his intellectual ascendancy over the main animator of the CEGP, Avelino Teixeira da Mota (an ascendancy acknowledged by the latter), and his close relations with the anthropologist Jorge Dias, whose research will only derive to the tropics in the mid-1950s.14 If we follow this path, it is still possible to admit that geography, as a whole, and Orlando Ribeiro, in particular, may be successfully incorporated in an integrated history of the social sciences, which, in the face of the later (and relatively late) affirmation of Portuguese anthropology and sociology, and the persistence of their naturalistic anachronisms, duly valorizes the pioneering role of geography (colonial and metropolitan) and of its main protagonist in the social turn of the human sciences in Portugal.