“It doesn’t have the American classification, it doesn’t exist!”: Oral history, tropical soil science, and Imperialism(s)

Abstract

The article reflects on the oral history methodology and its potentialities to knowledge advance in the cross field of the history of science and the history of imperialism. It gives an account on an oral history project that seeks to reconstruct the life stories of scientists who, in the decades leading up to decolonization (1975), were involved in scientific missions to the Portuguese colonies and gathered the scientific collections that constitute today the colonial legacy of the Institute of Tropical Research (Lisbon, Portugal). The focus of the article turns to the life experience of one of the interviewees, who worked in the Angolan soils’ cartography. From that oral testimony and from a theme that emerged unexpectedly in the course of the interview – the American hegemony in the post war science –, it is possible to reframe the historiographical work, and the observation and analysis scales, tracking new interpretation paths at the intersection of individual and global perspectives. It confirms that the subjective point of view of the interviewees - far from being a handicap of oral history - is one of its core advantages. In this case it acted as a ‘fuse’ that induced the overcoming of the national scale and the comseizure of Portugal’s dual role as a center of a colonial Empire (known and occupied in scientific terms) and as periphery of Europe (also subject to the informal empire of American science).

Keywords: Oral History, Soil science, imperialism.