Coordinator:

Walter Rossa

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Presentation

Our Heritage provokes feelings of identity, belonging, nationality and memory. It transcends disciplines as diverse as architecture and anthropology. From history to law, and from literature to linguistics, it generates transdisciplinary reflections as penetrating as they are profound. It influences the most diverse areas in the terrain of interculturality: formal and informal, administrative or spiritual, commercial or migrational, colonial and postcolonial. Heritages influenced by the Portuguese have a greater geopolitical reach than that attained by the Portuguese Empire. They point to the specificity of a common patrimonial denominator that belongs to all humanity and not just to one group.

In the postcolonial contexts in which we live, the debate about our heritage raises political, ethical and ideological questions. We need to discuss these in the name of a common heritage we must preserve and spread as free citizens, conscious of our individual and collective rights as well as of human rights, as pointed out by José Mattoso in the “lecture” he delivered when presenting the work “Património de Origem Portuguesa” at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in the past June 2010.

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