Portuguese Studies Review 25 (2) (2017) 127-153
V OLUME 25 OLUME PORTUGUESE $ N UMBER 2 STUDIES P REVIEW Volume 25 $ Number 2 Winter 2017 ORTUGUESE ISSN 1057-1515 S Interdisciplinary TUDIES R EVIEW W INTER 2017 9 7 7 1 0 5 7 1 5 1 0 0 7 ISSN 1057-1515 FERRAZ DE MATOS, PORTUGUESE STUDIES REVIEW 25 (2) (2017) 127-153 Who Were the Ancestors of the Portuguese? Portuguese Debate on their National Origins Patrícia Ferraz de Matos Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa S IN OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, such as Spain, France and Germany, Aalbeit limited here to small clusters and lacking the social, economic and scientific resources available in other regions, we can find in Portugal examples of the search for elements to confirm both the country’s antiquity and its originality, not only in geological strata and stratigraphic units, but also through the knowledge produced by archaeology, history, and anthro- pology.1 However, despite having some similarities with other countries, the Portuguese case is differentiable, taking into account its history and its geo- political situation, as I will expose. The quest for the origins of the Por- tuguese, centred on the topic of the nation, caught the attention of several authors from the late nineteenth century.2 However, an interest in its roots could probably be found in Portugal since the establishment of the liberal regime (in the 1820s) and even before that. In the late nineteenth century, the ideologist Ernest Renan considered that nations do not derive from “races” (in the zoological sense), languages (countries that speak the same language do not form a nation), religious af - finities, shared interests or geography.
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