The Invention of a Mission: the Brief Establishment of a Portuguese Catholic Minority in Renaissance Ethiopia

Abstract

Like most concepts in the social sciences, the notion of cultural minority entails some degree of fallacious labelling. As Bertrand Russel frequently alerted his readers (Russel 1995, pp. 210-212), supposedly general analytical categories are, firstly and foremostly, linguistic categories and thus their semantic scope is always culturally determined. Apart from this epistemological reminder that conditions the validity of any discourse in the field of the social sciences, such a notion, ambiguous as it is (for it enmeshes demographical and ideological premises), may prove helpful in the apprehension of the domination structures, discourses and practices of sixteenth-seventeenth century Ethiopia.