Estrangeirados e Circulação de Conhecimentos, Científicos, Técnicos e Médicos

Portuguese scholars who were part of international networks saw themselvesand were seen by their foreign peers as rightful members of the Republic ofLetters.Although not deterministic, these elements shaped the intervention of theestrangeirados as they ascribed to science, technology and medicine a determi‑nant role in the modernisation of Portugal. Their original social and culturalcontexts also account for the way they carried and expressed their values, moti‑In this chapter, a redefinition of the concept of estrangeirados (Europe-ori‑ented Portuguese intellectuals) is proposed, entailing an informal network of18th and early 19th-century scholars of multiple profiles, united by their com‑mitment to introduce in Portugal the latest novelties in the realms of science,technology and medicine. This reconceptualization enables the possibility offollowing their paths at home and abroad, unveiling relationships establishedbetween themselves and other scholars; their positions and movements inpolitical and institutional contexts; their strategies of appropriation of the newsciences, as well as their participation in the construction of a new global sci‑entific landscape.The networks of estrangeirados unveil the existence of different nodes andthe strategies put in place by their respective actors, as well as the challengesthey had to face, always dependent on the socio-political context and powerrelations linking science to politics, religion and the Freemasonry. In addition,Portuguese scholars who were part of international networks saw themselvesand were seen by their foreign peers as rightful members of the Republic ofLetters.Although not deterministic, these elements shaped the intervention of theestrangeirados as they ascribed to science, technology and medicine a determi‑nant role in the modernisation of Portugal. Their original social and culturalcontexts also account for the way they carried and expressed their values, moti‑vations and objectives, and integrated them in national scientific practices. Theneed to give a special emphasis to the effects of actors’ mobility was behind theintroduction of the concept of “moving localities”.Circulation is neither equivalent to mobility nor to fluidity; as such it isoften undermined by a variety of factors. Some are evident in the intersec‑tions of the networks in which the estrangeirados participated with human andnon-human agents. On the one hand, these networks always cover limited(but never global) geographic spaces; on the other, the estrangeirados and allthose with whom they interacted increasingly realised the existence of asym‑metries between spaces and the ability of circulation to change them. Thus,the dynamic notion of co-construction of particular places as centres and oth‑ers as peripheries emerge from the circulation of knowledge and actors andof the representations by participants of their impact. In this way, peripher‑ies are empowered, moving away from traditional diffusionist models. In ourview, every locality, whether a center or a periphery, has agency, which operatesthrough circulation. That is, spaces of scientific practice, of technology and ofmedicine are structured by multilateral dynamic hierarchies evolving in time.When revisiting the centres from the peripheries’ perspective, it is possible torewrite history by integrating the point of view of the periphery as part of aglobal narrative and re-equate the way history has been done.